From the Collect for today, the Second Sunday before Lent:

Almighty God, you have created the heavens and the earth and made us in your own image: teach us to discern your hand in all your works and your likeness in all your children...

Reflection:

The Collects are a wonderful resource: encouraging, challenging, thought provoking. Today’s is one of my great favourites, one to which I constantly return and often quote from. It calls us to open our eyes to the amazing complexity and beauty of our planet, and to praise God for it. Not hard, living where we do, with signs of spring appearing all around us!

Rather more challenging is the call to discern God’s likeness in ‘all his children’. In some blessed souls His likeness shines through; in others it is much harder to find. But if we look hard enough, and humbly enough, we may be surprised at what is to be discovered in apparently unlikely places.

And more challenging still: How likely are people to discern something of God’s likeness in us?

Revd Rosemary

Lyn Hayes