Covid-19 : prayer and inspiration in a time of challenge

Covid-19 is part of our lives and its effects are likely to reverberate through global society for years to come.

​"Life will never be the same again" - an oft-repeated sentence which is in itself a challenge to us all.
This page will therefore attempt to give us encouragement and glimpses of reality and hope. It will be a developed as the weeks pass by.

There will also be songs that can heal and enable us to hear Jesus' voice saying "Come to me..."
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Click here to reach the Songs/Video-file page.

The healing (Kitty O'Meara)
​

The people stayed at home. And read books –
and listened – and rested – and exercised – and
made art. The people stayed at home and played games, learned new ways of being – and were
still. Many listened more deeply; some meditated, some prayed, some danced.  Some met their shadows.

And the people begin to think differently. In
the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless and heartless ways – the
Earth began to heal. And the people healed.

And when the danger passed and the people
joined together again, the grieved their losses
and made new choices; they dreamed new
images and created new ways to live and heal
the Earth fully.

Because they had been healed.
​
Fishing the world - a reflection

(MATTHEW 13: 47-48)
 
‘The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every
kind; when it was full, the fishermen drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets
but threw out the bad.

This passage contains good news and bad news.
The bad news is, of course, bad news for the wicked. But the good news, for us, is that we
don’t have to decide who is wicked! This is a powerful image. The net in question is a large dragnet which will capture anything above a
certain size. Therefore, it catches fish edible
and inedible. It may catch debris. It may catch
the rubbish and detritus which ends up in the
ocean. But when the fishermen go out to fish, although they don’t intend to catch debris, or inedible fish, neither do they actively seek to
avoid it. The net is cast out and traps whatever
is in its path. 
In the same way, when we go on our fishing expedition, that great expedition for which
Jesus has commissioned us, it is not for us to
decide what we will catch in our net. There
are many kinds of fish in the sea, and not all of
them may look appealing to us, but that does
not mean that they are not edible. What’s more, having landed a catch, even at that point it is
not up to us to decide what is worth keeping
and what should be thrown away. This is God’s decision, and God’s alone. 

Jane Denniston, Minister of Campsie Church, nr Glasgow      

  Change (Michael Leunig)

   "God help us to change.
   To change ourselves and to change our world.           To know the need for it. To deal with the pain of       it. To feel the joy of it. To undertake the journey     without understanding the destination.                          This is the art of gentle revolution"




    Safety   (Anon.)

    Lord, throw us your healing life-belt 
    that we may float calmly
    on the disturbed waters of life.
  
    Keep our heads above water
    and our eyes fixed on the blue sky
​    of your presence and enfolding arms.
​

​
The Quiet Pool  (Joy Cowley)

There is within each of us
a quiet clear pool of living water fed by the one deep Source and inseparable from it,
but so often hidden
by a tangle of activity
that we may not know
of its existence.
We can spend the proverbial forty years
wandering in strange deserts,
sinking unrewarding wells
and moving on, driven by our thirst,
but when we stop still long enough
to look inside ourselves, really look
beyond our ideas about water
and what and where it should be,
we discover it was with us all the time, that quiet clear pool which is ageless,                                  the meaning of our existence,
and the answer to all our wanderings.
And as we drink,
we know what Jesus meant when he said
we’d never be thirsty again.

‘Aotearoa Psalms’