Reverend Ann's Letter

October 2025

On Sunday 18th October we celebrate the Feast of St Luke the Evangelist – author of Luke’s gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.

Luke was thought to have been a physician and because of this it is traditional to have a service based around healing on his festival. 

Luke, as I said, was a physician, but healing, in its deepest sense, does not refer solely to physical cure.

There are of course miracles, when people have been cured of physical illness and disability and we should not discount these.  We should never discount the miraculous, even if we don’t experience it ourselves or know others who have experienced it.

However, in a Christian sense, healing is not about cure.  They are two different things.  Healing is more to do with wholeness, with being made whole by God in a spiritual and emotional way.  Healing is about returning to God and putting right our relationship with God so that his love, mercy and grace can fill our lives and help us to be the people he longs for us to be.

So much pain and hurt in our lives is caused by the gap between what we long to be and who we actually are. The healing process, it seems to me, begins with accepting who we are and our situation and then recognising that God loves us just as we are and is always with us.  From this comes a facing up to our own failings and weaknesses but also a sense of peace.  From here we can learn to hold up everything to God and ask for his guidance, his help and his healing. 

Allowing God into every part of our lives, however dark and painful, is how we begin to heal and that always begins with prayer.  Healing can also come through loving and being loved, through fellowship and connecting with the natural world. 

For me, most especially, healing means being released from fear and learning to live life to the full, wherever we find ourselves and whatever happens to us.  This can only be done with God’s help. 

During these very unsettling times, it would be easy to succumb to fear.  But God is calling us to a fuller life.  We need to trust in him, place our burdens on to him and ask for his strength and grace to accept where we are and who we are.

The process of healing is not easy and might well be painful as we face up to some truths about ourselves and our situations.  However, God wants us to be healed, to be released from fear and walk with him into a new day where, we can be certain, he will never let us go.

Go well.

Ann