Sunday, May 06, 2007

From trees to flowers



I returned from the calm of Llan to a church all dressed up for a flower festival, on the theme "Let there be Light"
The entire church is filled with incredible creations - including the centre aisle, which posed a bit of a problem for OpenHouse this afternoon. Inevitably we decided that we'd better "consider the lillies" as our theme, and as always God produced a few surprises to add to the mix - this time in the shape of some unsuspecting visitors to the flower festival who found themselves drawn in to the worship and claimed to have enjoyed themselves hugely.

I was specially pleased with the "activity" slot today, which saw children and adults exploring the church, trying to count how many different colours of flower they could find (answers ranged from 24 to 1 million) and decide on their favourite...but then they were invited to discover an important secret hidden beneath a cloth in the (flower free) North Transept.
Beside the cloth a notice asked
"What does God find most beautiful in church today?....Lift the cloth to find out"
Beneath the cloth was ........a mirror.

Of course, the children enjoyed this, but on the whole took it as no less than their due (though I was rather delighted by one little girl's response to my question "have you discovered the secret surprise?" "MEEEEEE"). It was, though, the adults who were most thrilled by this discovery - particularly, I'm told, a rather elderly gentleman who was heard to exclaim
"God finds my feet beautiful" in tones of incredulous pleasure.

He was right, of course!

4 comments:

Disillusioned said...

I'm glad this went well. Was thinking of you all and participating from a distance. And thank you for the message.

Anonymous said...

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news..." lovely story! thanks. And your endless creativity is inspiring, spntaneously inventing a "consider the lilies" theme - plenty of people would have had an attack of the grumps and complained about lack of communication... you are a wonderful woman!

Fiona Marcella said...

All in all I think it proved to be a very successful way of introducing older people to the Church. How can we get them to stay?

Kathryn said...

lol
You're so right, Marcella ;-)