Dear Friends
This, as ever, comes with much love and prayers from the Community here at Scargill.
The Community continues to grow slowly and steadily. Hope is rising with Community numbers but we would still very much appreciate your prayers with this. Community is like a kaleidoscope – dynamic, changing shape as new community members bring themselves and their gifts, and others sadly move on. Community life is never static – it can be exciting, exhausting, life giving and challenging!
We are glad to say that after Easter we are hoping to start Phase 7 of our building project the main focus being the major refurbishment of the Marsh Lounge. Please read the article from +Chris and John Fell in the last Momentum (link here) which outlines our financial challenge.
The next online Quiet Day is on Saturday 25th February. It would be great to see you! (book here)
Here is Di’s latest reflection – enjoy!
In 2019, The EY Exhibition ‘Van Gough and Britain’ took place at Tate Britain. A Pair of Shoes 1886 by Vincent Van Gough was among the paintings. Will Gompertz, for the BBC, reviewing the exhibition wrote ‘Two battered black boots, laces asunder and soles heavy with mud, are left forlornly in the middle of the canvas with no evidence of their exhausted owner. They remind me of late Rembrandt, Vincent’s fellow countryman and guiding star, who had the same knack for showing the effects of hard labour with unsentimental honesty.’
This morning’s reading was Deuteronomy 15:1-11. Verses 7-11 from ‘The Message’ say this:
‘When you happen on someone who’s in trouble or needs help among your people with whom you live in this land that GOD, your God, is giving you, don’t look the other way pretending you don’t see him. Don’t keep a tight grip on your purse. No. Look at him, open your purse, lend whatever and as much as he needs. Don’t count the cost. Don’t listen to that selfish voice saying, “It’s almost the seventh year, the year of All-Debts-Are-Cancelled,” and turn aside and leave your needy neighbour in the lurch, refusing to help him. He’ll call GOD’s attention to you and your blatant sin.
Give freely and spontaneously. Don’t have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers GOD, your God’s, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbours in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbours.’
Well, this really spoke to me – I am so thankful that I married Phil. He is many things! But his generosity of spirit, in all its forms is top of the list. As you all know (well I hope you do!) we have a heart for the poor, for community, for welcome, for enjoying the company of others. Phil has also encouraged me to more generous with money than my cautious spirit would naturally allow.
And it is a mixed generosity to which we are called, commanded even. Jesus echoes Moses, and in the Gospels, we read about being generous to neighbours and moving toward a society in which there is “no one in need”. Perhaps stating the impossible, perhaps not, but surely this should be our overarching goal. And along the way, ‘there are milestones when special acts of generosity, moments of extravagance-in-love, are beautiful and fitting’. (SALT blog March 2022)
Generosity reminded me that our Wednesday Midday Prayers uses these words ‘God has generously entrusted us with a very beautiful part of creation, so we have promised to be involved in carefully looking after this gift’. Well, we may not feel we have been ‘generously entrusted with a very beautiful part of creation’! But ,where ever we are, God’s beauty will be present. We just need to look a harder, to look beyond the immediate, to look to relationships. Within our communities there are the poor in: spirit, friendship, housing, freedom, opportunities…. And we are called to honour them in love and grace, to open our hands to each personally, and at the same time to be active in supporting those who are fighting against poverty in all its forms. We are called to bring the light of Christ to shine in the darkness, and reveal God’s beauty.
‘Give freely and spontaneously. Don’t have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers GOD, your God’s, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbours in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbours.’ Deuteronomy 15:7-11
What a beautiful world that would be.
Diane
With love and prayers from