Different paths

Changing direction

This week has been about changing directions.  From the Feast of the Epiphany, when after visiting Jesus, the Magi ‘were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, and returned to their own country by a different way’, to the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord when Jesus, after his Baptism by John the Baptist, ‘was led by the Spirit out into the wilderness.’

So too this is an opportunity for us to change direction, to value the time we have here, to value ourselves and to know that we are called to make a contribution while we are here.

In Assembly this morning the following prayer was used.  Attributed to Stephen Grellet, a French-born American Quaker missionary (1773 – 1855) it speaks the uniqueness of our own journey and of the chance we have to make the direction we take in life count.

I shall pass through

this world but once.

Any good therefore

that I can do or any

kindness that I can

show to any human being

let me do it now.

Let me not defer

or neglect it for

I shall not pass

this way again.

Stephen Grellet