Tuesday 15 May 2012

Background

Very sadly there are far too many children who today do notreceive good things from either their parents or carers or evenanyone else: one child without good love and care is one child toomany. How grievous must our heavenly God, the divine parent, findthis.

We are called on to become like children in order to be part ofGod's kingdom: to trust, to live happily and to enjoy one another'scompany. However these childlike qualities can soon become worndown as we grow older and experience the world as it is. Theravages of our modern world can take us away from the fundamentalsof good living. We can easily forget about the things that keep usin the bright sunlight of hope and joy that children can showus.

Many people today fear taking action against bad things eventhough they know in their heart of hearts that things such as childabuse are wrong. Often they think that it is someone else'sresponsibility to do something. If everyone recognised such abusesas evil and knew that they were not alone in thinking that, howmuch safer the world would be for these little ones and all of us,since it would be most unlikely that the signs of abuse would passunnoticed.

So today's passage about persistence in prayer, asking for thegift of the Spirit for discernment from which action follows canperhaps be linked to the call to each to us 'to do all the good wecan, give all we can and thereby save all we can' ... Wesley'strilateral on money turned round to meet the scourge of today,abuse perpetrated by human beings upon human beings ... all beingGod's children.

Today is part of Christian Aid Week, which has taken as itstheme: "Let's give the tools to help people out of poverty". Let uspray that we will be given the tools to overcome the evils of thisworld so that good will outweigh any nastiness and the bells ofheaven will ring out rejoicing at Ascensiontide that the Son of Godhas gone up on high and all is much better with the people workingfor the kingdom below.

To Ponder

Prayerfully reflect over times when you have seenwrong doing and:

- did nothing believing it was someone else's job
- did something and found you could not cope
- did something and knew you had made a difference.

What did you learn from any of these experiences?What will you do differently next time?