Holy Week stramash!

Palm Sunday yesterday, and the whirl that is Holy Week beckons again.  It never feels the same, and this one, as ever, has a different flavour.

A few days, maybe a couple of weeks, after Easter, we will leave the church building in Dunoon to allow contractors to carry out a massive conservation project (thanks largely to the Heritage Lottery Fund and Historic Scotland, and much fundraising effort).  Maybe four months out will take some planning, management and looking after everybody!  And in the background the pieces are falling into place to recruit and appoint a new priest as my immediate diocesan neighbour to the north: something that I am intimately involved in my capacity as the dean (still newly installed in those shiny wooden seats in the cathedrals). Add to which a whole host of medium to short term issues with worship teams, rotas, fabric repairs on the island, financial planning, stewardship campaigns, a provincial board: there is a real danger that Holy Week might be swamped in the busyness of it all.

So let's slow down, stop, and see what's what.

Dean Marion (a different sort of dean) in Acts and Omissions last week had a different scale of this, but I felt a distinct mutuality with her plight.  But a Facebook status update this morning from a friend in Gloucester helped:

"Lord, when all seems out of control, help me neither to lash out nor to cave in, but help me to look up to the One who seizes chaos and marvellously creates new life from it. Amen."

I clicked "like" to that one.

A blessed Holy Week to all!