The pessimist sees the glass as half-empty and can be guaranteed to bring gloom and despondency to any situation. It’s second nature to a pessimist to see the worst in any situation and to believe that the worst will always happen.

I struggle with pessimism on a daily basis, so I know that changing one’s mindset is not achieved overnight. I used to work with an eternal optimist and it always amused me how we could see the same situation so differently. I learned a lot from his enthusiasm and optimism and gradually came to see that the middle way of realism with faith is the way forward. At times, he had to learn caution and not to rush in heedlessly where angels fear to tread; more often, I had to learn to see the positives and opportunities in situations instead of always fearing the worst. Letting go of that instinctive bias towards the pessimistic is not easy, but with God, nothing is impossible.

Man’s inhumanity to man (and to animals and pretty much everything else) is well catalogued throughout history. The cruelty we can often display to others is not only seen in dictators and megalomaniacs. We often display it in many more subtle ways: the toddler who pushes a baby out of the way because the baby is interfering in its self-centred play, the sarcastic comments towards someone who does not share our views, the bullying which goes on in many schools and workplaces. Cruelty may well be a defence mechanism or a means of asserting one’s importance, but it is something we need to eschew. People are more fragile than we realise; we all need to be ‘handled with care’!

Instead of cruelty, let’s find ways to be kind and gentle, to care about other people and to put others before ourselves. In this way, we reflect God’s nature and show others there’s a different way to live.

The World Day of Prayer service in Goldthorpe was held at Goldthorpe Parish Church this morning. The service was prepared by Christians from Zimbabwe:

The service looked at John 5:2-9 and the healing of a paralysed man. The man had been ill for 38 years and probably felt powerless, hence Jesus’s question ‘Do you want to be made well?’ We have to be willing to believe that God can intervene in our hopeless situations. Zimbabwe has faced many years of political unrest and injustice, but Christians are called to pray for love, peace and reconciliation, no matter how difficult situations may look.

Jesus told the man to ‘rise! Take your mat and walk!‘ The dialogue between Jesus and the man take us beyond the realm of physical healing and remind us that we should not be afraid to act on the word of God. God offers us the steps for personal and social transformation.

Our thanks to the ladies from Goldthorpe Parish Church for hosting the event, to Ann Crooks for playing the piano and to all who attended and gave £55.05 to the work of WWDP.

Paul urges us to ‘pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.’ (Eph 6:18) This implies that prayer can be varied in form and that we need to pray always as well as underlining that prayer is a spiritual activity. It’s not something we can necessarily explain or even understand, but when we connect with God through prayer, His power is unleased into our situations and our world.

We have two opportunities this week to join with other Christians in praying. Today is the World Day of Prayer, and a service will be held at the Parish Church in Goldthorpe, starting at 11.15 a.m. This service started in 1887, when Mary Ellen Fairchild James, wife of Darwin Rush James from Brooklyn, New York, called for a day of prayer for home missions, and Methodist women called for a week of prayer and self-denial for foreign missions. This international movement now gathers Christians from all over the world to pray on a particular theme on the first Friday in March. This year’s service has been written by Christians from Zimbabwe and calls us to pray for justice, love and reconciliation throughout our world. After the service, there will be the opportunity to join with Goldthorpe Parish Church in their ‘Lent lunches’ – an opportunity for fellowship as well as nourishment!

Tomorrow (Saturday 7th March) will be the first of our ‘Take Back The Streets’ prayer meetings, when we will be gathering to pray specifically for our local community and for revival. We’ll be meeting in church at 10 a.m. and those who are not physically very mobile will stay in the church building to pray whilst others will go out onto the streets and pray, asking God to speak into lives and situations and praying for the breath of His Spirit to come on our community. Join with us tomorrow until 12 p.m. as we pray in the Spirit with all kinds of prayers and requests!

We can pray with a formal liturgy (as at the World Day of Prayer) or more spontaneously (as we will be doing tomorrow), but what matters is not so much how we pray as that we pray. Prayer is so important; it’s our means of connection to the Almighty God!

The rise in suicides shows us clearly the despair many feel in the world; they feel that life is not worth living. Many face situations which they cannot resolve and see no way out of the bottomless pits into which they have fallen. A breakdown in relationships, bereavement, poverty and hopelessness are often keys to the despair many feel. Despair can be defined as the absence of hope and without hope we all struggle to find meaning in life.

For the Christian, however, we know that despair does not have the last word. Easter is very much a time of despair: betrayal, injustice, pain, loss and sorrow are with us as we travel through the last week of Jesus’s life on earth. Yet we persist in remembering the day of Jesus’s crucifixion as ‘Good Friday’: not because we celebrate the victory of men over an innocent man, but because we know Jesus gave Himself willingly as a sacrifice for sin and that Good Friday is not the end of the story. The reason we can eschew despair is because Jesus rose from the dead and is alive forevermore and therefore we have hope in even the darkest situations.

I find one of the most difficult things in the Christian life is challenging wrong thinking. It’s not only changing our thinking which is required; the first step is actually recognising that our thinking is wrong.

We live in a culture full of ideas and preconceptions, all of which we absorb (often unconsciously) from a young age. The Jews had absorbed centuries of teaching about being God’s chosen people, which was true… but they had also absorbed the notion that everyone else was excluded from God’s family, which was not. Separating true thinking from false thinking is the first step to change.

How do we do this? We need the word of God to show us truth and the Spirit of God to make the connections for us to understand how this applies in our situation. Often, this does not seem like rocket science to an outsider, but it can be difficult for us to do. Jesus was once questioned by a group of Sadducees about the resurrection. They had preconceptions about the resurrection based on a firm belief it couldn’t happen and were trying to prove to Jesus their point of view through a ridiculous question based on improbably circumstances. (Mark 12:18-23) Jesus pointed out the error of their views through Scripture. (Mark 12:24-27)

The first step is, therefore, to know the truth and this can only happen as we allow the word of God and the Spirit of God to rule in our hearts. The next step is harder, though: we have to accept that truth only frees us if we do what it says. We have to submit ourselves to God’s word. When our attitudes and actions contradict the truth we find in God’s word, we have to let go of those attitudes and actions. Most of us stumble at this point, because we are sinners. We don’t like admitting we’re wrong and we prefer our sinful choices to the painful admission that God is right and we are wrong.

But if we actually choose to believe God over our own feelings and ideas, revolutionary change can happen. Gentiles and Jews can co-exist in God’s family. Slaves can be set free. People can be treated with respect and honour because they’re people made in God’s image, not because they’re rich or white or belong to the right family. Children can be welcomed and loved, even if the circumstances of their conception were not ideal. Murderers can be forgiven. Men and women can live in harmony instead of in competition. We can change the world… not because we have the power in ourselves to do that, but because we are aligned with the all-powerful God.

All of this starts with our thinking. We see Christianity as a global movement today precisely because Peter and the first Jews were willing to change their thinking. Are we?