Some (New Year) "Holy Humour" (and other miscellanea)
(N.B. Our Vicar, Rick, has given permission to use the following story - since both he and I know that it didn't happen at BUNBURY Vicarage, Ed.)
The Churchwarden arrived at the Vicarage, to keep an appointment with the new Vicar, whose teenage son answered the door.
"I'm afraid he won't be able to see you after all, He's just had a letter offering him the post of Bishop of the Bahamas."
"But" said the churchwarden, "he's only just been appointed to this parish."
"Yes - but they're offering him a huge car, six weeks' annual holidays, and twice the salary he's getting here. So, he's gone to the study, to pray for guidance."
"Is your mother praying with him?"
"No," answered the young lad, 'She's up in the bedroom, packing the suitcases."
(the following words of Martin Luther King, twentieth-century North American civil rights worker, seem to be particularly appropriate on which to ponder at the beginning of another New Year):
"One day, youngsters will learn words they don't understand. Children of India will ask, "What is hunger?" Children from Alabama will ask, "What is racial segregation?" Children from Hiroshima will ask, "What is the atomic bomb?"
"Don't worry" is the most frequently repeated command in the Bible. There are 365 different occasions when the words "Do not be afraid" are used - one for each day of the year (not least, for the year that lies ahead of us).
Perhaps the name "Minnie Louise Haskins" may not mean an awful lot to most of us - yet I think most of us are very well acquainted with some of her words. They are taken from "God Knows" and they were quoted by King George VI in his Christmas broadcast of 1939:
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'
And he replied, 'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of Christ. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.'