Seems the New Year is the time when people look back over the last twelve months and forward to the next.
The equivalent Saturday to this one last year I was visiting someone in Leicester General Hospital and by chance/grace was there when she received a diagnosis of cancer; eight months later I conducted her funeral. Today I could be hospital visiting, but have elected not to - I am still on leave and the outlook is possibly marginally less bleak. A lot has happened in the last twelve months and yet the same basic patterns of life continue unchanged.
Regular readers of this blog will have shared in the happenings of the last year, and many have had their own share of tragedy, challenge and change to contend with. Rather than chart a list of events, I want to 'stream of consciousness' some of what I think I've learned that I will take forward into the next year.
I've never really been a procrastinator, but this year has been a keen reminder not to put off until a more suitable occasion those things that one deems important. At the same time, there have been runs of weeks when I've worked way too hard and too long, and have paid the price in fatigue and irritability. Someone said to me that it is good every now and then to say 'no' to something that sounds really good, really interesting - and discovering that actually you don't feel guilty or unfulfilled as a result. It will take me a lifetime to manage that one, but maybe the awareness is a step on the right path?
Beware success criteria - especially if they are numerical. In five years the membership of my little church has decreased quite significantly from mid-forties to low thirties. We have closed our building, our Sunday School and our children's work. By some criteria we (I) are (am) failures (a failure). But I don't believe that we are (or that I am). We have grown up a lot, bravely faced countless challenges, established many new initiatives from Lent/Advent prayer lunches to a travelling lunch club to events in a pub. We have learned to be far more creative, long-suffering and forgiving, and now almost everyone under 80 is on a rota for some aspect of worship-life and/or mission. My person who died from cancer said to me at one point in the year that she'd never realised how much love there was in our church until she became ill - this for me was a measure of success that no numerical method would ever identify. As it happens, we reached the dream of 500 people-contacts in the week up to Christmas but what I treasure are the qualitative moments, often shared with very few people.
The God of small things - not a book by an Asian writer, but the glimpses I've caught of God this year. Right there in the most insignificant moments there is God. I have found myself pondering many times the mustard seed, the yeast, the seed that dies, the widow's mite, the one lost sheep... one small Baptist congregation doesn't even show up on the radar of the world church, but God sees, knows and is. Five years of little things like saying 'thank you,' of refusing to put people down, of attention to detail seem to be bearing fruit, transforming the dough, whatever the metaphor might be.
2009 will bring it own numerous challenges, already they are emerging: the end (we hope!) of the process to sell our building; the challenge of convincing anyone to stand for election to the diaconate; a shortfall of several thousand against budget for last year (understood and justifiable but nonetheless real); our older congregation getting increasingly frail... but maybe what we've learned in the last year will help us to step forward in ways 'known and to be made known' as we walk with God into the future.