With hilarious anecdotes, tough lessons and spiritual reflections from wrestling with faith, this book charts what it's like to live in the goldfish bowl of a vicarage, grow up in the shadow of your parents, lose your faith and find it again. With both rewritten blog posts and brand new material, this collection of tips, letters and musings will appeal not just to clergy children and their parents, but also to teenagers growing up in Christian homes, and to those who want to know what it's like to live a life of ministry you never really asked for.
Contents
- Clergy child's lament
- Introduction
Tips for clergy children
- Bring-and-share lunches are highly unpredictable
- Sometimes the smallest offerings have the biggest impact
- People will come in and randomly start dismantling your house
- Do not give out your address over the phone
- Boundaries are excellent things
- Don't feel obliged to invite the entire congregation to your birthday party
- You will never realise how important your hospitality is until you're on the receiving end of someone else's
- Always lock the toilet door. A surprising number of people will just barge through closed ones
- Teach your parent to turn off their phone
- Make sure you check out the parish profile before your parent applies for a job
- Learn to accept strange gifts with grace
- You are, to all intents and purposes, the vicarage social secretary
- If someone's coming to stay, make sure you're informed well in advance
- It's OK to grieve
- Don't bother waiting for your parents before leaving church. It's a waste of everyone's time
- There are certain things you should never tell a caller
- Always carry ID. You never know when you might need to prove yourself
- Your love life will be a continual source of parish speculation
- Sometimes it's just awful, but God is still good
- Forgive; it changes lives
Letters
- A letter for the new clergy child
- A letter for clergy parents
- A letter for when the church has hurt you
- A letter for when you feel as if the church has stolen your parents
- A letter for when a friend leaves
- A letter for when you feel inadequate
Musings
- Coming home
- Dancing in the grey
- Confessions
- Chains
- Walking the forgiveness path
- Interrupted
- Trust and obey
- Hide-and-seek
- Be still
- Barefoot
- Battling
- Fingertip faith
- Prayer for a friend
- Here is love
- On being human
- Naked
- Out of the ashes
- At the feet of Jesus
- Heaven has a climbing frame
- Without words
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