This Wednesday (28th August) we have the last of the Summer Fun Days, this one being held at Hanover Street Park in Thurnscoe. Come along between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. for sports, games and a picnic! Free entry & free food provided; just bring a picnic blanket.

We’ll have our last summer prayer meeting this Friday (30th August) at 10 a.m. Do join us to pray together and don’t forget also the ‘Churches Together’ prayer meeting on Tuesday 17th September at 10.30 a.m. at the Salvation Army.

On Saturday (31st August) we’ll be getting ready for the new term and having a morning (10 a.m. – 12 p.m.) cleaning the toys used by the Parent & Toddler Group. Many hands make light work, so please do come along to help us prepare!

The Dearne Community Arts’ Festival is on Saturday 28th September between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. at Astrea Academy Dearne (secondary school). Come along to browse the lovely arts and crafts prepared by local residents (including our own Gemma and Grace!), buy handmade Christmas presents and take part in workshops as well as listening to performances from Pat & Andy Moore, the local ukulele group and watch dancing from the Deborah Clayton School of Dance and Grace Martin. Free entry and so much to see and do at the festival including:

• circus skills

• arts & crafts

• sand art

• hot wax painting

• creative writing & storytelling

• bead badges

• origami books

We’ll also be hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning on Saturday 28th September between 10 a.m. and 12 noon where all donations will go towards the Macmillan Cancer Charity.

So often when we pray, we do so bringing a list of problems to God. It can be very easy to feel overwhelmed by circumstances, as Jehoshaphat was when faced with attack from the Moabites, Ammonites and Meunites (2 Chron 20:1), and there’s nothing wrong with being honest as he was: ‘we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.’ (2 Chron 20:12) Jehoshaphat called all the people together (including the children and little ones (2 Chron 20:13) as they sought God together.

When the people of God cried out to God in this way, He heard and answered through Jahaziel (2 Chron 20:14-17), encouraging them to trust Him and reminding them that ‘the battle is not yours, but God’s.’ (2 Chron 20:15) Their job was then to praise God for the victory He would bring before they saw it. Praying from the place of praise is a vital weapon in our armoury. Jesus taught this principle too: ‘whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ (Mark 11:24) Faith means that we pray with confidence in an all-powerful, all-loving God; the people of Judah set off with the Levites at the front singing ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for His love endures forever.’ (2 Chron 20:21) It was as they began to sing and praise God that the Lord set ambushes for their enemies who ended up defeating each other, with the people of God not having to lift a hand in battle but simply to go in and plunder the loot afterwards. (2 Chron 20: 22-26)

When we pray from the place of praise rather than from the place of problems, we are acknowledging God’s sovereignty and power and goodness. The result, unsurprisingly, is more praise as we see God move on our behalf. On the fourth day, after collecting all the equipment, clothing and items of value from the plunder, God’s people assembled in the Valley of Berakah (Praise) and praised the Lord. (2 Chron 20:26) Instead of a vicious cycle of worry, depression and fear, they lived in the virtuous cycle of praise, prayer and praise!

Let’s fix our eyes on God as we pray and understand His goodness, love and power, that He is working for our good in all circumstances and that no plan of His can be thwarted!

1 Cor 13 gives us God’s measurements of love. How are we measuring up?

Love is patient. (1 Cor 13:4) It waits. It is not in a hurry. It doesn’t flounce off when things don’t happen to our timescales or give up when things are slow. I think there’s a reason God made a pregnancy to last 40 weeks. Love needs to learn patience.

Love is kind. (1 Cor 13:4) It is considerate, thoughtful and tolerant. It’s outgoing, seeking someone else’s good and being merciful to them. It likes to give rather than to take.

Love does not envy. (1 Cor 13:4) It doesn’t want what someone else has, like the toddler snatching the toy away from the baby in selfishness. It’s not jealous or covetous.

Love does not boast. (1 Cor 13:4) It’s not self-centred, thinking the world revolves around us and wanting everyone to know our every achievement. It’s content to take second place and be quiet.

Love is not proud. (1 Cor 13:4) Pride prevents us from saying sorry and from doing the menial stuff. It always has a higher opinion of ourselves than of others; pride makes us like the Pharisee who looked down on the tax collector with disdain. Love doesn’t care if we have to wash people’s feet; it’s not bothered about position.

Love does not dishonour others. (1 Cor 13:5) It always seeks what’s best for someone else, even if that means inconvenience to ourselves.

Love is not self-seeking. (1 Cor 13:5) So many of our problems in relationships occur because we are selfish. When we truly consider others before ourselves, we learn how to love as God loves.

Love is not easily angered. (1 Cor 13:5) It’s not volatile, snappy, bad-tempered or like a rocket, flying off in all directions. Love takes the blows and absorbs them instead of acting like a trampoline and bouncing the blows back onto someone else.

Love keeps no record of wrongs. (1 Cor 13:5) It’s amazing how good our memories are when it comes to remembering wrongs done to us. Instead of this, we need to learn to forgive and let go of the wrongs. We need to improve our ‘forgettory’!

Love does not delight in evil. (1 Cor 13:6) It doesn’t laugh when someone else falls or fails. It doesn’t gloat and chuckle over mistakes. Secure in itself, love does not need to ‘revel when others grovel’, as the Message version puts this.

Love rejoices with the truth. (1 Cor 13:6) Truth becomes the definition by which we live, and God defines truth because He is truth (see John 14:6) Every time we see truth flourishing, we can rejoice.

Love always protects. (1 Cor 13:7) It guards and seeks to prevent harm coming to others. It holds an umbrella over another’s head when it rains and a parasol when it’s hot. It’s always thinking of the other person’s good.

Love always trusts. (1 Cor 13:7) Instead of jumping to conclusions, making assumptions about people’s motives as well as their actions (‘they didn’t speak to me so they must hate me’) and being quick to believe the worst, love works hard to trust and have faith.

Love always hopes. (1 Cor 13:7) Instead of being cynical and using low expectations as a defence against disappointment, love chooses to hope. It believes the best, not the worst, and insists that no one is hopeless.

Love always perseveres. (1 Cor 13:17) We started with patience and we end with perseverance. The two things work together; they are the unsung heroes of love. When romantic love has faded and affection has worn threadbare, patience and perseverance keep going. They help us to keep on loving, no matter what.

Yesterday, I managed to cut my finger. I still don’t know how I actually did this, but I suddenly became aware of pain, looked down and found blood oozing from a long cut that looked like I’d sliced the finger on something sharp.

The Bible describes itself as being sharper than a double-edged sword (Heb 4:12). The Message version brings the metaphor more up-to-date and talks about a surgeon’s scalpel. Part of the Bible’s job is to jolt us into awareness of the disparity between God’s way of doing things and ours and to prick us (cut us) so that we are changed.

This morning, I continued my daily reading plan and found myself, once again, at 1 Corinthians 13. This is such a familiar chapter that it’s easy to skim over the words defining and describing love. Today, I found myself arrested by this mirror, as sharply aware of my failings to live up to this definition as I was yesterday by the pain in my finger.

If we substitute our name for the word ‘love’ in the passage (1 Cor 13:4-7 in particular), we quickly see our shortcomings and understand the limitations of our love. And that’s when we’re thinking about those we really do love! God wants us to love our enemies with this kind of love, not just our friends and family! (Matt 5:43-48) God’s word has the power and capacity to cut us, to wound us, to hurt us… but it does this not to harm us but to transform us and make us more like Jesus. Just as a surgeon inflicts short-term pain on us in order to bring long-term relief from pain and healing to us, God’s word is there not to make us feel comfortable or nice, but to show us truth and reality and to bring our lives into conformity with God’s truth and reality. Don’t flinch from the cuts of the Word. They are there to shape us further into the image of God.

‘Messy play’ is an important part of growing up. With a toddler, it refers to playing with different media such as paint, glue, playdough, glitter, sand and water, all of which have the capacity to be messy. Messy play usually ends up with paint daubed everywhere and bits of playdough stuck to the carpet, however many protective layers have been used!

It’s no surprise that I don’t much like messy play, especially when it comes to cleaning up afterwards. But it strikes me that that says more about my obsessive need for control than it does about the value of the play itself.

I don’t like mess, but life is messy. It’s colourful, vibrant and wonderful, but it’s indisputably messy. Last week I watched a group of children take hold of pots of playdough and roll them into different shapes. They used cutters to produce animals, food shapes and vehicles. They squeezed and squashed the playdough into what they wanted to create (‘Grandad’s car’), and the end shapes were indubitably more interesting than the original lumps of the material. That is a parable of life: God squeezes and moulds our lives into the shapes He wants our lives to be, like a potter working with clay (see Jer 18).

But then the unthinkable happened. Instead of being content with the pristine colours, making green cars and blue elephants, some of the children began moulding the colours together to create a mishmash of playdough, a rainbow-coloured gloop which could no longer be separated back into its constituent parts. I was horrified. If I’d thought the play was messy before, now I’d lost total control!

Life can seem like that to us. Not only does it feel like God’s squeezing us and moulding us and we’re being pressed into shapes we don’t like, it can feel like we’ve lost our identity entirely and we are being moulded together with other people into something that looks, to us, messy and ugly. I loved the definition of the separate colours, all in their separate pots. I didn’t like the multi-coloured mush at all. But this parable reminded me that God is building people together into His church in a way that is more concerned with the finished whole than the sensibilities of the constituent parts.

The analogy doesn’t work entirely, of course, for God never crushes our identity in the way those children worked tirelessly to blend the playdough colours together. But this scenario did remind me of the need to relinquish control in order allow the Master Potter free rein (and reign!) and the fact that a jumbled-up whole is not necessarily a bad thing. Messy play will never be the same again!

We had two more birthdays to celebrate tonight (apologies for the photos, taken on my phone rather than on a camera; perhaps I should just admit to not being a photographer!)