Every month we submit an article written by one of the elders or church members to Great Shelford's monthly magazine. Here is our latest contribution for the January 2025 edition.

This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.
Jeremiah 6:16-20
 
I recently had the privilege of spending 5 days at the home of the Northumbria Community, on a retreat entitled ‘Life at the Crossroads’, based on the verse above. Looking ahead to a new phase of life, I wanted some guidance for the years ahead. Much of my life so far has been measured out in plans, be they for a year, or maybe three or five, with key indicators and reviews along the way. This is how many of our organisations, be they educational, governmental or charities, for example, are programmed to work.
 
Living in the community and talking to others likewise seeking guidance was interspersed with time alone in silence, walking in one of the few glorious weeks of autumn weather we’ve had this year. I walked on Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, through woods and by rivers and along glorious vast and empty beaches.
 
However, far from coming away with some plans for the days ahead, this is what I learnt. Life has a habit of throwing curved balls, be they freak accidents, devastating medical diagnoses or financial catastrophes. Kingdoms and governments rise and fall, and actually none of us know what is around the next corner. We face moral and ethical dilemmas that cause us anguish and turmoil, and life is full of unresolved questions. But that is OK; the poet Rainer Maria Rilke says “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
 
As I walked and allowed myself to become immersed in God’s glorious creation, sensing his deep love all around, I realised that there is a profound satisfaction to be found in the waiting, that it is a wonderful thing in itself. I don’t know what the future holds, and neither do any of us, but I do know that God holds me, and that is more than enough.
 
Liz Jenkin
Elder