Dear Friends
We hope this finds you well as we all navigate through these disorientating and strange times.
We are still hoping to open in October. We will let you know what we are doing, and how to book, sometime in September. We are so much looking forward to being able to welcome people back again through our doors.
If you are unaware, we will be doing a Scargill Forum on Zoom on Wednesday 9th September (8-9:30pm). We will let you know soon who our guest speakers will be for this. This is bookable through our website here (please do not use the hello@ e-mail to book onto this event).
We are also doing two ‘Renew, Refresh, Restore’ Quiet Days on Zoom on either Thursday 17th or Saturday 26th September (10am to 4:30pm). They will be led by Philip and Phil, and also involve other members of the Community. These are bookable through our website here (please do not use the hello@ e-mail to book onto this event).
As we pray for you, please do pray for us. September is going to be a busy month as we prepare to receive guests again in the COVID world that we are living in.
I hope you enjoy Di’s reflection. I just want to highlight the bit that we are actively looking for new Community to join the Scargill Adventure, particularly those who would like to do a gap year.
As a Community we would love to pray for you so please send any prayer requests to: prayer@scargillmovement.org
We are delighted to be able to welcome Day Visitors on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and have released dates into the middle of September. It will be lovely to see you. For details and how to book please go to here.
All these events are free but if anyone would like to donate then please visit our website here which shows how you can do that.
Diane writes:
In my last reflection I talked about being ‘half-empty / half-full’ people and was sent this – ‘The optimist says this glass is half full, the pessimist says this glass is half empty and the engineer says this glass is twice as big as it needs to be!’ which made me smile, thank you.
When we closed due to COVID Scargill Community was in many ways ‘twice as big as it needed to be’. We stopped inviting guests and Working Friends and began the slow process of saying good-bye to Community, including very recently 5 over a period of two weeks. We are indeed now half the size we were! Ironically in the hope of opening to a small number of guests later this year I am on the verge of recruiting a small number of Community! And with all the news concerning universities and gap-years I am also hoping to recruit two or three gap-year students – so if you know of any – honestly, let me know. As for all you Working Friends, you are not forgotten, we just need to see how all the logistics pan out. Please continue to be patient and continue praying for us. We’ll be in touch
The artwork below, ‘Camels in the Eye of a Needle’, isn’t ‘photoshopped’. These are actual tiny, sculptures that fit in the eye of a needle! Russian artist, Nikolai Aldunin, using syringes, toothpicks and superglue keeping his hands perfectly still, in order to build these extraordinarily microscopic artworks. I find this absolutely amazing especially as I have been making face masks for Phil and I and in the process I have struggled to even thread the needle, time and time again I have squinted with poised thread to no avail, until at last for no apparent reason, hey presto, the thread slides through the eye of the needle, reminding me of Matthew 19 where Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I tell you solemnly, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ When the disciples heard this they were astonished. ‘Who can be saved, then?’ they said. Jesus gazed at them. ‘For men’ he told them ‘this is impossible; for God everything is possible.’
The image of a camel going through the eye of a needle, even if it was a very small gateway, is a great description of our planning meetings, where we have discussed many practical issues, trying to cover every guideline we can read about to prepare for guests, but we also need to ensure we can provide – A WARM WELCOME, a FRIENDLY STAY and a feeling of being WANTED and VALUED notwithstanding social distancing and family units. As Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, on ‘Thought for the Day’ this week said, “if society remains so gripped by fear of illness and death that we think of nothing but physical safety we risk losing sight of other virtues that make us human in the fullest sense. Virtues like compassion, kindness, sociability, community, to name but a few.” She went on to say, “We are more than physical shells we are soul and spirit too.”
At times this all feels like an impossible, uphill task, so I hold onto the fact that Jesus said. ‘For men this is impossible; for God everything is possible.’
With love and prayers