It’s always a delight to visit our church schools, especially in these last couple of weeks of the summer term, as the children and staff approach the end of the academic year.
In each school I have visited recently there has been such a strong sense of celebration of the year that is ending, alongside anticipation of new things to come. Children in reception are now confident and ready to move up to Year 1, infants ready to be juniors, Year 6 looking with a mix of excitement and apprehension to the move to secondary school, and in secondary school that similar expectation of new opportunities and challenges.
But before that, there is the anticipation of the long summer holiday with a mix of different activities and space, time to rest and to live at a different pace. While those of us no longer in formal education may not have quite the same opportunity to do this, there is none the less for all of us a sense that the world around us revolves differently for a while. We will hear the joyful sounds of children and young people, notice the change in our streets and parks, for some of us we will see it in the lives of family and friends.
For me, this time also enables us to look at our world and our lives afresh, to be thankful for and to appreciate the gift of life itself and of the creation of which we are a part, a season to be thankful.
I am also reminded that this gift comes with a responsibility, that as men, women and children created in God’s image we are to share with God in the care of this earth, our ‘island home’. The urgency of this task was reinforced for me just this last Sunday at a service of confirmation as we sweltered in 30-degree heat in what is usually one of our coldest churches and promised to follow Christ and to ‘strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and to sustain and renew the life of the earth’.
Rejoicing these coming weeks in the beauty of creation we are also faced with the reality of its fragility, of global warming and of climate change, the impact of rising temperatures, flooding, on our communities. We are surely bound to ask also how we are to live at peace with this world we have been given.
The Prophet Isaiah writes (30:15) that ‘in returning and rest we shall be saved’. This cannot surely be simply individualism, but a call to each of us to discover again what it is to dwell in the world, at peace, in harmony with God, with each other and the earth itself.
May these weeks of summer that are now upon us be a blessing to you, and may we be a blessing to creation and to all who share it.
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