The middle of June will be a busy time in the calendar. It will be the first official birthday of King Charles III on 17th June which is marked by the Trooping the Colour at Horse Guards Parade in London. King Charles’s other birthday is on 14th November when he will celebrate his 75thbirthday. The same weekend is also Father’s Day on Sunday 18th June which is always on the third Sunday. Then that same week we have the Summer Solstice on Wednesday the 21st at 3.57 pm. However, while most people consider the summer solstice to be a day, it is in reality an exact moment in time. At this moment the earth is most tilted towards the Sun which gives you the longest day of the year. In Devon, the sun rises at 5.02 am and sets at 9.32 pm giving an impressive sixteen and half hours of daylight. The slightly saddening fact is that by the end of June, we have already lost nearly four minutes of daylight, and the nights are growing longer already. However, summer is only just beginning and we hope for the heat of the Sun to bring warm sunny days in July and August. What the clouds and rains do might make a quite different picture to that which we had hoped for!
I suspect that you might have noticed that life is not evenly spaced and carefully ordered. It often feels like things come together at the most inconvenient time. A lot of people believe in the rule of three. When two things happen, there is an expectation that a third is about to happen. I do not think there is any evidence for this to be true, it is just when we notice three things happening we recognise it as a triplet. It becomes more memorable than a single event or double event. It is interesting to note how much we forget and discard and how we selectively remember special significant things. Memory is formed by what impacts us and how we see the world and so is unique to us. You must remember arguing about the same event because two different people see it from an entirely different perspective. It can be infuriating when someone did not see the same event the way that you did. We know from DNA that each one of us is unique, we are not all the same and we know that our memories are part of that uniqueness. For me, it speaks of a God of infinite possibilities and the real wonder of creation. The more we discover about our world the more we realise that there is so much more to learn about it.
If we know there is so much that is unique about our world, we should want to celebrate the amazing diversity we find in people and our world. It often feels safer to be in a world conforming to the way we want it to be. We discover that we are just a small part of it and are called to share it with other people. We want future generations to be able to experience the rich diversity of our world.
