Living in Love and Faith Online Course - a landmark resource helping us explore identity, sexuality and relationships

Bishop Michael will be leading an online zoom course for Living in Love and Faith.  The sessions are all on Wednesday evenings, from 7.30 pm – 9.00 pm.  The dates are: 26th January; 2nd February; 9th February; 23rd February and 9th March.  You can follow this link to book a place: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/living-in-love-and-faith-llf-course-msn-tickets-229353130387
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Lent Course: 
Rev’d Su will be leading a lent course on zoom based on ‘The Nail’, a book by the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell.  It will run on Thursdays at 7.30pm. Please let Rev’d Su know if you wish to join the group.
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February 2022 Letter  
Dear Friends                

It’s not even the middle of January yet and here I am writing this February letter.  If I had started it yesterday, I would have said that I had not seen a glimpse of the sun all day.  This was despite me having been out and about in the car with my husband.  I might even have said that it had been wet and miserable all the time since Christmas .            
 I am not sure that this is true, but it was how I felt.  I had forgotten the joy of Christ’s birth. I had forgotten the carol singing and the candles around the village.  I had forgotten that on boxing day, which is St Stephen’s day, we sang about Good King Wenceslas and remembered his kindness and his encouragement to his page.  I had forgotten about the Epiphany when the three kings brought their gifts to the baby in the manger.                 
All I could remember of those Kings was words from the poem “The Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot.   “A cold coming we had of it----- the camels galled, sore footed, refractory----------the villages dirty and charging high prices-------------A hard time we had of it-----“.               
Does winter get you like this?   Or is it old age?    Or some of the effects of Covid and of people having to work from home?               
Then another thought flickered through my mind.   The word HOPE.   This was followed by my mind being drawn to the words, faith, hope and charity.  Old words long remembered.   I looked up the word hope in a bible with a system for finding passages by the important words in them.   They were written by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians chapter 13 verse 13.   The modern versions use the word love rather than the word charity.           
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”            
Hope is what helps us to carry on when we are downhearted and unable or unwilling to see the good around us.  That is what I needed.           
 Faith means trust in God’s love and caring for all of us.  Maybe I had forgotten a little about this.          St. Paul also says, in verse 7, that love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.    Isn’t this what we all need to hear and think about at the moment?            
I will finish this letter by wishing you all a happier year than last and a February filled with hope.          
May God bless each one of you.               
Judith.     Reader.