Not an ordinary Christmas Card

     

 I wasn’t going to write about my church for today, but the blog I’d started was going nowhere when Ken (my husband) came to interrupt to show me something. I’ll come back to that later.

It’s a crazy life, being on the four person leadership team of a smallish community church. And exhausting for all of us, but especially Ken and myself because we are much older. Some weeks we travel to church or on visits on four or five days - and it’s fifteen miles away. Then there are phone calls and visits and things wrong with the church toilets/heating/boiler etc - these can be delegated but someone has to do the delegating.

Our church now has teams to delegate to. This is usually successful but the main benefit is that we on the leadership team all feel better knowing that we don’t carry responsibility for many of the areas on our own, particularly the practical matters.

It is still a thankless task. It can be rewarding in itself as people are seen to grow spiritually and new people join our fellowship. But often it can be hard-going and we feel as if we are not appreciated.

But . . .

Ken interrupted me earlier, and this is why:

We had a church AGM last night and were given many Christmas cards, which was lovely. We opened them when we arrived home and read the usual wishes for a Happy Christmas and the occasional ‘God bless you’ or ‘Blessings’.  

We missed one. It was still in the bag this evening and Ken found it and opened it, then rushed down from his study to show me. 

No, the envelope didn’t contain a winning lottery ticket, or a voucher for a holiday. It was  something far more special …

Encouragement! 

A Christmas card, but not any card, this was a Vine Church card. There were beautiful words printed in the design of the card on the front and inside but, more importantly, the inner pages were covered in hand-written messages of thanks for what we had been doing this year and how we had done it. So many signatures and we cannot begin to guess whose idea it was. 

We both feel very humbled and respected. But it’s made me think about how gratitude can be so encouraging. I reported on the Association of Christian Writers at our AGM yesterday. This is because our church has contributed to ACW in the past and because I have been a committee member and Chair of the committee in previous years. After reading the report, I thanked the church members for the personal support they had given me regarding my novel writing, including book launches and selling my novels on the bookstall. There were smiles all around the room.

And now I want to thank all the ACW committee for the hard work they do on our behalf, with no pay, at an enormous cost to themselves especially in terms of time. This is valuable time when they could be writing, or reading, or earning money.

While I am thinking along these lines I would like to thank all those other writers who encourage each other in their writing and through prayer on the Facebook page, other social media, letters, Zoom and in person.

A little encouragement makes a big difference - let’s carry on doing it.

Annie Try writes Christian novels. These include the Dr Mike Lewis Stories (Instant Apostle) and The Dangerous Dance of Emma JJ, written mostly for young adults (Kevin Mayhew Publisher).