Good Afternoon and Blessings
Christmas Worship this Friday, December 25th, will include Communion so remember to have your bread and juice/wine ready.
Christmas will be different for most this year—no large special gatherings with family and friends, no carolling throughout the community, no hugs nor personal greetings. I experience this Christmas as a humbling time, a simpler time that takes us away from materialism and brings me back to the basics of the Birth. But we can still do as much as possible to make it feel familiar. We can decorate our home with tree and lights; put up stockings; cook a festive dinner; set the table for your sit-down meal; write a story of a past Christmas memory positive or negative and call someone with whom to share it. Let us recall why we celebrate this special day.
Keep safe, Keep connected.
Blessings and the strength of Love be with you.
Rev. Mary,
revmjwhite@hotmail.ca
Reading • Sharing The Chocolate by Agnes
Excerpt From: Nicola Slee & Rosie Miles. “Doing December Differently.”
Last Christmas was particularly poignant for me, as a young girl whom I had been supporting with a little friendship – an asylum-seeker from Sierra Leone – disappeared from the address I had for her about ten days before Christmas. This girl had been suicidal a few months previously and although still on medication she had started attending a church, singing in the choir and had proudly begun a college course. On further enquiry we discovered that she had been moved about sixty miles away to another town. I tried to find a church that would welcome her there, but emails were not replied to and the people to whom I spoke claimed either not to know her address or that they were new to the area themselves. I’d hoped in vain that a church would offer to collect her for the Christmas service and maybe even invite her for lunch, but it was not to be. Definitely no room at the inn! I took a very small box of chocolates to the Post Office for her with two days to go only to be told by the postmistress that ‘it won’t get there now, you know’.
However, on Christmas night she phoned me as I was driving, and I stopped to take the call. It was snowing and I wept as she told me that my present had arrived on Christmas Eve. She was living in a hostel with four women who had been quite cold towards her up until now; but sharing the chocolate – the only present that they had between all of them – had broken the ice and they had all sat together and prayed. I was humbled and felt that here was the true spirit of Christmas.
Prayer Of The Day
Birthing Spirit
We are grateful that through you and our faith community, we gather to celebrate in spirit. We are weary of this isolation, this pandemic yet we remain hopeful. Because of Love and kindness for others, we choose to remain vigilant and hold each other gently. May we be aware that we continue to be seekers and through soul-searching may we discover the depth of Love within. “We are not alone. We live in God’s world. Thanks be....”
Amen