Make me a channel of Your peaceWhere there is hatred let me bring Your loveWhere there is injury, Your pardon, LordAnd where there’s doubt, true faith in You Oh, Master, grant that I may never seekSo much to be consoled as to consoleTo be understood as to understandTo be loved as to love with all […]
Personal thoughts from my own Journey as I come to rest awhile in the shadow of the cross.
Wisdom’s Channel
Read more of this post on Coracle and Tide by clicking on the link above…
Nicky: “Runng late again! But see you SOON”
Jean: “Wish I could run”
Nicky: ” I don’t run anymore But know I need to start running more – towards Jesus”
Nicky is the younger with husband, two young adult children and a job as a Teaching Assistant keeping her on the go No time for running Shoes.
Jean is the the older woman, who can only sigh for the times when ‘The Springfield Whippet” was her nickname.
Revd Barrie just recovered from Covid, regularly dons his running shoes and to ease his way back to fitness is preparing to deliver the Easter ‘flyers’ through Rowley’s letter boxes.
“It will do him good,” Dr Katie, Barrie’s wife told Churchwarden, Yvonne.
So three people, five with Yvonne who does her running, her way, and Dr Katie all running, ON GRACE.
Everyone entered in the race of life is running on GRACE.
And I run toward the goal to take the victory of the calling of God from on high in Christ Jesus
Philippians 3:14 ~ my paraphrase
As we all know life sometimes trips us up, gets us down. I share the following story, a true one from a faithful runner who knows trips, falls, tears and many smiles in the hope that it may encourage someone.
“I have always known God’s secret stairs. You know the ones I mean; he comes down them sometimes to sit on the one just outside our bedroom door and listen to our prayers. I have always known those stairs, stone ones, marble ones stretching from his house in heaven, perhaps the self-same ones Jacob saw when he laid his head on his stony pillow at Bethel, Well, I was so tired, so low in spirits, that I pressed my face into my pillow and just cried. One of those times when you don’t have the words to make the prayers, even if you knew how to pray… so I just cried. Then I heard the footsteps. Someone, a man’s footsteps, running down those secret stores, down, down they came swiftly like a man on an urgent errand, right down, straight past my bedroom door, fading into silence. I stopped crying. I think my heart may have stopped momentarily. Had Jesus passed me by? Then the footsteps began again, from a long, long way down, – this time running upwards to come to a stop right outside the door. A tap on the door,
“Everything all right in there? Really thought you’d slipped right down to the bottom there. Didn’t you know I would be right with you?”
The person who tells this story, remembers laughing with joy at this point; and says no matter how bad things get, however much we want to give up, we should just listen out for his footsteps on the secret stairs. When we need him most and cannot run for Jesus or run to him because of lack of fitness in our body, heart or mind, at our lowest point The Lord will always come running to us.
O God, make speed to save us.
O Lord, make haste to help us.
From Common Worship – Evening Prayer
tidesandtidings 