They say, ‘A change is as good as a rest' - but don't believe them! Change can be a wonderful thing, but I am in a position to assure you that it is not at all the same as rest. Still, having survived my first few weeks here, I'm starting to feel a little more settled in Sheffield now. I know my local bus route; my milk gets delivered to the door; I'm beginning to meet familiar faces on the bus and in the pews (my embarrassed apologies to those of you whose names still escape me) and my bookcases are constructed and filled, by topic and in alphabetical order. For true well-being, apparently, intergalactic hitchhikers need to know where their towel is. If I am to feel at home, I need to know where my books are. Yet I keep catching myself wanting to rearrange them in a more sensible order - and a different order each time. Maybe my unconscious is trying to tell me that too much order is as bad as too little.
Another way I remember the need for both order and a little bit of chaos in life is by pinning a picture above my desk. Some of you will remember that a few Sundays ago in church we looked at the story of the Creation through a Lion picture storybook, with words by Steve Turner and pictures by Jill Newton. The picture I have on my wall is of dry land emerging from the waves: order coming out of chaos, but with a fair bit of confusion still around. It's another image of the way I feel just now!
The Hebrew people hated the sea, maybe because they lived a long way away from it. Seas were unpredictable, full of monsters; a remnant of the ancient chaos over which God's spirit brooded in the beginning. God had made a good deal of order while creating the world, but for the Hebrews bits of chaos still lurked around the edges of the known and predictable - a little like the medieval mapmaker's warning where reliable evidence ran out: Here be dragons - and they were very suspicious of it.
In churches, we're continually walking a tightrope between too much order and too little. In my home congregation, I occasionally found myself being given a Bible passage to read at the last moment, under cover of the previous hymn. At St Andrew's, by contrast, we like to have things done ‘decently and in order', and preferably planned well in advance.
But at St Andrew's we're also good at going on holidays - and holidays, however well they are organised and led by extremely competent people, always involve some uncertainty. Some of us prefer one end of the chaos-order spectrum and some the other, but we can't avoid a bit of both. Someone who goes to the same place at the same time to stay with the same people every year, will, I suspect, find and appreciate a few changes each time, if it's only different flowers growing on the hilltop or a new family moved into the village. And someone who chooses an apparently chaotic recreation, for example white-water rafting or taking small children anywhere, will need to do a bit of forward thinking in order to survive unscathed!
So, as you prepare to go on holiday, or indeed as you cope with coming back to ordinary life on your return, I wish you some rest and some change, in the proportion that best suits your temperament. But in your dealings with God I also wish you a combination of the two. May you know the contentment of contact with the one who knows you best and loves you most. And may that relationship continue to grow and change in surprising ways, as the Spirit broods over the chaos in your life!