This week, with Fr Philip Gray, Chaplain to the Bishop of Blackburn

SPRINGTIME, the Easter Season, is one of my favourite times of the year.

The weather begins to warm. The grass needs cutting. Signs of new life are all around.

Most of us enjoy emerging from the hibernation of winter and all the opportunities that come with it.

It is easy to take the spring for granted for we know it always comes. There is, though, the important question, natural to all of us: What is the source of the spring? To whom do we give thanks for all its colour, beauty and new life?

We take the gift of new life for granted, and yet we doubt or question its force in our own deaths and winters.

I was fortunate this Easter to take a little holiday on a family farm in mid-Wales. It was the lambing season and my children were absorbed with these endearing little sheep.

After the tragedy of foot and mouth disease, which blighted our countryside last year, these symbols of new life were all the more potent. As our Jewish brothers and sisters know, the lamb is a symbol of liberation. The lambs of this spring point to that liberation for rural life today.

Whatever our views may be on the necessity of the cull to free these islands from foot and mouth disease, we know that the deaths many animals suffered enabled this new life, and the life of our rural economy, to grow once again. They were sacrificed for the greater good of the future.

In this springtime, when all arises new from winter's death, Christians celebrate this truth that to possess new life their Saviour Jesus Christ died as a Paschal Lamb.

His death led to his resurrection and the gift of new life for all who have faith in Him. We are challenged to identify what must die in us if we are to truly know that new life in our lives.