Yesterday, we woke to about 2 inches [4cm] of snow and to much excitement from our children who got dress much faster than I can remember for a while. Despite that, I was out of the door first on my way to morning prayer, therefore the first in our family to take in the full beauty of the whitened South Oxfordshire countryside and the first to crunch my boots down the garden path. It was great, a sight and experience that I have not had for a long time, even I was excited.

However, by lunchtime the landscape was much more colourful and the paths around college were more of a wet slush and unpleasant to walk through. By the time the school bus arrived the kids had to work hard at finding enough snow to fill their palms.

Since I had spent the morning reading about mission it was not surprising that such a parallel as this should occur to me:

Mission by the church is [at least in my experience], a little bit like an English snow fall. Very exciting at first with peoples enthusiasm and willingness raised. It is easy to find the extra effort to over come the difficulties that arise and it is even beautiful to see. But after this initial stage it all begins to fade away until it is more like a damp mess and it is both a source of disappointment and relief that it will all be over soon. By the end of the day we are actually very glad that things are back to normal and ordinary life returns. Glad of the experience, but also relieved that that doesn’t happen everyday! We’ll probably have a few photos embarrassingly showing ourselves over excited that it did snow even if we can’t actually remember it.