What is on your mind today? Perhaps you have to get the car through its N.C.T. Perhaps you have to do the shopping with not enough money in your purse.Perhaps you have to get some work done with not enough hours in your day. Perhaps you have to visit a family member who is ill, or help your child fix a failed friendship at school. There is so much to do. Continuing Jesus’ mission on earth problem doesn’t figure much in the pages of our diaries.

Today we are privy to Jesus’ prayer made on our behalf at the close of his ministry on earth. In this prayer, we are reminded that Jesus had finished the work that he had come to do. Jesus had made God’s name known, so that all could share in eternal life. However, for this to happen, we have to carry the baton and keep Jesus’ teaching alive in a world  bursting with conflicting values.

The first disciples continued Jesus’ mission without planes, trains, without a postal service, without TV or radio and without the internet. Yet thanks to these early disciples we are all very familiar with the promise of eternal life, even though these words were spoken over two thousand years ago. It doesn’t matter how busy we are, life is so much  easier for us than it was for those early disciples. We really don’t have much excuse. We have been entrusted with an important job, yet for most of us, it is something we don’t think about nearly enough.  We are told not to let the world tie us down, but that’s most definitely easier said than done. In truth we are very much of this world.

On this Sunday we celebrate World Communication Day, and it feels a timely opportunity to consider the task we have been set. We have all the benefits of a twenty first century world at our fingertips, now we just need to capture some of the passion that drove those early disciples.

We all know at least one person who sets a shining example. Perhaps it’s here that we will find our motivation. Perhaps the people we most admire provide us with a  model of who we ourselves would like to be. With a good example to emulate and our twenty first century means to spread God’s love, change is not beyond any of us.

‘Eternal Life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent….’