Thomas Goodwin - Blessings
Those blessings are sweetest that are won with prayers and won with thanks.
Thomas Goodwin
www.cotn.co.uk
Showing posts with label prayers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prayers. Show all posts
Please Pray for:
Rosie and Nathan - that they will be able to return to England
Rev Viatlis (Kenya) who is very ill with malaria
Laura - revising and taking exams
Sharon and Simon - school appeals process
May's brother Gordon
Eleanora as she receives treatment
The Bhatti Family
Madeleine and her family (Portugal)
Laura undergoing tests for MS.
Prayer for the Day
In 2005, riots in the Paris suburbs took place in the largely immigrant area of Seine-Saint-Denis. Many of its residents are without French citizenship and the right to vote. They also suffer among the highest rates of unemployment in France, and their relations with the police are generally distrustful or hostile.
Yet in this setting a new voice of hope has emerged from hardship. In 1997, after a diving accident in a swimming pool, a young man - Fabien Marsaud - displaced his spine. He now works under the name 'Grand Corps Malade' which translates literally as 'big sick body'. His rap poetry album of 2006 spoke a message of hope into the despair of the Paris riots a year earlier, becoming one of the top ten selling singles in France for weeks on end. With his broken body, 'Grand Corps Malade' speaks of the trials and tribulations of life, the problems of living in a notorious Parisian suburb, with his own additional struggle to live with physical handicap which has become a kind of symbol. Taking a twist on Descartes' 'I think therefore I am', he writes that he's a grand optimist with a credo of J'espere donc je suis - 'I hope therefore I am'. In one of his songs, Vu de ma Fenetre, he hears laughter and two men shake hands with greetings of "Shalom" and "Salam". "If you could see these things," he says, "you too would understand why I laugh, and dream throughout the seasons".
The biblical prophet Jeremiah is often seen as a doomsday pessimist, warning as he does, of Judah's impending destruction. Yet he forsees a time when the exiles will settle in the land once again. God "knows the plans he has for you," Jeremiah writes, "plans to give you a hope and a future."
Lord God of the poor, may it be so in our troubled cities. We pray that all may have hope and opportunity to realise their potential. Amen.
Mark Coffey - Radio 4
In our prayers this week
May's brother Gordon
Eleanora
The Bhatti Family
Clem Bull
Mary and Family
Madeleine and her family (Portugal)
Laura undergoing tests.
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