12.3.14

Twenty years ago today



Twenty years ago today, I was looking forward to leaving my teens behind, somewhat troubling years but probably very average really: boys, homework, fashion fazes, school work, all that usual stuff.

I would be twenty in eight months and I knew what I was about, two years of university under my belt, my head full of Dead Poet's Society and pressing on towards becoming an English teacher. Making that decision that my current boyfriend was 'the one' - he was!

At fourteen, five years before, I can remember standing in the front room of my grandparents' house in Chester, hearing them debate women's ordination, probably only briefly and before moving on to conversations about Sunday lunch but I remember being caught up in a moment which I knew to be significant, even though my life revolved around boys, homework, fashion fazes, school work, all the usual stuff.

Five years before that, as a nine year old, I had stood inside my grandparents' bedroom, after having posted a 'Thank you Granny, I loved your roast potatoes' note on the headboard of their bed, (I know I was rather cute!) staring at the back of the bedroom door that had swung closed on its hinges at my Grandpa's Reader gowns, one black cassock and a surplice and Reader scarf, wondering why there was something about them that excluded me.

So today, I celebrate women's ordination to the priesthood.

On this day, with eight months to go until I am 40, I think about the church of which I will become vicar and pray for God's leading.

I also pray that very soon, I will be celebrating the day when the first woman becomes a Bishop and the gowns that hang on the bedroom doors of future grandmothers and grandfathers say to future leaders of God's church, there is something about these that's including you!

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