The eight who are off to India are busy making preparations… packing suitcases and sorting out last-minute arrangements. It seems surreal that after so many months of planning, we are soon to be off on the mission trip!

Don’t forget you can follow what’s happening through our dedicated Facebook page (where we hope to post photos and updates) and we will try to keep this updated regularly (free wi-fi is supposed to be everywhere in Bangalore, the IT city, so let’s hope that works!)

In the meantime, here are some photos to whet your appetite!

Please pray for the team while they are in India and for all who remain at home. Our God is able to bless, heal, save and work wherever we are!

Compassion is defined as ‘sympathetic pity and concerns for the sufferings or misfortunes of others’ and is derived from two words literally meaning to ‘suffer with.’ Jesus was moved with compassion when he saw crowds of people because he saw they were ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ (Matt 9:36) It was compassion which caused him to feed the crowds (see Matt 15:32) and to heal the blind (see Matt 20:34); in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the father is filled with compassion when he sees his returning son (Luke 15:20). God is called ‘the Father of compassion’ (2 Cor 1:3), so clearly having compassion is part of our growth in godliness.

In our world today, however, it is easy to become inured to sorrow, tragedy and devastation and to become, if not hard-hearted, at least so wrung out that we feel we have nothing left to give. Having a soft, tender heart means we will be easily hurt and wounded; we will feel the pains and sorrows of others and sometimes feel we cannot cope daily with that kind of pain, so we hide away. The only way we can truly cope with the sorrows and misfortunes of others is to bring these before God.

Listening is a skill that has to be developed; James reminds us that we should be slow to speak and quick to listen (Js 1:17), and someone has commented that we have two ears but only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we speak! Listening well means that we have to slow down and give our full attention to something or someone.

These days, we seem to be obsessed with multi-tasking. One of the banes of my life is ‘background music’ – music that is there in shops, restaurants, homes but is never listened to properly. We fail to listen properly to it and rob ourselves enormously by trying to do too many things at once. Listening can’t be done half-heartedly or while juggling a thousand other tasks. For us to listen well means to slow down, stop preparing our responses before we’ve heard someone out and stop being in such a hurry!

Listening to people takes time and effort, and the same is true of listening to God. I am challenged by Michael Card’s question: ‘Is the reason we’re not still to hear You speak/ Because we don’t believe You will?’ (‘In Stillness And Simplicity’) Take the time out to listen for God’s still small voice today. You might be surprised what He says.

The easiest way to pray the psalms is to read them meditatively and allow them to shape our prayers, rather than trying to fit our prayers into the psalms. Traditionally, the psalms have been read daily; in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, it is possible to read through the whole book in a month by reading a selection of psalms each morning and evening. Other Bible reading schemes include a psalm, or portion of a psalm, each day so that in the course of a year, the whole book is covered. This allows for a more leisurely meditation of the Psalms. Reading them in different versions can help us to retain freshness so that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt.

The Psalms force us to look at different situations and emotions and show us how people bring these to God and cry out to Him. The most basic prayers are ‘Thank You!’ and ‘Help!’, but in the Psalms, we also discover laments, complaints, thanksgiving, despair, hope, confidence and trust. We discover, in effect, that there is nothing too small and nothing too big for God. They are often read individually, but also form the basis of our collective prayer, helping us to see God as He reveals Himself rather than as we may imagine Him to be.

Take a psalm a day and let it shape your prayers!

As we move on from considering the Psalms as poetry and song to thinking about them as tools for prayer, we spent the evening praying using the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9-13) as the model for our prayers.

Timothy Keller calls the Psalms ‘uncensored prayer’ and Eugene Peterson says they are prayers which deal with ‘raw honesty and detailed thoroughness.’ Perhaps the most liberating thing we can discover in the Psalms are that they are prayers which are not ‘refined’. They haven’t been through some purification process which takes the emotion out of them and renders them ‘fit for human consumption.’ They are vibrant, pulsating with emotion, prayers which encourage us to come before God honestly and which remind us that we can bring absolutely every aspect of our lives to God in prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer gives us a framework for prayer, which always starts with honouring God. So many psalms also do this (see, for example, Ps 57:5, 7-11). To ponder, reflect on and meditate on God’s character and nature is always a good basis for prayer.

In prayer, we align our wills with God’s. Ps 119 gives us much to chew considering the role of God’s Word in helping us to do this. Ps 121 is an example of relying on God’s guidance, protection and provision for us as we seek God to provide our daily bread and realise we need spiritual food as well as natural bread. Prayer also has much to do with forgiveness – the forgiveness we receive from God and the forgiveness He expects us to show to others (see also Ps 32, Ps 51).

Prayer is a spiritual weapon and many psalms teach us how to trust God when we are going through temptations and trials (see Ps 13, Ps 88). Ultimately, the Psalms teach us how to rejoice in God (see Ps 100). In prayer, we may list our laments, bring our requests, sing joyfully or complain miserably in between, but we need to have a focus on the greatness and majesty of God as we pray, and the Psalms are one of the greatest ways of bringing our attention to the right place!

One of the most important things we need to embrace in our walk with Jesus is obedience. Samuel told the king Saul, after his foray into doing his own thing, that ‘to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.’ (1 Sam 15:22) These are strong words. Samuel went on to tell Saul that ‘rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry’ (1 Sam 15:23) and that the kingship would be taken from him as a result of this.

We need to ask God to search us and know us and reveal to us the areas of our lives where we are not being fully obedient. We so often can be like Jonah, running in the opposite direction from God, but perhaps more worryingly than this flagrant disobedience are the times when we compromise and rationalise what we do. We partially obey, thinking some obedience is better than none, when actually God searches our hearts and knows all our deception and half-truths and longs for us to obey whole-heartedly everything He tells us to do.

Jesus’s mother told the servants at Cana, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ (Jn 2:5) That simple text, when pondered and assimilated into our lives, becomes our springboard to obedience. God only needs our willingness. He even supplies the power to do that which He asks, once we yield ourselves to Him. Give up the excuses and step out in faith today. Obey God.