In three weeks’ time I will be finishing my sabbatical leave and resuming actively being the minister of Mutley Baptist Church – I can’t wait. I have missed everyone so much, and I have missed what I do to serve this wonderful church of people. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed having sabbatical leave and still have some things I want to do in the next 21 days, but I am already excited about being back with the church I love.
21 days feels like a long time.
I’ve started pondering how it will be when I return. Will it be as if I had not been absent for 3 months, or will I feel like I did when I started at the church 5 years ago? I know that lots will have been going on without me (nothing depends on me being there) and hope that the church will have made some changes, started new things and be in good heart. It’s a strange thought that some people who may have started coming to the church in the past month will know more about what’s going on than I will!
One of my ponderings has been about preaching. While we have already got a sermon series planned for the Sunday mornings in September, and while I have been busily writing poems, bloggages and pages of my (likely never published) novel, I will not have written a sermon for 3 months, nor will I have preached one. I hope it’s like riding a bike – not the falling off and grazing your knee bit – it’s something that is so ingrained in me that it comes naturally. And of course I rely on God’s Spirit for inspiration: which is good because it’s not all down to me if it goes well or it goes badly.
As a Baptist Minister you’d expect me to say that I love writing and preaching sermons. And I do. Right from the inception, through the initial preparation phase beginning with prayerfully reading the Bible; through discovering and collating various thoughts, resources and ideas; through the writing and refining; and finally to the preaching: these things are a core part of who I am and what I am called to do. I feel spiritually fulfilled and filled full as I do these things.
It has always inspired me to think that God’s Spirit was with the people and in the circumstances that we find in the Bible before anything was written down; was with and in those who recorded and wrote these things down (in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek); was in and with those who discerned which writings had that divine spark and collated them; was in and with those who copied the manuscripts faithfully by hand, and those who preserved them; was in and with those who translated those manuscripts into contemporary language so that we have Bibles we can read today; is in and with those who prepare and preach sermons from the Bible; and is in and with those who receive those sermons. It’s no wonder and yet a wonder that people say that God has spoken to them in a sermon even though what the Bible contains is thousands of years old!
Before my sabbatical leave I created a series of daily Bible reading for myself, and offered them to the church as well. They’re based on our six values as a church, and even though I compiled them and the brief thought attached to them, I have been surprised, encouraged and inspired by them. I find even that astonishing and those thoughts are less than 3 months old and I wrote them!
If you’ve never picked up a Bible to read I encourage you to do it. I’d advise you to start with one of the biographies of Jesus. We call them the ‘Gospels’ (it means ‘good news’) – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Read it with an open mind and an open heart, and perhaps offer a prayer beforehand to help you. “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening,” is an ancient prayer from the Old Testament when a young boy, Samuel, was first learning to listen to God. And if you haven’t picked up a Bible in a long time, perhaps try the same exercise.
Be blessed, be a blessing.
nukelearfishing 
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