Family

FAMILY

At this time of year many of us leave the island to escape the heat and humidity and visit family, usually back in the UK, where we can enjoy the British ‘summer’. Or perhaps our family will come out to visit us, and I must admit, as our grandchildren are now grown up I miss being able to watch them enjoying themselves in the pool.

Family is so important to us, and those few days we can spend together become very precious. Contact is a little easier now than it used to be. We now have the Internet and Facebook, to enable us to keep in contact with our family, but it’s still not the same as being there. Many times I have heard people say that they want to return to the UK because they miss the family.

Even just two generations ago very few people moved away from the area they were born in and unless you were in the forces, travel to other countries was a rarity. I remember as a child listening to Three Way Family Favourites on the radio, with Jean Metcalf in Germany, Cliff Michelmore in the U

K and Jean Challis in Cyprus, reading messages from the men serving at Episkopi and Akrotiri, and thinking all these places sounded like they were the other side of the world! Modern jet travel has certainly shrunk the physical distance but the emotional distance can still be difficult to live with for some.

So how do we cope here on the island of Cyprus without our close family around us all the time?

Well as a Christian, church becomes our family. God is our Father and the church members become our brothers and sisters. In Psalm 68 verses 5 & 6 David says God is ‘A father of the fatherless and a judge and protector of the widows is God in His holy habitation. God places the solitary in families and gives the desolate a home in which to dwell’.

Because God is our Father in this intimate sense, and because Jesus Christ is our brother, we do not need any other human intermediary to bring us into close contact with God. God is our Father and we are brothers and sisters to all other Christians.

So, if you are feeling lonely and alone ask yourself, why? Many people are lonely because they choose to be alone. Jesus tells us it’s not good for us to be alone. We all need to belong, it’s a basic human need. Much research has been done on the need for relationship. It has been found that those who have bad eating and living habits but good relationships fair better health wise than those who have good eating and living habits but poor relationships.

Church should be a place where we all come together in fellowship. That’s why NTCC have a coffee morning at Coral Star (opposite Phillipos) in Coral Bay, see advert opposite. It’s a chance to meet and talk and get to know each other better, and although we will be giving our team 2 weeks off in August (6th & 13th) to spend time with their families, we will be running our service on zoom only. We will be back at our usual meeting place from the 20th. We will still meet for coffee at Coral Star, so we look forward to meeting you.