By Canon Alec Boyd, The Cathedral of The Isles, Millport.

This Thursday is Ascension Day – 40 days after Easter. 40 days is a period of time in the Bible representing that a course of action has been taken and reached its fulfilment. Christians believe this refers to Jesus completing the work He came to do. He returns to God and sends the Holy Spirit to empower his followers to proclaim the good news of the Gospel throughout the world.

We all set ourselves a time by which we have to complete something. Very often we leave things to the very last minute and find it almost impossible to do what is expected of us – or what we expect of ourselves.

This is a time when it might be sensible to take stock of where we are in our life’s journey. What would you write in your “bucket list”? Perhaps you might like to jot down a few ideas of the important things you would really like to achieve? It might be an interesting experience and some of the things you come up with may even surprise you. But then we need to follow Jesus’ example and make sure we take time to achieve all that we would like to do.