Revd Helen Writes …

 

  By the time you read this it may well be February and those who may have started New Year Resolutions at the beginning of January may be splendidly keeping them – or not. For 2026 we may have decided to lose a stone or two of weight, take up yoga, learn a language, exercise more, drink less, and spend less money. And we will have made these resolutions on the first day of January with solemn determination and with unfaltering commitment. January, that month of cold weather, dark mornings and post-holiday blues, financial strain from Christmas spending, broken New Year's resolutions, and the return to work, leading to increased feelings of gloom, often culminating around “Blue Monday” (the third Monday in January which is when the bills are likely to arrive).

 

   We all know that New Year resolutions don’t always work terribly well. This could be partly due to the kind of resolutions we make. We can expect that, somehow, the patterns that we have established over many years can be changed overnight, just because the calendar changes. It is so difficult to live up to our commitments to change ourselves. The fact is, it is easy to think about making changes to our lives while we might have a glass of our favourite drink in our hand, fireworks in the air and jolly people around us cheering as the clock strikes midnight, but it sometimes doesn’t work like that after 1st January.

 

  When we look back at the times we have changed in a significant way, we may realise that, in many of those instances, our hands were forced. We didn’t easily leave the comfort of our old familiar habits for the promise of the new. It is often said that “when one door closes, another opens.” There is much truth in these words, but this maxim cheerfully overlooks the turmoil that is often involved in change. A more realistic version goes like this: “when one door closes, another opens, but it’s hell in the hallway!”

 

  Someone else said, “Although the place where we cling to the rock face may be uncomfortable and battered by icy winds, to move towards our goal means giving up the known for the unknown. But remaining here cannot move us forward.” Moving forward can require letting go of things we have become comfortable with, something familiar, and seemingly secure. Now, once again, another year stretches before us with all its possibilities as yet unwritten. And, despite the poor success rate of New Year’s resolutions, we can change ourselves.

 

  Whether we recognised it at the time or not, we have all made decisions that changed our futures; and we make decisions like that all the time. Some of them are big decisions: what we would study, who we would spend our lives with, where we would live, what job we would do. But even the simplest decisions can have great consequences. How many parts of our current lives hinge on some small decision we made at some point in our pasts? A different decision could have led us to be somewhere entirely different today.

 

  So, whether we have attempted New Year resolutions or not for 2026, most of us will experience changes of some variety or another in the next eleven months. Some of us will be looking forward with some excitement to something that we hope will be good. Some of us will be gazing ahead with apprehension to something that we fear will cause anxiety or pain. Whatever awaits us in the coming year, with God’s help we will see it through. My prayer and my wish for 2026 is that, when changes happen to any of us, the new doors will open smoothly for us and that we will never have to spend too long in that hallway.

 

With love and prayers.

Helen Kempster

Birds in my Garden

 

During the unusually cold and wet winter, we are enjoying a greater number of birds visiting the garden for food and drink, and on the rare days when it isn’t raining and the

frost melts, we can hear some birds tuning up for spring. Amongst the

flurry of finches, robins, blackbirds, starlings and far too many pigeons,

three less common visitors have come to the feeders - a pair of blackcaps

and one lone dunnock (right). Unfortunately, the robin and dunnock have

similar diets. Consequently, in the winter when food is in short supply and

robins are defending their feeding territories, the robin often chases the dunnock away – but they are patient little birds and while the robins are fighting amongst themselves, the dunnocks eat all they want.