North Berwick

Last week one of my dear friends Angi returned to Edinburgh for a visit. I abandoned the library (almost!) for an entire week and we had a wonderful few days of touristy fun. We drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of cake in the various haunts of Edinburgh. I could probably write a book on places to eat cake and drink coffee in Edinburgh!

On the Friday we took a trip to North Berwick, just outside of Edinburgh. In the nearly four years that I've lived here I've never made it over there, but have always wanted to. The day was gloriously sunny and incredibly windy! Before we hitched a ride to the beach, we climbed up the Crags and I was certain I'd get blown off at one point!







Then on we went to North Berwick to sit in a tea shop, naturally, and frolic about on the beach. We had a lot of fun wandering up and down the beach and town. It was such a breath of fresh air, literally, to get out of the city and just blow away the cobwebs. I'd recommend it to anyone!







Finally, we had a root around the charity shops. In Oxfam I was delighted to find two lonesome M&S stacking cups to replace two of mine that had been broken... now I have a full set of four again (it's the small joys in life!!) And then I bought an entire tea set of, what I think is fake Churchill stuff, for less than a fiver! It may not be the real deal but I think it's really pretty and I'm looking forward to using it for my birthday next week. Maybe one day I'll get the real stuff.

Calling

A copy of an article I wrote for the P's and G's Blether Magazine last month:

A few weeks ago in a sermon, those who felt a calling to lead the church were told to ‘get ready to die’. Sitting in the balcony as a final year Divinity student and currently exploring my own calling, I felt pinned to my seat.

Exploring ‘the call’ can sound like a pious response of a final year student trying to scrape an answer together to the question ‘So what ARE you going to do with a Divinity degree?’ Yet the fact is we are all called into ministry within the church: our God is a missionary God, Jesus embodied that mission on earth, and the church now continues it.

John Pritchard’s The Life and Work of a Priest summarises the different aspects of ordained ministry under three headings: The Glory of God, The Pain of the World and The Renewal of the Church. While written for those specifically exploring a call to ordination, it is certainly not exclusive. We can all recognise elements of this in our every day journey with God: maybe you long to honour and glorify God in your life, maybe seeing conflict and starvation around the world or closer to home fills you with a pain unrelated to your own circumstances, or maybe you’re frustrated with the apathy towards the church and long to see it reclaim a role as salt and light in society.

Listening to God and understanding where he is calling you to be is no easy task. Some of us may be called full time ministry, others will feel called to their family, a specific career, job, vocation, study, mission abroad… But above all, Pritchard states that we are all first and foremost called to a life of holiness; by spending more time with our holy God we are able to hear his call on our life more clearly – a daunting, yet joyful, task.