Our first ‘Take Back The Streets’ prayer meeting took place yesterday, with a good number of people coming to pray either in church or on the streets:

Two groups went out to pray on the main road through Goldthorpe, praying for our local shops, primary school, local library and Cherry Tree Court, among other things:

We gave thanks for the regeneration that has already taken place on the Goldthorpe Railway Cuttings site, which was an eyesore for many years as the former mining railway line was a place for fly-tipping. Now, thanks to volunteers from the community, it is a beautiful green space (we’ll be holding our next Family Fun Day there on 15th April).

However, there are still many areas where fly-tipping and litter are spoiling our community, and we pray that we will be able to make Goldthorpe physically beautiful as well as praying for spiritual growth and revival. The gas canisters abandoned at the bottom of Beever Street indicate the needs people have and the wrong solutions they employ to meet those needs.

Our thanks to all who have taken the call to prayer to heart; our next meeting will be on Saturday 4th April.

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.