Reflection: Sunday 11th September and for the week ahead:Scripture:‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1Timothy 1.15)Reflection:The religious leaders of Jesus’s time despised him for consorting with ‘sinners’ - a blanket term covering not only the immoral and the actual wrongdoers, but all those they dismissed as ‘unclean’: misfits and outcasts of every sort, including the diseased and disabled, not to mention women! To associate with such people would be to be made unclean oneself.But the love and care of Jesus for the despised of society gave such people a new self respect, new hope, new confidence, a new way of living. In our churches, in our community, in our places of work and in our chance encounters, we are not called to disapprove of and avoid those whose are not ‘like us’, but to actively seek ‘the likeness of Christ’ in all God’s children. Not always easy. But who ever said that to follow Jesus would be easy? Certainly not Jesus himself.Revd Rosemary Kobus van Wengen
Reflection: Sunday 4th September and for the week ahead:Scripture:O Lord, you have searched me out and known me;you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar.You mark out my journeys and my resting place and are acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139 1-2)Reflection: Truly letting go and trusting in God’s will for us all is such a difficult thing to do - our ego normally has something else to say about it. We tend to believe that we have all the answers and boldly, or not so boldly, go where we think the pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow is - and we all know where that will lead us!! We are all too ready to rush around, attaining this, achieving that, that we rarely take time to stop and listen to what God has is store for us - which is always infinitely better than we can ever imagine. Simply taking a little time out of our busy day and resting in God’s peace for even a short period may help us all to discern His journey for our lives. Lyn Hayes ALM
