Weekly letter from St Luke's - 14th March 2025

Dear Parish Friends

With the winds and rain gone, I look forward to greeting you back at St Luke's this Sunday. Our services are as usual at 7am and 9am, with Zoom streaming at 9am. Children's Church is also back on. The weekly notice paper and 9am service sheet are available at the links below.

The gospel passage for this Sunday (Luke 13:31-35) reassures us that even when things seem to conspire against us, God's plans are still being worked out. This is echoed in the psalm of the day: "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear" (Ps. 27:1). This gives us hope, but we acknowledge that for those of our neighbours who have suffered floods or power loss, it is a difficult saying. The rain brings life, but it also brings destruction, you cannot have the one without the other. The message of hope is that in this we see God's presence. The English poet William Cowper (a colleague of John Newton) puts it this way: "He has no hope who never had a fear."

Our building site by and large did not suffer damage, apart from lots of water creating lots of mud. However the time that the builders took to prepare the site for the predicted cyclonic winds, and the clear up this week, mean that the project has inevitably been delayed, and we are looking at an early May completion. We have therefore taken the decision to cancel the Archbishop's visit on 4th May and are negotiating with his office to arrange another date for a celebration service, most probably on a Sunday afternoon.

Regards

Rev'd Timothy