Hope For Today

Dear Friends, Monday 23rd November was International Day of the Bible.  The idea was to share, either publicly or online, with the world how much the Bible means to your life, by sharing a favourite Bible verse or passage.  It got me thinking about how much the Bible has meant to me since I was a young child.  How I loved the Bible stories I was taught in Sunday School.  Then as a teenager being part of a youth group where we were taught God's Word.  How much it meant to me as I left home to go to university and relied on a regular quiet time and how that has continued to this day. As a result, I have many favourite Bible verses, and the list is continually growing. When I was baptised at the age of eleven I shared my then favourite verse from Hebrews 13:5 “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”   (NIV)  That very day I became ill with terrible stomach pains which progressively got worse over the next twenty-four hours.  My GP had no idea what was causing it,

Dear Friends, Do you ever wake up and feel overwhelmed at all you need to accomplish this day?  Or do you get to the end of your day and feel like you've wasted the time? I know I can often feel like that, and I know there's so much more for me to learn when it comes to using my time wisely - in work, rest and play. Psalm 23 has been in my thoughts a great deal these past few weeks and I've spent time meditating on just one phrase or sentence at a time.  It was while I was meditating on Psalm 23:1 "The Lord is my shepherd; I have all that I need." (NLT) that I realised God had given me all the time I need for each and every day.  His gift to you and me is time, but it's up to us how we use what he has given us.  The psalmist writes in Psalm 90:12 "Teach us to number our days so that we may truly live and achieve wisdom."   (VOICE) I'm conscious that I can waste my time on things, that while not necessarily bad for me, are not that be

Dear Friends I like to be organised and I like to make plans.  I like to plan the things I need to do and when they need to be done.  I like order and having a system.  I do not like it when that order is disrupted!  However, our plans don't always go according to, well, plan! Recently, my computer crashed which also meant my plans for that day crashed too.  I was so frustrated.  I now couldn't spend the time I had put aside to work on my laptop.  It made me feel that my time was being wasted because I wasn't able to do as I had wanted to.  Jason suggested I take it in to him at work to take a look at.  It was kind of him, but this was not how I had envisioned spending my day.  It was all taking up what I saw as my precious time.  What made it worse was we weren't able to fix the problem that day. At around the same time our dishwasher broke, a copper pipe in the kitchen came apart, which meant we needed to have the water turned off while we waited for it to

Dear Friends, Back in the summer I was really struggling with my frozen shoulder.  The pain had got so bad that it wasn't just  certain movements which caused me pain.  The pain was pretty constant, whether I was doing something or sitting still.  The physical pain was also affecting me emotionally, mentally and spiritually.   I really did not feel like worshipping God.  In fact, to be honest, it was the last thing I felt like doing. Worship is fine when things are going well with us.   We come along to church on a Sunday and join in with the praise and worship – we feel like worshipping God.   During the week we worship God in our hearts and attitude easily because we feel like it.   It comes more naturally. We are called to worship God.  Paul writes in Romans 12:1 " And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is tr