The Joy and Challenge of Being Yourself

By
the Revd James Crockford

This coming week, children across the country return to schools for a new academic year. Recent headlines highlighted some of the findings of the Good Childhood Report 2018, published in August by the Children’s Society in partnership with the University of York. The major shock-fact was that one in four girls had harmed themselves in the course of the last year. The report’s key findings note the effects of pressure and expectation on children, the fear of not fitting in or not looking good enough, and the damage caused by outdated gender stereotypes. 
 
Many of us may well have experienced such pressures and fears in earlier years, or indeed at any point in life, or perhaps we fear our children and grandchildren do. It is a sadness that the Church has too frequently had its own forms of social coercion (not least when it comes to outdated concepts of gender). For all the talk about acceptance and welcome, freedom and grace, it is still easy to walk into a church service or event and feel out of place or judged. We each have a role in what sort of place people will encounter when they engage with the Church. Will they find us insular, and bickering about seeming irrelevancies? Or will they discover a family of people who know they need each other, who know they stand in need of grace and seek to be a means of it?
 
At the heart of the Christian gospel – and I hope at the heart of our community at St Mary’s – is a message that we are accepted for who we are, and that our failings and fears need not define us. We are offered the joy of being ourselves, and the challenge of learning how to become ourselves. And weare sent to speak and live that message in a world where so many experience anguish over how others perceive them.
 
Almighty God,
you have broken the tyranny of sin
and have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts
whereby we call you Father:
give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service,
that we and all creation may be brought
to the glorious liberty of the children of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
 
The Revd James Crockford
Assistant Priest