Maps have been featuring a lot in my life recently. This started with the prayer walks in January, since it’s helpful to have a map to know where you are going when you are dividing up an area among several people so that you avoid all going to the same place and leaving some streets unvisited! It was decided to have a ‘prayer map’ of all the streets in Goldthorpe so that we could continue to pray even when we were not physically walking on the streets. Having a cartographer for a friend proved useful, as she was able to access Ordnance Survey maps and edit them to show just Goldthorpe. Thus began an ongoing process to produce a large ‘prayer map’ to go up in the foyer at church to remind us where the things we are praying for are located.
The map was produced and personalised with the church name and logo.
Compass points were added (not only to orientate the map, so to speak, but to remind us of Ezekiel 37:9 (“This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live’ “) and Isaiah 43:5-7 (“I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back”), verses which have been significant words from God to the church.)
Then the map was taken to a printer’s so that we could have a large version. The laminated A1 version then needed to be fixed to a board so it could be hung in church with stickers to remind us where things were and photographs to remind us of the prayer walks. I assumed (naively, as it turned out) that we would sail into B & Q, pick up a large board, stick the map to it and that would be that. I ought to have known better (B & Q is not that kind of place…!) There were no suitable boards large enough, so we had to buy two boards to fit together and at that point, Garry decided that to make this suitable, we also needed to make a frame for the boards.
Collaboration is definitely the name of the game in church work! Mark donated his mitre saw to this project (thus making Garry’s job of making the frame from off-cuts of wood easier) and the making of the board began.
Two separate boards…
Two becoming one…
The board was then covered to give a more finished look:
Now all that remains to be done is to attach the map, labels and photographs to the board and hang it in the church!