Pastoral Letter for the Month

 “I was thinking,” my wife said, “that perhaps you should take one of the fans in the car with you when you go away this weekend, you know, because of the heat.”

I looked at her blankly. “I don’t think that’s very practical,” I said.   “It’s up to you, but it’s going to be very hot overnight,” she said.

“Oh… you mean for my room…”   “Yes of course I meant for your room. Wait.. did you think I meant for the car?”

“Well… yes, and I thought – well, you know, the car has its own fan.”  “Where would you even plug it in?” she said.

“Don’t take it up with me, it wasn’t my idea,” I replied. “It wasn’t mine, either,” she pointed out.

The early summer has been marked, for me, by hot weather. “Is it always as hot as this in Yorkshire?” I wondered, before remembering I’ve spent the last couple of decades living only 20 miles away. It’s also been marked by a slew  of meetings and overnight stays. “Why is everything happening now?” I grumbled. Eventually these will culminate in four days at the URC General Assembly, where decisions on all sorts of things will hopefully be made – among the subjects under discussion are the future of the URC training colleges: can we really afford to continue to run more than one college when there are so few people training to be ministers?

As I headed out to the car for yet another journey, I found the grumpy cat lying in the shade just behind the rear wheel. “That really is not the best place to sit,” I said. The cat scowled at me, silently defying me before eventually giving in and skulking off.

“By the way, did you know you’re a minor celebrity now?” I called after it. “In three churches in Hull and the East Riding?” If it knew, or cared, it didn’t show it.

There’s a passage which I often turn to at funerals, from Ecclesiastes chapter three – it talks about the way that the seasons change: “There’s a time for everything,” it advises. At first glance the passage is straightforward enough, it speaks of the way that the world works, the natural cycles of life, birth and death, building up and pulling down. On closer inspection, though, it reveals itself to be more complex. “A time to love, a time to hate…” it says, and then “a time for war and a time for peace.”

The idea of a time to hate doesn’t sit well with me, neither does the idea of a time for war, although the poet who wrote the lines 3000 years ago (often known as Qoheleth, which means ‘teacher’) perhaps meant them just to reflect the natural ebb and flow of the world. There are times when things go well, and times when everything seems wrong. Sometimes those times arrive, confusingly, together.

“You know,” I said to the grumpy cat the next time as it scowled at me from the shade of a hedge, “there’s a time for everything. And that means that you should occasionally be pleasant.” The cat looked at me then turned its head away to lick a paw. It was a time to ignore. 

“You should definitely think about taking a fan,” my wife said as I was about to set off. “It’s going to be really hot.” “There’s a time for everything,” I said, thoughtfully. “Does that include fans?” she said.

“I think it probably does, yes,” I replied.

 Simon