From the Chaplains

I invite you, before you continue reading, to take a moment to pause and simply listen to the world around you.

Begin by focusing on your breathing and then slowly open your senses to the world around you. The sounds and smells. The feeling of the air against your cheek. The warmth or the coolness of your hands.

Close your eyes if you need to.

What did you hear? What did you feel?

Where was God?

In chapel this week we have been introducing Pymble to the prophet Anna.

Anna only features in a few small verses in the book of Matthew. She is the only woman identified as a prophet in the entire New Testament. She is given this title because she was one of the first to see and name the newborn Christ Child as God, and she was the first to share this news with the people of Jerusalem.

Ana is interesting because up until that point she spent her days repeating the exercise that I invited you to start with. For Ana each day was spent temple waiting for God through prayer and fasting following the death of her husband. And nothing ever happened, or so we assume because we are only told about the waiting.

And then one day, something did. Mary and Joseph entered the temple with their newborn baby. And in that moment, because she was waiting and noticing Anna saw the newborn Christ child for who he was. God incarnate. And she went into the world to share this good news.

I can’t help wondering if this is what Ana’s waiting had been what she thought she was waiting for, or something else?

And I can’t help wondering what difference it would have made in the faith of those who follow Jesus today if Ana and others like her did not notice him through his life praying, healing and teaching among them?

Because many people didn’t. And this is understandable. They were busy. They had other priorities.  Just like we do.

This week I want to invite you all to simply take a few moments each day to pause.

To notice your breathing, and then to open your sense to the world. To hear the sounds, you would normally not hear, and to see the things that you would normally not see in the busyness of all that you do.

My prayer is that you see God in that moment in a way that you did not expect. In yourself, in others, in the wind. Because it is in in noticing, and waiting, in the cracks in between and in the moments, we least expect that we realise that God is always there.

Danielle Hemsworth-Smith

College Chaplain