What are the stories you tell/believe about yourself, your neighbour, the earth, the world...about God? When we gather together as a faith community, we gather as people of faith to find the place/s where our story lives and sits right in God’s Story...where it brings aliveness, and also where it is worn out, dried up, disempowering, or not/no longer true. In the next few weeks we will engage the power of story to free us or bind us. On our pilgrimage, it matters how and why we tell stories about our journey, about this community of faith, and about the God who calls us into life.
Christian Pilgrimage
The Christian life is a story of Pilgrimage. Sometimes we glimpse the spires of the City, and sometimes we are so busy looking in the wrong direction we wonder if there is a city—but it is our vision that gets clouded.
Fortunately we are not left to our own resources. The Builder of the City gives directions. The directions tell us that the Builder of the City walked the pilgrims’ way, too. He has taken the long, hard road to becoming man so that we can walk with him. When we stumble on the rocky path he lifts us up. There is a danger in being a pilgrim. We must not watch the distant City so intently that we fail to notice the traveller in difficulty.
Pilgrim means to be a servant. Achievement is not the pilgrim’s aim, but service. As pilgrims we must serve others for Christ’s sake—and leave the rest to God.
Prayer: We thank you, God, for a future for which we can work and plan, a future alive with dreams.
O God, we thank you that, as we journey together, you have promised to be with us until our pilgrimage is over. Amen.