First of all thank you to all who made Holy Week and Easter Day so special by coming along and joining in the worship but also in decorating the church and mowing the grass!

Apart from the fact that the sun didn’t come through the clouds for the 5.50am Son rise Service on Easter morning the whole day went really well!  Thank you too to Colette Som and Richard Boyd for Bacon Butties and tea and coffee after the service – we needed them!

Holy Week was quite a week as in the midst of it I was on BBC Wiltshire and challenged with the idea that being a vicar is a top job (vocation) for happiness!  Given that home is the office 24/7 and there is, at most dare I say, one 24 hour period per week when there is no work related interruptions, I was really surprised to hear vicars are in a top happiness job!  There is a lot of stress involved, as there is with many jobs, on home and family as my ministerial duties always take precedence.  And of course, the highs and lows are experienced by my family too!

I was even more intrigued when I discovered that the happiest jobs all had loads of stress of one sort or another in them, and were very demanding on family life! CEOs, Farmers, Company Secretaries and similar were all in the top 10 jobs!

It started to make me think – the one thing all the job holders appear to have in common is freedom to do the job as they think best.  They are also responsible for their own actions and reading a situation correctly, adapting a response to it and carrying it through.  And they are responsible for the well-being of their families.  In other words they are not in a 9-5 situation where a job is prescribed for them.  They are all jobs which are different each day and one must adapt to the changes that take place with regard to priorities.  All the jobs include the freedom to care for people as well as family according to one’s ethics and morals.  People depend on them for their well-being and happiness.

Do we just need to develop more trust in each other to be able to create more happiness?!

With love
Reverend Ann