Heartfelt Thanks

In between my two sessions at the ATC I was sipping a cup of tea (there's something amiss with the Squadron kettle, the tea was cappuccino-frothy even before I put the milk in) and spotted a handmade thank you card on the noticeboard. As I suspected, it turned out to be from a young woman who was a member of the Corps and is just about to go off to university. Becky used to come to Swanvale Halt church too, and though she claims to be an unbeliever she still volunteers with children with learning difficulties at another, much bigger church not far away. In tiny, exceedingly neat handwriting Becky described all the benefits she'd gained from membership of the ATC, physically and emotionally. It was very sincere and yet curiously formal. (It didn't look like this picture, by the way, in case you get the wrong impression).

As Becky gets older she'll develop in other directions and her few years in the Air Training Corps and its effects may seem to occupy a different and less crucial place in her life, but for now it's central  in the business of growing up, a transitional phase. We all learn to contextualise our life events out of all recognition, and be a little more reticent, perhaps, about them, perfectly reasonably so. But her youthful commitment opens the possibility of change and development which any organisation, especially a church with its truly cosmic weight of inertia, vitally needs. I would like it at Swanvale Halt.