Dear Friends
We would like to begin by thanking you for your continued support and prayers. We have had a rich and enjoyable summer but it has not been without its challenges. At the beginning of July we had a Covid outbreak amongst us which put us under quite a lot of pressure, but we are all OK and we had a wonderful Summerfest, which felt much more like a festival than the previous year.
Community is gradually growing and it has been a joy to welcome some new members over the summer. We would very much appreciate your prayers for Community and for new members to join the adventure at Scargill.
We are delighted to welcome on to Community Phil and Liz Goodacre with Miriam and Phoebe. Phil will be an additional Chaplain working with the Pastoral Team and we are still looking for a female Chaplain. We very much value your prayers in this area. You won’t be surprised that all our Chaplains are working hard on other teams at this time. We are delighted that Liz will be joining the House Team when she is not looking after the children.
For your diaries, the next online Quiet Day is Thursday 20th October.
Our regular Wednesday Evening Prayer services will resume on Wednesday 14th September.
Thank you to those who pray for the life of Scargill. We have published the prayer diary for September and October this year to aid your prayer.
Di and I had an enjoyable weekend at Greenbelt, it was a nurturing and enriching time catching up with old friends. Di reflects on one of our experiences there. Enjoy!
Diane writes:
It feels like a long time since my last reflection. I have missed writing them and have therefore made a pact with myself to write a reflection each month and by hook or by crook I will send it out!
Anyway, Bank Holiday weekend found Phil and I going to Greenbelt, Phil full of excitement, me hesitant – I fear I have become a ‘fair weather’ Greenbelter! Thankfully the weather was fair, very fair, in fact possibly too fair, reminding me of the ever present climate emergency which, along with migration, UK poverty and gender equality, was topping the main issues talked about this year. In their programme the welcome to Greenbelt included a call to ‘wake-up,’ to ‘wake up to our lives, to our world, to the work there is for us to do, to the party there is waiting for us.’
Perhaps like me ’to the party there is waiting for us’ came as a bit of a surprise, although it really shouldn’t have. In revelation 21 we read, ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth……. And I heard a voice shout from the throne: “God’s home is now with his people. He will live with them, and they will be his own. Yes, God will make his home among his people. He will wipe all tears from their eyes, and there will be no more death, suffering, crying, or pain. These things of the past are gone forever.” ‘
Here is a photo taken by my friend Tricia; Phil, Andrew and I standing under the earth! looking up to our world! and for a brief moment or two I wondered if we have already given up on saving our planet, perhaps its time has come, it can certainly feel like it. But soon that small kernel of hope reawakened and despite all not being well I felt that all could be well.
Julian of Norwich wrote ‘Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Now, I don’t remember reading ‘Sin is Behovely’ before and had to look it up – ‘necessary, required, unable to be avoided, inevitable’ which gives the much quoted sentence more depth and great clarity, for me anyway! Darkness is all around us but even so, ‘all manner of things shall be well’. All we have to do is ‘wake up to our lives, to our world, to the work there is for us to do’.
Waking up though leads to choices being made with the endless list of do’s and don’ts we hear almost daily. At Greenbelt I heard this question – ‘Do the dos we do, out do the dos we don’t do? Yes! Yes! Yes! I certainly hope so. Read it through a few times – it took me awhile to get my head round what it means. But I like it! I find it encouraging, encouraging us to do what we can, as much as we can, however small and seemingly trivial, to save the world, to live in hope for the Earth God created and loves, the planet he has given us the task of overseeing and looking after.
Perhaps we have forgotten and have become very poor stewards, but we can redeem ourselves if we ‘wake up to our lives, to our world, to the work there is for us to do’, if we re-evaluate and find the courage to do what we can, to save the world and to have hope of a party waiting for us.
I am sure deep inside we already know what to do and are probably well on the way, we just need that little nudge to do that little bit more, to keep going, to, like Phil, Andrew and I, begin to look at our world with renewed hope.
With love and prayers from