The Community Gardens Scheme in Goldthorpe is calling for volunteers to hear with cleaning the streets and refurbishing the street planters tomorrow, Saturday 4th March from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m., working around Gosling Gate, Kelly Street, King Street and Queen Street in Goldthorpe. If you want to help, they are meeting at the Unity Club in Goldthorpe at 9 a.m. Further cleaning will be done on Monday 6th March from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Straight Lane, Railway View, Leadley Street and Jackson Street, meeting at the Salvation Army.

On Monday 13th March, Radio Sheffield will be running a news feature about the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival at 11.05 a.m. Don’t forget that we need to know what people’s involvement in this festival will be, so if you have any art you want to display… or knitting, sewing, crocheting or cross-stitch… or any creative writing, craft or other creative work you’d like to exhibit… or you want to take part in any performing arts (there will be slots for drama, dance, comedy, song, music etc.), just let us know! Check out the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival Facebook page for more information. The Festival is 1 & 2 September, but in order to plan effectively, we need to know contributors by 24th March.

On Friday 17th March at 2 p.m., there will be a meeting about training in construction for young people aged 16-24 at Thurnscoe Library. This would be ideal for someone struggling to find a job or course to suit – practical work in the local community will be offered.

The Women’s World Day of Prayer was held at the parish church in Goldthorpe today. This year, the service has been written by Christian women from the Philippines, looking at the theme of justice and fairness.

Getting ready for the service:

Two pupils from Sacred Heart Primary School read from the Parable of the Talents:

God makes it clear that justice matters to Him and we often feel it is difficult to understand how to balance the plenty and lushness of the world with the poverty and injustice we see all around. An artist tried to capture this tension in the artwork which formed part of the meditation:

Many thanks to those who organised the service and took part as readers from a variety of local churches.

One of the key aspects of Lent is a desire to re-establish God’s priorities in our lives. Life can be so busy and frantic these days that God often gets squeezed out in the everyday rush. We all have the same number of hours in a day, but many of us live trying to squeeze more into a day than we have hours, which results in a sense of futility, helplessness and despair. Many people use this period to examine priorities and what is going on in a day in order to consciously ‘de-clutter’ our lives from practices which are no longer useful or helpful.

Ps 5:3 says ‘In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.’ Most of us find mornings a rush: the desire to stay in bed as long as possible fights against the need to be at work, school or elsewhere for a certain time, and we often end up having to choose between punctuality and prayer. Ps 4:4-5 says ‘when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Offer the sacrifices of the righteous and trust in the Lord’, but most of us are so exhausted by the time bedtime comes, we can barely keep our eyes open, let alone read God’s Word and pray. As we work through Lent, perhaps one of the things we need to do is examine our priorities so that we can give God more of our time.

Considering how much time we spend on the trivial may cause us to turn off the mobile phone and the TV or put aside the newspaper or the novel. There is nothing sinful in these things in themselves, but we so easily become addicted to things and need to look again at pruning our lives so that we can become even more fruitful. I used to spend the inordinate amount of time I spend on public transport in sleep, but now tend to spend that time in prayer, finding that I have gained enormous chunks of prayer time once I realised I could pray anywhere and did not have to be in my own home to pray effectively!

There is a ruthlessness required to prioritisation which our hearts often find difficult to enforce. My family tends to hoard possessions; my daughter-in-law detests clutter and frequently exhorts us to take black bags and get rid of things which are simply there, for no reason at all except our disinclination to tidy! We have to be prepared to get the black bin bags out and recognise that there is a spiritual laziness in our busyness: as Eugene Peterson says, ‘Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness … in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.’

Since we can’t be everything to everyone and can’t do everything we may want to do, we have to prioritise the things that are crucial, and nothing is more important than God. People often say, ‘I’m too busy for God’ or ‘I’m too busy to pray.’ The truth is, we are too busy NOT to pray and God is too important to ignore.

After New Year’s resolutions, ‘giving something up for Lent’ has become a fashionable way of disciplining our appetites. What we give up is often connected with food (chocolate and alcohol are perhaps the two things most frequently renounced over Lent), and certainly, there can be real benefits from looking at what we eat and drink and curbing our appetites. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins we rarely talk about, though it is quite possibly one of the most prevalent in Western churches. Certainly it is a sin I struggle with. I’m known in my family as a ‘feeder’, someone who finds comfort, worth, reassurance and value in food. I used to work with someone who would frequently forget to eat because he was so busy, something I cannot even imagine doing, no matter how busy I am!

Molière, a 17^th century French playwright, once wrote ‘il faut manger pour vivre et pas vivre pour manger’ (‘you should eat to live, not live to eat.’) There are many health benefits to giving up certain foods (especially sugars) over a period of time, but the primary purpose of renouncing things over the Lenten period is not as a way of dieting or benefitting physical health, though these may well be useful things to do. We give things up for spiritual reasons: to focus our minds and hearts on God, to have more time for prayer (preparing, consuming and cleaning up after eating take a lot of time in an ordinary day!) and to enable us to become more spiritually attuned and alert to God. (Luke 2:37, Luke 5:33, Matt 6:6-16)

Fasting is an important spiritual discipline, training our bodies that physical appetites should not have the last word. When we first give up some food or drink, it seems that’s all we can think about! Our bodies crave the substance we have renounced; our minds perhaps do so even more! But as we deny ourselves, we enter into the spiritual principle that the way to life and freedom is through renunciation. (Mark 8:34) We can never under-estimate the importance of bringing our appetites and earthly desires under God’s control, of establishing His rule and reign in every area of our lives.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the period of 40 days which leads up to Easter. 40 is a significant number in the Bible, with the Israelites spending 40 years in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land, and the 40 days of Lent reflects the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert before the start of His public ministry. This year, Lent starts on 1^st March and ends on Maundy Thursday, 13^th April (Sundays are excluded from the period of Lent.) In many churches, a service is held on Ash Wednesday, when the mark of the cross is put on every believer in ashes, to symbolise repentance from sin and to remind us of our human mortality, encouraging us to focus on spiritual matters connected with eternity.

The purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer through prayer, doing penance, repentance, almsgiving, and self-denial.  As such, it’s a human way of focussing our attention on doing away with sin (the ‘putting to death the earthly nature’ discussed yesterday.) There is nothing particularly ‘special’ about the period itself, but as fallible people prone to forget, it is often helpful to have something external which reminds us of eternal values.

Over this period, we will be looking at the things we need to leave behind and the life of Christ we need to embrace. Michael Card reminds us,

“When we say ‘no’ to the things of the world
We open our hearts to the love of the Lord and
It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find from the things we leave behind.’ (‘Things We Leave Behind,’ Michael Card)

I’m no great fan of New Year’s resolutions or even ‘giving up things for Lent’, largely because I know how easy it is for me to fall into legalistic traps that either make me feel smug and self-righteous when I’m successful or (more frequently!) despondent and despairing when I fail. However, self-examination is important in spiritual growth (see Ps 139:23-24, 2 Cor 13:5), so our Lenten studies are designed to focus our attention on both repentance and spiritual growth.

Today, S & G Electrical finished the installation of the fire alarm. First of all, they had to fit a dialler (so that if the alarm goes off, we are contacted…) Here is Dave fathoming the instructions:

Then he had to drill to connect cable to the landline:

Fitting the dialler fixtures to the wall:

All the fixtures now fitted:

Tidying up everywhere:

Outside emergency lighting fitted:

Now we have the job of explaining to everyone how it works!