The Welland-Fosse Benefice: Prayers and Notices.

 Sunday 8th November 2020:  Remembrance Sunday.

 

• Please remember in your prayers those who are sick: Janette Saunders, Ann Hensby and those whose operations have been postponed again.
• Zoom services continue today at 10.55am.
• Next week there will be only one Zoom Service at 11 am as a result of Lockdown 2.
• Zoom Morning Prayer continues on Mondays, Wednesdays and now Fridays at 8.30am.  Compline will be restarted on Thursdays at 6pm from 12 November as well as Sundays in Advent beginning on 29^th
• The Rev’d Dr. Carys Walsh’s presentation on  S.Thomas will now be on Zoom at 2pm on 12 November. If you would like an invitation – or to order the Advent book – please let The Priest-in-Charge know on 01572 748634 or chris.armstrong60@yahoo.com. 

SOUTH LUFFENHAM:

• Although we will not be holding services in Church this month we will still be open every day for private remembrance and prayer. 
• Thank you to the people who have offered to decorate their window for Advent. We now have volunteers for every day. Look out for details nearer the time. 

Thanks to Sue and Janet for the Remembrance flowers

This Week’s Meditation: Hope:  In the last few weeks the fields around us have turned from gold to brown as the farmer puts in the plough and the autumn sun glints off the mouldboard smoothness.  Other fields have turned further, from brown to green as next year’s crop asserts its new life.

 

As soon as the harvest is over the farmers are busy ploughing and sowing, confident that nature’s new year will work its magic and produce our food once more. There is an expectation that nature can be depended upon. Yes, a few weeds might also appear but a fine crop of corn is expected. St. Paul puts this process under the microscope and reports that the crop which is to be will look nothing like the seed which is being sown. It comes to life in a completely new form.

 

So it must have been with those young men and women who risked all for what they hoped would be a better future for us all. They sacrificed their freedom as individuals so that we might enjoy a greater freedom in the future.  (That is precisely what the government is urging us all to do in this latest lockdown: restraining ourselves for a better tomorrow.)

 

Of course we might have doubts: doubts about the quality of next year’s crop; doubts about the defeat of CORVID -19 – just as those young soldiers may have had doubts about the chance of victory.

 

Some of us might be airily optimistic but hope rests on more than a whim. Hope rests on the nature of God who brings victory out of suffering. For Christians, hope turns on the resurrection of Christ who brings surprising new life out of a grisly death. In the Lord’s Prayer we hope for daily necessities (“give us this day our daily bread”) and universal redemption (“thy kingdom come”). The trials that beset us now are as nothing to the life which is to come, both now and hereafter if we place our hope in Christ.

 

See wellandfosse.org for much more information, including contact details for The Very Rev Christopher Armstrong and the churchwardens