Vicar's thought for the week

26th April 2026

Save your life to find it - the freedom and joy in just taking up your cross.

It strikes me that so often we have become all about ‘saving our lives’, rather than finding them. In other words, what is in this for me? How can I look better? How can I be thinner? I look on Facebook now at a friend’s message and every other picture below it is an ad for a ‘thinner body’ or ‘better face”. If we spent as much time working on the inside, instead of on the outside, we’d all be saints by now! I am not anti-caring about our bodies, I work out too and try to eat well, we are God’s temple after all, but it can’t be all about my looks, or we stop looking deeper both at ourselves and one another. Getting fit is good, but making it our life is a short-sighted goal and a temporary achievement as compared to nourishing our souls which we should also view as daily activity.

I have begun to see that when we give over our whole selves to God, this means entering into the pain of those around us and understanding where they are coming from. This then opens us up to empathy, seeing things from God’s perspective and not just our own. This is a life-long journey which we are on all together.

It struck me that the deep empathy of Christ on the cross is that He understood the pain of the robber next to Him, and his deep desire to be forgiven and that the robber totally saw and understood that Christ didn’t deserve to die. He acknowledged this by asking to be remembered when Jesus came into His Kingdom, he believed Jesus was the Son of God - whatever appeared to be the reality in front of him - he believed. It was an act of defiant faith and hope even as he was dying and deserved to be there.

Like the robber, we all, at our core being, long to be loved for who we are. Christ saw him and loved him. And said, “Today you will be with me in paradise”. He rewards our faith in the unseen heavens around us as we cry out to be remembered by Him.

I know we can all become distracted by many things, but it comes down to this good news, the most important news for each of us; God does love us all, in that deep way, just as we are, and not even as we hope to be - like all the ads on social media promise. He says simply, be with me today in paradise - come as you are. And once we fill ourselves up with that love, that deep unconditional love, we can start giving it out to others, the sacrifice of having to go the extra mile, feels like nothing, when you realise what that does for the one in front of you and how it makes them feel. There is the empathy in seeing it from God’s perspective. Even the pain of getting fit, feels like less when you realise how it makes you feel and enables you to be healthy for those around you - to help them, and this help motivate you. And just like the pain of practicing scales makes you a better singer or musician, we cannot avoid sacrifice to achieve things, in fact we need to embrace it to lead abundant lives.

It is inevitable in life that we have to sacrifice to become good and better at anything - we need to sacrifice our time too, to truly love our friends and our family - kids only know us if we are present for them and they will only not be on their devices, if we aren’t on ours. So carving out time for one another is something that pays dividends in the long run.

In the end, we find life in the community we inhabit, not in the commodities we buy. Fostering friendship and community can feel like giving out, but we get back in so many ways, seen and unseen, when we do.

Yesterday, I had an altercation with somebody on the street because they didn’t want a friend of ours parking near their house on our street - perhaps they felt there were just too many cars there. It felt sort of unreasonable, as their own home has a driveway and the person was parked on the public part of the street. So when somebody becomes aggressive like that, it’s natural to defend the friend and be aggressive back. But then I started thinking about what it must be like to live in one of the little houses along the road with their small gardens and to have people coming and going past all day as we live at the end in the cul-de-sac with a large garden and so we don’t have that traffic. Yes, of course people are visiting others not just us, but we have a lot of friends and folks coming to see us and perhaps it feels evasive and perhaps if I lived there, I would feel annoyed at another car parked. Perhaps? So, I felt cross with myself for not having more empathy for their situation, in the heat of that moment, how could I have been kinder? What should I do now?

Well, I don’t do this often, but I decided to go out and buy some really beautiful flowers, a plant rather than cut ones, that could grow in their garden. I left it on the doorstep with a card of apology that it had upset them. By the way, I am really not that nice, so I know it is God working in me that prompted me to do it. But, do you know what? It felt good when I had done it. It gave me joy, it was a random act of kindness that filled my soul and made me feel lighter and my life more abundant.

So, here’s my suggestion for you for today, try to avoid listening to things that talk about ‘our rights’ and focus on what is right. It is just a more healthy way to live. I also believe it leads to abundant life if you have a very large dose of forgiveness up your sleeve, which you can ask to have injected into your bloodstream at any time by the Lord Jesus Christ. His blood has been shed for you and for me, for all time, so that we are reconnected through our loving Saviour with our Heavenly Father, who has an everlasting embrace of never-ending love waiting for you and for me, which can and will fill us with joy, whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

So why not ask God to give you an opportunity to share a random act of kindness with someone today, perhaps even someone who doesn’t deserve it? Just like Jesus himself did from the cross, as a final act of kindness and forgiveness to the robber on the cross next to him who repented. This final act of love of Jesus, even in agony, shows that it’s never too late to do so, at any point in our lives, and taking up our cross means looking out for the other. So, why not try it today? And…

… be blessed!

Helen