One of the prayer pointers for February is for Christian organisations working in schools. There are a whole host of charities who are involved with schools’ work. Perhaps the most well known of these are Scripture Union and Youth for Christ. Both charities employ youth workers and have teams of workers who go into schools regularly to take lessons and assemblies; they also seek to make links with local churches and work with youth workers there to equip the local church to have effective ministries to children and young people. Many secondary schools have Christian Unions for pupils, but often these need the input of Christian staff and volunteers to be successful. Scripture Union also provides a lot of literature for children, including the ‘It’s Your Move!’ book for Y6 children about to move to secondary school. At £14 for 10 copies, we could, as a church, have a significant impact on young people in our area through the distribution of this booklet, perhaps.

Many local churches have some input into local schools. Primary schools are often very willing for ministers and church workers to visit to take assemblies or lessons on RE topics. Pray for all those who are able to visit schools in this way. Some of the larger churches in the area have ‘schools’ teams’ who work regularly in schools.

There are a number of other charities who can provide information, resources and help for parents, children, young people and Christian teachers. These include:

1) Care for the Family, who run excellent parenting courses and holidays and often hold regional seminars in Sheffield or Leeds
2) Rainbow Trust, working with families of children with terminal illnesses
3) The Children’s Charity, working with disadvantaged children (running a network of programmes which includes drop-in services for runaways, children’s centres and support for young carers. We support children who are refugees from violence, and we give those in care a voice.
4) The Boys’ Brigade, running a number of children’s and youth clubs for boys
5) Girls’ Brigade, running a number of children’s and youth clubs for girls.

As we pray for our local schools, let’s pray for the children and young people who attend, but let’s also remember the many other influences on their lives. Christian charities and churches work within the local schools, but they are often active in local communities as well, offering support and activities for children and young people outside of school hours. Let’s pray for all the Christian workers and for schools to be willing to allow Christian input. There are so many opportunities for witness and teaching within the curriculum, but it is not always easy to gain access to schools or to win the respect and trust of young people.

It is hard not to have a vested interest in the prayer focus for February when you are a Christian teacher! The first points Mark has highlighted for prayer are that:

1. God will bless and encourage Christian teachers
2. Through these teachers, the school will have some Christian input.

All teachers need our prayers. Teaching is a stressful profession, juggling many different tasks. The public view of the job often only sees the ‘public’ face of teaching: someone in a classroom for a limited number of hours, five days a week, for only 37 weeks a year. “All those holidays! All those training days! All those free evenings!” In reality, teachers have both a ‘public’ and a ‘private’ face, often spending hours at home preparing lessons, marking books or keeping up with a seemingly never-ending stream of paperwork that is constantly changing, being judged by inspectors, governors, parents and children at regular intervals. Keeping meticulous paperwork, planning lessons that are entertaining as well as instructive, coaxing unwilling pupils to work whilst at the same time extending those who are keen, marking assessments, tracking pupils’ progress, looking after social issues, teaching ethics as yet another classroom argument or playground fight needs defusing whilst negotiating training costs or a never-increasing budget are all part and parcel of a teacher’s ordinary workload. League tables, exam results, performance-related pay are all things that influence the everyday and yet these things often seem to bear no relation to the reasons teachers go into the profession: usually because they have a love for a subject and care for children and young people. The road between the ideal and the real often seems increasingly wide. Many teachers are stressed, worn out and feel under-valued and demoralised. Bringing Christian input into these situations can seem an impossible dream for many Christian teachers.

Pray for the staff in all our local schools. The headteachers in particular need wisdom, guidance, protection and good humour to negotiate the minefield that is a modern school. They have to act as managers and juggle with finances; they have to cope with a wide range of staffing needs; they have to safeguard and work with children and young people to help them learn, often when many of the children and young people seem to have no active interest in learning!

The headteachers in our area are (according to Barnsley Council online):
Goldthorpe Primary School – Mrs Fields (Acting Head)

Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Primary School – Ms Curran
(the school’s motto is “Together we believe that each person is gifted, unique and loved by God and therefore worthy of deep respect”. Let’s pray that this motto is evident in each member of the school.)

Dearne Highgate Primary School – Mrs Leishmann

The Dearne ALC – Mrs Robinson

(If you have any more up-to-date information on these schools and specific prayer requests for staff there, please let us know.)

Pray also for the Governing Bodies in these schools. These are the people who have responsibility for the management of the school, often working in school on a voluntary, unpaid basis. Pray that many Christian governors will be able to be salt and light in this role and that other Christians will consider this type of role as a key way of contributing to their local community.

February is the month of love, with Valentine’s Day being an annual reminder that undying love must be declared! The origins of this day are unclear. One legend has it that the emperor only allowed men of a certain age to marry (since single men could be sent to war and married men were more reluctant to go!) and Valentine was a monk who felt this was wrong and so allowed younger men to marry, thereby incurring the emperor’s wrath and being martyred for this. Another legend has Valentine as a monk who helped Christians who were being persecuted by the Romans and who again was killed for his help. Other legends believe that Valentine’s Day originates from a fertility festival to honour the god of agriculture. Whatever the origins, by the 17th century it was commonplace to send handwritten notes declaring love to a beloved, but without signing a name to these declarations; by the 20th century, the advent of printed cards revolutionised the day (and made big business for card companies!)

Our willingness to go along with the commercialisation of love indicates a deep-seated need to be loved that is felt by every human. We all want to be loved as we are, to be fully known and fully accepted. This was how it was meant to be in the beginning, with God creating man for relationship with Him, but as sin entered the world, mankind pushed God away, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts which we often seek to fill through other things.

Garry spoke about a 2-storey building in Sheffield that was demolished to build 5-storey flats on the same location. The foundations needed strengthening, but it was only when concrete was brought in to fill the gap that it was realised the original building was built on an old Victorian aqueduct. The actual amount of concrete needed to fill this hole far exceeded expectations. In the same way, no human being – however loving and kind – can fill the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by God.

Jeremiah 2:13 tells us that Israel’s sin was to forsake God, the spring of living water, and to dig their own cisterns. God is the source of pure, life-giving water. Water from our own broken cisterns will not satisfy.

However unloved we may feel, the fact remains that we have never been unloved. God has loved us with an everlasting love (Jer 3:31). His love is ‘no emotional reaction, but rather a unilateral love shaped by His character.’ (Henry Morriss III) God’s love for us is unconditional and continuous.

Even Christians can hold God at a distance, building walls to defend ourselves from hurt. But God sees through all our defences and wants to meet our deepest needs. There is ‘so much more to be revealed’, but we need to be willing to receive His love and accept that His love can meet our deepest needs.

As Michael W. Smith has sung, no matter how unworthy, unwise, unwilling and unteachable we have been, the one thing we know is that we have never been unloved. ‘It’s because of You, and all that You went through, I know that I have never been unloved.’
‘Never Been Unloved’, Michael W. Smith

Tonight’s family service looked at the theme of ‘Unloved’. Mark organised a quiz for us to identify unwanted or unloved or obsolete objects:

I hope you’re better at guessing what these are than I was!
1) Vinyl LP
2) Old steam iron
3) Broken heart
4) Holey socks
5) CD player & cassette player

As usual, there were prizes to be won:

There were even prizes for the teams with the lowest scores!

Throughout the month of January, God has been impressing on me that He is the God of hope (Rom 15:13) who can turn even the most desperate situations around. During the prayer walks, ‘discovering’ Hope Avenue (despite walking past it for six years and never recognising its name!) became a kind of parable for me that there is hope for our village and area just because God is here with us, on our side.

Psalm 124 recognises that if God had not been on Israel’s side, they would have gone under.
“If the LORD had not been on our side –
let Israel say –
if the LORD had not been on our side
when people attacked us,
when their anger flared against us;
the flood would have engulfed us,
the torrent would have swept over us,
the raging waters
would have swept us away.” (Ps 124:1-5)

The psalm resounds with the fact that God helps us. It starts with the thought that if God had not been on our side, we would have been completely lost – swallowed alive by enemies, engulfed by floods, trapped like a bird in a fowler’s snare – and ends with the declaration ‘our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.’ (Ps 124:8) God is the one who has made the difference.

Throughout the Bible, we read of desperate situations that are turned around by God. Things were bleak, with no way out… but God stepped in and made a way of escape! From the first sin (when God promised a Redeemer) through to Noah (Gen 8:1), Abraham (Gen 21:1, Gen 22:8) and Joseph (Gen 45:7-8, Gen 50:20), we see how God is the One who turns situations around. When the Israelites were trapped in Egypt, He provided a way out through the ten plagues and then through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Trapped with the sea before them and the Egyptians behind them, the Israelites were told “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Ex 15:14)

The deliverance of Daniel in the lions’ den or of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace give us further examples of God’s ability to bring hope into hopeless situations. But by far the greatest evidence of God’s deliverance comes in the New Testament, where we see how God stepped into the world in the form of Christ and rescued us from the dominion of darkness. Throughout Acts, we read how “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.” (Acts 3:15) and “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” (Acts 2: 22-24)

There is no situation more hopeless than ours before Christ (see Ephesians 2). We were dead in transgressions and sins. (Eph 2:1) We were cut off from God, without hope and without God in the world (Eph 2:12). We were by nature deserving of wrath (Eph 2:3). “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.” (Eph 2:4-5)

The fact that God has intervened in our lives to bring us back to life and has raised us to eternal life with Him as joint heirs with Christ gives us great hope. Even if we don’t see any reason to hope, there is reason, because God is the God of hope. As we seek God for what He wants to do in Goldthorpe and the surrounding villages in 2013, we do so with hope in our hearts and the good news that ‘Hope is here; shout the news to everyone!’ (Tim Hughes, ‘Jesus Saves’).

Igor went on another adventure this week, sadly without me! He was taken out to Las Iguanas, a restaurant in Meadowhall which obviously needs to cater for iguanas!

Apparently the waitress was impressed to meet Igor and the food there (for humans) was very enjoyable, but I’m not sure Igor enjoyed being stuffed in a rucksack in order to get from A to B…