This is my first ever reflection for the Okehampton Times and Tavistock Times Gazette, so let me introduce myself. I’m Revd Claire, the new vicar for Okehampton, Inwardleigh and Belstone. I started here just a few months ago, when the bishop came and did a special service. This was when he gave me the licence to be vicar here, and some of you may have been there.

Being still very new here, I have been thinking about what it means to have a new start. My family and I moved to Okehampton just before I started as vicar, so it was a new start for us in a number of ways. A new home, a new job, a new place and new people to get to know.

New starts can be daunting. Often it involves a lot of change, leaving familiar places and routines behind, and we don’t necessarily know what that new life is going to look like.

But on the other side of the coin, it means a reset, a new chapter beginning, new friends and the possibility of wiping the slate clean again.

As a Christian, I believe that is what my faith in Jesus offers me. Easter was only a few weeks ago, when we were reminded of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Easter message speaks of new life and new hope. In John’s Gospel Chapter 10, Jesus says: “I have come in order that you might have new life, and life in all its fullness.”

Through Jesus’ death on the cross and his rising again, whoever we are and whatever we have done, we are all offered that possibility of a new start. Of wiping the slate clean, of beginning again. Across the world approximately 2.3 billion people call themselves Christians, and know what it is to experience that new life. Perhaps now might be the moment to explore that offer more.

Revd Claire Reynolds

Vicar of Okehampton, Inwardleigh and Belstone