Month: February 2026

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Become still

Life is full of complexity at the moment. A change in the weather and the sight of these fabulous snowdrops has significantly lifted my mood.

Before we pray, it can help to become still, to quieten our hearts and minds and make ourselves available to listen to the whisperings of the Spirit. I invite you to try out the stilling I’ve written below, but do it slowly, taking all the time you need at each stage to fully be with the experience:

Start by making sure that you are sitting comfortably, with your back supported and your feet on the ground.
Close your eyes, or lower and soften your gaze.
Notice your breathing, but do not change it.
Take a few deep breaths.
Become aware of the life-giving oxygen entering your body as you breathe in and of the carbon dioxide you breathe out, which feeds the plants and trees around you.
Life entering your body, and the potential for new life leaving your body.
Notice how your body feels.
Starting with the top of your head and flowing down through your whole body.
Pause at any places of tension or pain, and offer that pain up to God.
Notice how you are feeling today, and offer those feelings up to God.
Become aware of God in whom you live and breathe and have your being.
Become aware of God who is found deep within you.
And rest in that space.

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Stressing over seeds

Some spinach holding its own against the cold of the winter and visits from the pheasant.

As part of our house hunting efforts, last Sunday we visited a church that sits five minutes from a place we have our eye on. This was a very friendly, welcoming congregation and would be very convenient, but I know that it isn’t for us. Apart from not being my preferred style of worship, which perhaps I ought to be able to get over, I was put off by the altar call with a sinners’ prayer beginning ‘despite deserving outer darkness…’ and an injunction to the rest of us to get out there and evangelise.

My reading for this morning was the growing seed. It paints a picture of a mysterious process, whereby seed sown grows on its own, without any effort on the part of the farmer, resulting in a harvest that just needs to be gathered in. The farmer doesn’t go out to his field every day and fret over the seeds, he doesn’t coax, threaten or cajole then into sprouting and growing – he trusts that the mysterious alchemy of soil, sun and moisture will do its work.

Perhaps this is just my personal bias against evangelism, forged in the conflict between the expectations of certain forms of churchmanship and my own introversion, shyness and hatred of conflict, but trying to persuade people to become Christian feels like a farmer fretting over his seeds. It feels like so much stressful labour with, I suspect, diminishing returns these days.

It looks like our job is to sow seeds and gather the harvest. That will look a little different for each one of us, and might even mean standing on street corners for some, but definitely not for me.