Goodbyes & Vapour
Minister's Letter: December 2025
Dear Grace Church,
Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Minister’s Letter is coming out a little earlier this month. That is because this time next week, we will be in Ireland where we will be spending Christmas and New Year. It is our first Christmas in Ireland since 2018 and I am filled with excitement to spend the time with my family.
Could I remind you of two dates, one before and one after?
This coming Sunday, 21st December, at 4pm is our Annual Community Carols. We’d love to see you there. Bring a friend.
And a month tomorrow, on Saturday 17th January, Paul & Caroline Ritchie will be joining us to help us think about how we live as Christians with mental health struggles. Paul will be taking two session from 9.30am that morning and in the evening at 7pm, we will listen in to an interview with Caroline. More details to come soon. But put it into your calendars now.
As we prepare to say goodbye to 2025, we must also say goodbye to all those who will not travel with us from this year to the next. There’s a heaviness for us as we consider that 2025 was the last time we were able to make any memories with some of those we loved and cared deeply about. Today, I’m thinking about Walter Petrie.
My earliest memory of Walter is from Saturday 23rd April 2022. It was the day of my Ordination & Induction as Minister of Grace Church. Walter had turned around one of the seats in the row in front of him so he could put up his leg. Alex was telling him off, saying that the seat would be needed for people coming soon.
My final memory of Walter is from Friday 4th April 2025. We had heard from his cousin that his health had declined rapidly, so Alex and I went to visit him at Ninewells that night. We spent time talking with him, praying with and for him, trying to get him a bit more comfortable, reading the Scriptures to him, and finally sitting with him in silence. Remarkably, at one point, Alex even elicited a laugh from Walter. And as we left, we said our goodbyes to him.
As I have started to reflect on the year that is fading from our present into our past, there is something about those two memories that stand out. I’m not sure if it’s poetic, appropriate, providential or all three that Alex was there in both. But those memories capture the ordinariness and extraordinariness of the life we live.
As I consider the year that will soon have been and and as I consider the death of Walter Petrie, I hear the Preacher whispering in my year:
“All is vapour.”
I have been preaching at Grace Church for the last three and half years. I have been preaching almost weekly since the beginning of 2020. I have been working at churches and been involved in various forms of word ministry since moving to Scotland in 2013. I have either preached through, written devotions on, or led Bible Studies in numerous portions of Scripture.
Yet in all that time, nothing in the Bible has got under my skin like Ecclesiastes.
While we began the series in Ecclesiastes on 14th September, I started sitting with the Preacher in May. Ecclesiastes is unsettling. It is disorientating. Confusing. Unnerving. Uncomfortable. Bewildering. Perturbing.
The Preacher probes the questions we ask in the dark. The questions we try to keep hidden away in the dark. “What gain is there in all I have done?” We are afraid of the answer because we know it. Yet the Preacher does not allow us to shy away from reality. All is vapour. All is mist. All is merest breath.
It is in accepting this, not in a Stoic or fatalistic way, but as followers of Jesus, that the preacher then shows us a path forward to joy.
Something that the Spirit has been unearthing in my own life this year is the critical spirit of my own heart. Through his word, he has convicted me of this. Particularly how my first instinct is to see what is wrong with a situation, event, institution or person.
Yet in his providence, God has used Ecclesiastes to nourish and cultivate my own gratitude. He has used it help me see the evidences of his grace in what I am living today. He has used it to help me treasure and celebrate not the life I want but the life that has been given to me.
For that and many other reasons, I am not ready to leave Ecclesiastes behind. I don’t think we are meant to. Having lived with Ecclesiastes since September, it should now live on with us.
Let me invite you to meditate on the words of delight and truth the Preacher has presented to us. Let me invite you to consider how is prompting you to put them into action today. Let me invite you to remember your Creator!
In Christ,
Ciarán R. Kelleher
December Treat
In September’s Letter, I attached a playlist for the series in Ecclesiastes. I have updated it with a number of new additions, so here it is posted again. Enjoy.