Confirming your Confirmation

 

The Church of the Resurrection in Ely was packed out last week for our Confirmation Service with Bishop David.
I felt very proud to accompany our candidates who, for the last several weeks, had been preparing for this day – Reg, Jenny and Debra, and our young people Daniel Snook, Joshua Searle, Dylan Salter and Kayleigh James – we hope to have pictures of them all on our website soon!
It’s of course one thing to be confirmed – and a pretty major thing at that! – but how do you stay confirmed? How do you confirm your confirmation? You need a life-time to answer this, but I’d stay a pretty important step is turning up.
Woody Allen once said that 80 % of life is about showing up – about simply being ‘there’, being present in the daily routines and rituals of life.
We don’t realise just how much we are shaped by the daily and weekly habits of our lives. Brushing your teeth, taking children to school, the way we answer questions, listen, respond, offer lifts to people, enjoy morning tea or coffee – these all part of a daily liturgy that over time makes a deep impression on who we are.
In following Jesus, we always look for the big, dramatic gestures to show that we are his followers. But the most important lessons, in the words of S. David, are learning to be faithful in all the little ways: making sure we turn up and show up at the Sunday Eucharist, saying at least one daily prayer, remembering to thank God for our food (even if that’s done silently) showing kindness to strangers and remembering the many, many good things we have in an unfair world.
Learning and doing and repeating these things are the first and longest lessons in the Christian life. But they must be done and repeated and learnt if we are to live our baptism, and confirm our faith every day, every Sunday. Faith is a muscle that grows stronger with use, and weaker with neglect.
However this magazine finds you, faith-filled or feeling strained, know that the people and priests of S. David’s and S. Timothy’s are here to help you on your journey. None of us here are experts; all of us know what it’s like to get things wrong, sometimes very wrong. But we also know that we are loved and accepted by God just as we are. So we want to share our faith in Jesus with you, and we want to walk with you in His way, in this life. I, personally, can’t think of any other way I’d rather go.

Fr. Jesse