成人快手

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Chine McDonald, director of Theos - the religion and society think tank

Good morning,

News came earlier this week that the long-running soap opera Neighbours may soon be ending after nearly four decades on our television screens. I鈥檝e never really known a world without Neighbours existing. It began just two years after I was born. My dad often talks about how he and his fellow doctors used to gather round the TV during lunchtimes in the late 1980s to catch that day鈥檚 episode; while my sisters and I would arrive home from school every day to watch Neighbours at tea-time. Scott and Charlene, Madge and Harold, Mrs Mangel and Bouncer the dog became like extended members of our family, or residents of our street, despite living in a fictional town on the other side of the world.

What the show demonstrated, however, was genuine community. Friendship, feuds and affairs that demonstrated life in all its texture: the pain and the heartbreak, yet the joy and the celebration. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic I was one of many who recognised I craved that same sense of local community; a group of people we could walk through those terrifying months with, at a time when our friends and family were not so close by and we were literally forbidden from seeing them. So the local street Whatsapp group was born and since then we鈥檝e shared surplus food, gone on supermarket trips for each other, shared contact details of plumbers and electricians, celebrated birthdays and even started a book club. Planning will soon start for our street celebration of the Queen鈥檚 Platinum Jubilee later this year.

I鈥檓 so thankful for this community of people and grateful for good neighbours becoming good friends. This sense of community is symbolised in the three-in-one nature of God, who dwells in relationship: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God, who draws us into relationship, may we know your presence in our communities this day and every day.

Amen.