Steve Bennett
Ordinand
The Parish Church of All Saints StaplehurstEmail:
Ordinand's Letter - October
Dear friends,It was about this time last year that I remember looking up into the evening sky just before sunset. The gathering gloom, the migrating geese and the slightly cooler temperature were all clear indications, as if I needed them, that Summer was well and truly over and I was about to embark on a new journey. The setting was Aylesford Priory and I was attending my first residential weekend of a three-year ordination course at SEITE (the South East Institute for Theological Education).
I now appreciate the feelings of trepidation and anxiety felt by our new students at Dulwich Prep as they arrived on their first day recently. Treading unfamiliar corridors for the first time, coping with all those new pencils and pens as they awkwardly tumble out of the brand-new pencil case onto the floor, and the fear of being left behind after the rest of the class has gone to Room 14 (wherever that is!) all bring back memories I'm sure for all of us of our own first day at a new school.
Like any journey, we make wrong turns, we occasionally need to take a break in a welcome lay-by and we sometimes desperately want to turn back to where we came from. But new journeys are also full of opportunity, discovery and the chance to make new friends - companions on the way. As I start the second year of my course, I can reflect on an amazing year behind me. In that year I have come close to giving up several times, longing for my life to return to `normality' without the pressure of essay deadlines, but at other times I have felt God's presence and reassurance more closely than ever in my life. I have made some fantastic new friends who have shared in the highs and lows. We have worshipped, prayed and sung together and shared more than a few pints!
Though we may not feel like it at times, we are all called to move on, to keep travelling, to encounter the unfamiliar. The disciples were called to leave their old lives behind and to embark on a journey full of risk and uncertainty. Every day, each one of us is called to walk with Christ as we carry on the work of those first disciples. Jesus is forever there to pick us up as we stumble and fall on the unfamiliar path and we answer his call when we help those companions on the journey who find the going tough. It's a good time to think about those starting difficult journeys - the new student finding it hard to settle in and make new friends, the neighbour facing a new life without a loved one, the friend about to start cancer treatment, the asylum-seeker struggling to build a new life in a strange culture...
We're also there to share in the good times, to celebrate, to laugh and to enjoy the well-paved road with its fine views. Whenever I feel a bit low and weighed down by it all. I remember the beautiful words of Horatius Bonar, a prolific nineteenth-century hymn-writer and Presbyterian minister:
lay down, thou weary one, lay down thy head upon my breast:”
I came to Jesus as I was, so weary, worn and sad;
I found in him a resting-place, and he has made me glad.
Yours in Christ,
Steve Bennett
