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From Reverend Sharon Grenham-Toze, Anglican Priest and Prison Chaplain:

One of my colleagues flies off to New Zealand this weekend, to visit her daughter who’s emigrated there. Another team member’s planning a trip to India in a few weeks’ time, and yet another one’s pondering a visit to Jamaica. I’m the boss of all three, so I’m not sure if it’s me they’re escaping….but whatever it is, everyone’s got their minds on a journey.

Well, whilst I wish them all well, and hope they have a great time, it’s also true that journeys often don’t work out quite as we planned. Maybe the accommodation’s disappointing, the review was misleading, or it takes a lot longer to get there than we expected. I watched Top Gear on Monday night about the team’s trip to Chile and Argentina - now there was an eventful journey, what with getting stuck on a beach, crashing into ice walls, not to mention the protesting locals!

Rabbi Pete spoke about the Christian festival of Epiphany yesterday – the day when the wise men are supposed to have reached the end of their long trek from the East, seeking the Messiah. That journey certainly had an unexpected end, because the King they were looking for turned out to be a small child from a humble background, with no trappings of greatness about him at all.  I bet they were confused that after so many miles, here was someone who looked very unpromising indeed. But taken aback as they must have been, still the Wise Men laid their wisdom and riches at the feet of that vulnerable baby.

They did it because they realised that it’s not outward appearances, or success, or material things, or even knowledge and learning, which helps us on our way through life. As a prison chaplain I see men every day who’ve made a right mess of their lives, and those of others too. What I tell them is what I learned in my most difficult days – we can’t always choose the destination, or even the road we take, but we can choose, every day, to travel with hope.