Lambs

Today we began the extreme bit of Lent.

Forget eating oranges... actually I didn't but that's by the by

Forget switching the radio off in the car... still very difficult

Today... I went for a walk!

To put this in context:

1. three vicars meet once a week to pray


2. three vicars go on retreat together


3. three vicars climb hill and don't die (private joke don't worry about it)


4. finally three vicars make rash promise to change pray time into walking time.

So today we walk... and as before on the retreat our mighty leader takes us up a hill. His theory is that it's best to get the hill out of the way first. To be honest in our area there is always a hill. I am sure that this time, despite the fact that we went on a circular walk we went up more hills than we came down!

How did that happen?

Anyhow on the walk we saw some of the first signs of spring notably lambs.

It reminded me later as I thought about the lambs of the way in which they link together Christmas and Easter. Lambs are associated with Christmas because they appear in Crib scenes although not in the Gospel stories. Apparently they are not there to be cute but were deliberately put in Nativity Scenes by artists to point to Easter.
They are not in the Easter story either but the idea of Jesus as a "sacrifical Lamb" is there adn pointed to by John the Baptist who says: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

We saw some baby pigs as well but I couldn't think of anything clever about them except that one had ginger hair and looked a bit like me.