St Mary Redcliffe Church Parish Magazine - October 2016

Are You Flourishing?
Kat Campion-Spall
The summer is now over and we are firmly in
autumn – I picked up a couple of conkers the
other day and contemplated turning the heating
on this morning! This is, in the natural world, a
season of plenty, when the fruits of the spring’s
flowering and the summer’s growth are ripe and ready to be harvested
and enjoyed. Some of us will be feasting on the produce of gardens,
allotments or even hedgerows, enjoying the results of our hard work or of
nature’s bounty.
The first Sunday of October is our Harvest Festival in church, where we
give thanks to God for the abundance of the earth. In the Old Testament,
the people were required to give the “first fruits”, the best of the harvest,
to God, so it’s also a time to share with others any abundance we have –
in our urban setting this is expressed through bringing food for
distribution to people who don’t have the resources to provide enough
food for themselves or their families.
But the Bible, and especially the teachings of Jesus, is rich in the language of
flourishing, growth, fruit-bearing and harvest for people too. We all,
whether we are gardeners or not, understand what it means to talk about
someone flourishing, or growing, or doing fruitful work of one kind or
another. Our church vision statement includes the line “people blossom
in front of you when they talk about their faith.”
So it is a good time of year to think about other kinds of fruits. Which
areas of life are you flourishing in? What has borne fruit in your work,
your relationships, your life? Where have you grown? And the question
that follows from that is, have you offered any of those first fruits to God?
It’s harder to quantify than whether you have put your envelope in the