Benefice of St Mary’s Chard, Combe St Nicholas,
Wambrook and Whitestaunton
18th October 2020
Dear Friends
This Sunday we
celebrate the Feast of St Luke the Evangelist – author of Luke’s gospel and the
Acts of the Apostles.
Luke was
thought to have been a physician and because of this it is traditional to have
a service based around healing on his festival.
This is what we shall be doing at St Mary’s, Chard and at Combe St
Nicholas.
It is difficult
to be talking about healing during a global pandemic, but it is also crucial
that we do. It is a shame that the word
has been used by some to refer solely to physical cure and not looked at in its
wider sense.
There are of
course miracles, when people have been cured of physical illness and disability
and we should not discount these. We
should never discount the miraculous, even if we don’t experience it ourselves
or know others who have experienced it.
However, in a
Christian sense, healing is not about cure.
They are two different things.
Healing is more to do with wholeness, with being made whole by God in a
spiritual and emotional way. Healing is
about returning to God and putting right our relationship with God so that his
love, mercy and grace can fill our lives and help us to be the people he longs
for us to be.
So much pain
and hurt in our lives is caused by the gap between what we long to be and who
we actually are. The healing process, it seems to me, begins with accepting who
we are and our situation and then recognising that God loves us just as we are
and is always with us. From this comes a
facing up to our own failings and weaknesses but also a sense of peace. From here we can learn to hold up everything
to God and ask for his guidance, his help and his healing.
Allowing God
into every part of our lives, however dark and painful, is how we begin to heal
and that always begins with prayer.
Healing can also come through loving and being loved, through fellowship
and connecting with the natural world.
For me, most
especially, healing means being released from fear and learning to live life to
the full, wherever we find ourselves and whatever happens to us. This can only be done with God’s help.
During this
time of uncertainty and change, it would be easy to succumb to fear. But God is calling us to a fuller life. We need to trust in him, place our burdens on
to him and ask for his strength and grace to accept where we are and who we
are.
The process of
healing is not easy and might well be painful as we have to face up to some
truths about ourselves and our situations.
However, God wants us to be healed, to be released from fear and walk
with him into a new day. He will never
let us go.
Blessings
Ann
NB
Our weekly
Wednesday 9.45 am Communion services are now restarting at St Mary’s and the
monthly (third Wednesday) BCP Communion service at Combe is also
restarting. If you would like to attend
either of these, but are unsure, please talk to myself or Georgina.
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