Yesterday my husband presented me with not one, but two Advent Calendars.

The same thing happened last year: on the first of December I present him (and the children of course) with a chocolate Advent Calendar. On the second of December I am gifted not one, but two, calendars which have miraculously arrived courtesy of next day delivery: a chocolate calendar and a tea one. As I boiled the kettle and plucked the teabag from it’s ‘window’ I had a flash back to this time last year.

This time last year I had taken myself away for a few days to my favourite retreat house, The Society of Martha and Mary in Sheldon, Devon. It had been a year of pandemic, of lockdowns, of closed church buildings, online worship, and the tiniest funerals I have ever taken. It had been a year of home schooling, of working from home, keeping at a distance, of clapping on the doorsteps. It had been a year of change for everyone.

We come to the presence of the One who is making us

We come to the presence of the One who is healing us

We come to the presence of the One who is guiding us

We come in love and trust.

Sheldon Morning Prayer

As I meditated upon this prayer I felt a real sense that this was for me, for this time. I had begun to discern that it was time for a move, and I trusted that God was making something new in me. I recognised that after the challenges of the past year I needed some time and space for healing. I tried to listen to where God might be leading me.

The prayer came home with me. It stayed in my heart and my morning meditations, it sat on my bedside table, inked on a portion of disused roadmap, framed in gold. Each day I asked, ‘God, where are you leading me?’ We celebrated Christmas with all the confines of Covid; churches were open again for a limited number, our usually packed Christingle service was held outside with the wind blowing out the candles before they had time to catch, Boxing Day was spent with family via Zoom, sharing a Christmas Quiz. And then, January, and the process of ‘Dispossession’ began.

If you are clergy with tenure living in tied accommodation you cannot be made redundant, you are ‘dispossessed of your living’. I kept praying, ‘God, where are you leading me?’ and there seemed to be no answer. In the silence I applied for posts, for new livings. The perfect positions arose and disappeared, not so perfect after all. Easter was celebrated, and I processed back down the aisle at the end of the service to silence, returning home to a huge bouquet of flowers on the doorstep, and that was it. GCSEs were taken under Covid Conditions, I cleared my study of the books and tools of ministry, and the space was used to store packing boxes as we prepared to leave our home, still not knowing where God was leading us, just that we were being taken on our own personal Exodus.

A year on and I am preparing to lead another Petite Retreat. Over the next few days I will be welcoming people to spend a day at a beautiful Quiet Garden in a very cosy cabin to be Cradled in God’s love. I will be helping people to make space at home for God to cradle them in this Advent season thanks to the new online skills formed during the pandemic. Three separate days of retreating, three days of discovering that this is where God has been leading me, this is the new thing that God was creating in me; I am now understanding the healing process that has begun by moving out of the confines of parish ministry to a place where I can be more creative, more me.

The three days of retreats will be interspersed with more conventional forms of ministry, celebrating Holy Communion at a church currently without a vicar, conducting a funeral. I am still a priest, and have been blessed to be able to find my place at the Communion Table during these Sundays of Advent. I am still, and always will be, a priest, but the shape of ministry is changing and I am too.

A year on and that sense of disturbed waters is settling. My portfolio is beginning to fill, and I am thankful to God for the changes that have been taking place. I am excited by this new direction God is leading us, and I’m looking forward to whatever lies ahead.