³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with the Very Revd Dr Sarah Rowland Jones

Good morning. Today is the World Day of Prayer. This brings together people of various races, cultures and Christian traditions, in prayer around a common theme; as well as encouraging closer fellowship, understanding and joint action, throughout the year. The wave of prayer begins in Western Samoa at dawn on the first Friday of March, and encircles the world until it ends almost 24 hours later in American Samoa, just the other side of the dateline.

In the UK alone, there will be hundreds, even thousands, of events today.

This year's theme has been prepared by the women of the Cook Islands, a tiny island nation in the Pacific. They have taken a verse from Psalm 139, in which the psalmist says to God, ‘I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. They invite us to consider what it means for the creator God to say to each one of us, to all of us together, and to our planet and all life on it ‘I have made you wonderful.’

It may be hard to view ourselves as wonderful! Perhaps we feel being ordinary is safer, as then only ordinary things might be expected of us! Yet God continually remakes us wonderful through his Holy Spirit, so we can be channels of his wonderful work.

There's also the challenge of whether we truly view others, and our world, as similarly wonderful to God. More than this, do we treat them as wonderful?

Creator God, you have made us wonderful - help us to recognise and celebrate the wonder of everything and everyone that you have made. Amen