Watching the very slow, but highly impressive, transfer of a 113year old Church building in Kiruna, Sweden, to its new home three miles up the road this week, caused me mutter under my breath the proverbial phrase: ‘Where there is a will, there is a way’. It was a triumph of both engineering and community spirit.

We are told that faith as small as a mustard seed has the power to move mountains, but, without the will to move them, they remain firmly grounded and so often the problems we face are not with the ‘way’ that change could happen, but with an institutional inertia, which we allow ourselves to believe prevents us from following in the way we should go. If we had the will to do so, as collective humanity, we could make a lot more difference than we typically do. We could distribute wealth and resources in such a way as to eliminate child poverty, we could end homelessness, we could build more renewable energy systems, we could change laws and hearts to bring an end to discrimination and violence. But in a world overwhelmed by want, and in lives overwhelmed by multiple demands and limited energies, where do find the will, let alone the way, to do so? This is where we must abandon our own notion of willpower and fall on our faith to inspire us.

In prayer we learn to align our will with God’s Will; to open ourselves to God’s vision for our lives and planet. A vision much more expansive, just, and achievable than our own notions of success. And, in Jesus, we are gifted the Way to follow in so that we may all come to know fullness of life. We have each been gifted unique and individual talents to contribute to making the Kingdom-vision a reality and we all have a part to play (prayerfully and practically) in moving the church, and the world, towards the day when lack and injustice will be no more. God sees and honours your contribution, even when it feels unnoticed by the world, and, on the days it feels impossible or like you’re ’running out of steam’, be encouraged that it is not our own will that will bring the Kingdom to fruition, but it is God’s Will for us, travelling together along The Way, that will complete the work he has begun.