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A reflection and prayer to start the day with the Rev Lynne Gibson.

PRAYER FOR THE DAY 6TH OCTOBER 2021

Good morning.
‘What do you think the word ‘compassion’ means?’ I asked a group of children recently, as we explored the story of the Good Samaritan.
‘It means having a good heart…being kind…it means not leaving anyone out’. In the innocence of childhood, their answers were clear. They understood the purpose of a parable, and that the Samaritan represented the ‘other’, whoever the other might be for us.
They grasp that loving God and loving our neighbour mean just that.
In that childlike faith, being open to God means talking the talk as well as walking the walk.
The God of our childhoods can however be portrayed as an unfortunate cross between a benign Santa Claus on a good day, and an angry thundering judge on a bad day – and yet the faith of a child, the integrity of a child’s faith, can still challenge us.
There is none of the quoting of intractable Bible verses in support of hard-line moral or ethical stances.
Children, in spite of that strange image of God that we implant in their imaginations, haven’t yet learned to abandon their understanding of being made in the image of a loving, gracious, compassionate God. They haven’t moved to creating God in their own image, as we tend to do.
Our grown-up God is often one who speaks only the words we want to hear,
His hardest and harshest words are those that we like to quote, perhaps out of context, in support of our most narrow and unforgiving views of the ‘other’.
The god of the extremist of every hue, is a far cry from the God of grace and love we actually encounter in the pages of Scripture, the God of compassion, the God, who, as 9-year-old Lily declared, ‘wouldn’t leave anyone out’.
God of Love, give us love in our thinking, in our doing and in our very being today, Amen.