God of time and God eternal, God beyond millennia; God whose fingerprints reveal you In the atom and the stars: Flood our hearts with hope and wonder, Fill us with your healing love. God, in Jesus, you have lived life, Shared constraints of...
Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven
Kintsugi – Broken Beauty
Thus far I did come laden with my sin; Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in Till I came hither; What a place is this: Must here be the beginning of my bliss? Must here the burden fall from off my back? Must here the strings that bound it to me crack? Blest...
God is a Surprise
What is belief? A recognition? Who knows of what? If any say He knows, he lies. Who knows what never was begun And will not end? God is a way, And a surprise. And in that way we cannot choose, For choice deceives us, as it must. We live in sense, Certain at...
Black Friday
‘You will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand and yielded that which is not yours to give or to withhold.’ ‘I cannot’, she (Lilith) answered, ‘I would if I could, for I am weary, and the shadows of death are gathering about...
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild...
Made for Joy and Woe
Man was made for Joy & Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine William Blake (1757-1827), Auguries of Innocence...
Climbing out of bed
Teach me thy love to know; That this new light, which now I see, May both the work and workman show: Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee. George Herbert (1593-1633), Mattens.
‘His Eye to Watch’
I bind unto myself today The power of God to hold and lead, His eye to watch, his might to stay, His ear to hearken to my need, The wisdom of my God to teach, His hand to guide, his shield to ward, The word of God to give me speech, His heavenly host to by my guard....
Indifferent?
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed him by They never hurt a hair of him, they only let him die; For men had grown more tender, and they would not give him pain, They only passed him down the street, and left him in the rain. Studdert Kennedy G.A....
Recovered Greenness
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers of spring; To which, beside their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such thing. Who would have thought my...
Waiting for Jesus
On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited. Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited. How horses, turned out into the meadow, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight. But the...
Converted
'A wolf is not only turned into a sheep, but doth also take to himself a shepherd's nature. It is as if Christ should bring forth with his hand some angel sent from heaven.' John Calvin (1509-64), Commentary, (Acts 9:1-5).