Keeping it Simple

The seasons are changing and with it our habits. Where we wanted to be outside with a chilled glass of wine, the bottles of red are being dusted off and the sofa is the location of choice. Box sets are our friends, cups of tea our staple. It won't be long before the mulled wine is brewing again. This week was ripe with challenges and by Friday I'd lost all energy for them, just wanting to curl up as the season demands and let the world pass me by for a minute. But luckily this weekend has been everything that this week hasn't been, an antidote to all the confusing, complicated strangeness where I've desperately longed for simplicity.

Last night I cooked a huge lasagne, is there anything more rejuvinatingly simple than that? Two of our best friends sat around our dining table and we laughed and chatted. We all have responsibilities now, shoes to fill and worries that our feet are not big enough to fill them. Like toddlers walking in our parents shoes. For a while it was good to realise that life can be as simple as the popping of a cork and leaning back in your chair and laughing.

This morning I went for the first time to my placement church where I will be each Sunday for the next year. After all the theorizing, the debates on how church should work (and frankly all the sheer complicated nonsense that surrounds that!), I could finally breathe again. It's an almost comical irony that training for church ministry takes you so far our of the world you are training to be in. Vicar School is so earnest, so slick. Does that sound ungrateful? Perhaps it is. But I've been missing the roughness, the patched togetherness of ordinary church services, of life in the community.

That is the Kingdom of God to me and where I know I belong. I'm a thoroughly ordinary person, constantly saying the wrong thing and laughing far to loudly. These are my people! At church today the children took to the front and sang a song with beaming smiles on their faces, gifted little things full of happiness and possibility. We celebrated someone's 100^th birthday with a posy of flowers. We talked about chicken recipes over coffee. Glorious simplicity.

I realised this week how much I need those moments. Like a shaft of sunlight cutting through the clouds on a grey day. It's a well needed reminder of what it is all for. As the lady who lead the prayers at church today said 'There are so many divisions in church, remind us that what you ask of us is so simple. To love you, to love our neighbour, to include and put up no barriers that stop people from knowing you.' I'm holding on to that this week. To going for it with the abandon of children, to caring less when I get it wrong, to looking for the heart of the matter. To a bit more simplicity.