We urge you… to admonish the idlers, encourage
the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with all. (1 Thessalonians
5:14)

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any
consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion
and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having
the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. (Philippians
1:1-2) Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.
(Philippians 4:4-5)

Be angry but do not sin: do not let the sun go down
on your anger. (Ephesians 4:26)

No one should wrong or exploit a brother or sister…
For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness. Now concerning
love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone
write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love
one another. (1 Thessalonians 4:6,7,9)

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what
does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness.
(Micah 6:8)

And now I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have
love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my
disciples. (John 13:34,35)

Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy,
love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not
repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary,
repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called –
that you might inherit a blessing. (1 Peter 3:8-9)

…..

Let’s summarize our journey together so far: we
were created by God to enjoy him, appreciate our own and others’
uniqueness, and to grow in community, or fellowship with others.

In the brilliant film Kramer vs. Kramer the divorced
father has to explain to his five-year-old son that he’s just
lost the custody battle between himself and the boy’s mother.
Soon the child will be going to live with her. The little boy
sobs out what for him are questions of ultimate concern: ‘Where
will I sleep? Where will I put my toys? Why can’t I stay with
you too?’

The movie is about three people. Two grown-ups –
a man and a woman – have needs that aren’t being met by the other.
Their little boy, therefore, has to have his life messed up too.
Where does such a vicious circle begin? Why is it not possible
for humans to live together without conflict? What can we do to
stop the chain reaction of grief being handed on to another generation?

Oscar Wilde believed that ‘other people are quite
dreadful; the only possible society is oneself.’ Wrong, Oscar,
and sad. (There is more wisdom in something else he said: ‘In
this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what
one wants, and the other is getting it.’) How can we get along
with those we live with?

You begin by knowing who the real ‘me’ is. If you
don’t like yourself you won’t enjoy living with others either.
When I ask people in counseling ‘What do you like about yourself?’
I often get a ‘nothing’ response. Some of us avoid responsibility
for our behaviour with the excuse ‘Well, nobody’s perfect.’ True,
but you don’t have to opt out of growing; nor do you have to live
with the negative self-fulfilling prophecies you or others have
heaped on yourself. At the deepest level your identity, your perception
of who you are, has derived from what others have communicated
to you about you. It’s on the esteem of others that you base your
own self-esteem. With the help of a caring friend, learn to accept
yourself. You are an unrepeatable miracle of God’s creation.
If you want to get along with others, you had better start with
the person inside your own skin!

Then, affirm the uniqueness of others. They, too,
are who they are as a result of the mix of verbal inputs into
their lives by significant others, plus the accidents of life
they have experienced, plus their own success or otherwise in
determining to become a whole person. The Christian approach
here is simple, and it works: pray to your and their Creator God
for a gift of love: to view the other as one precious to God and
made in his image. You can’t pray this prayer sincerely for too
long without beginning to appreciate the other!

Then, let’s be lovingly honest with one another.
One of the great middle-class sicknesses of our time is affability.
We are so nice to each other it’s sickening. We play games to
cover our true feelings. Rather than ‘walking in the light’ we
leave one another to stumble in the darkness about who we are
and they are. But then, if we cannot ‘speak the truth in love’
without the risk of creating greater hurt rather than healing,
we might have to (a) learn ‘win-win’ conflict resolution skills,
and/or (b) follow the advice on my desk calendar the other day:
‘Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have
to leave them alone to do it.’ (Marcel Proust once said, ‘The
one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing
it on others’).

We exist in homes, families, communities, to ‘care’
for each other, as well as being cared for by others. However,
‘care’ has ambiguous connotations, as Henri Nouwen has pointed
out. For example, when a Mafia boss tells his henchmen to ‘go
take care of somebody’ that somebody had better watch out. He
is about to be made an offer he can’t refuse! Actually, our English
word ‘care’ goes back to a Gothic root, kara, meaning to ‘lament,
weep with, grieve’. So caring should mean we become aware of the
other in ways that stir deep feelings, and out of these feelings
resolve is born to care for them in appropriate ways. This means
breaking out of the circle of selfishness and making our lives
a resource to others.

This is the meaning of the Good Samaritan story.
Every ‘good Samaritan’ says to the other: ‘What happens to you
makes a difference to me.’ Just as God makes an unconditional
covenant to commit himself to us no matter what happens, so we
forgive ‘seventy times seven’ and serve the other, even if we
are not thanked, or such labours are not returned. This is authentic
caring.

Again, let us take a journey back to the first few
chapters of Genesis. There’s a wonderful story about God’s desiring
communion with the creature man/woman he had made. When Adam
sinned, that fellowship was broken. God arrived in the garden
for their usual fellowship-time, but Adam was hiding. The ‘Fall’
was a fall from fellowship, not only between us and God, but between
humans themselves. Cain killed his brother Abel, and we’ve had
to work very hard to maintain fellowship, particularly where our
fallenness has led us to create barriers between persons and groups.
And yet, though God in the Old Testament is characteristically
sovereign, and holy, in his ‘apartness’ from sinners, his statement
to Moses – ‘I will be with you’ (Exodus 3:12) – indicates his
desire to commune with his covenant people. The Divine Presence
within Israel was symbolized in the ark, the cloud, the guiding
angel, and later in the Jerusalem Temple. But, as Psalm 23 tells
us, he feeds us, cares for us, protects us, guides us and encourages
us.

In the New Testament the Greek noun koinonia simply
means ‘sharing’, and is translated variously as ‘communion’, ‘communication’,
‘community’, ‘fellowship’, ‘partaking’, ‘contribution’, etc.
An ancient inscription put up by a husband in memory of his wife
said: ‘I shared all life with you, alone’. Thus ‘fellowship’ in
New Testament usage is the sharing of something with others in
a community, not merely the act of associating with them. The
outpoured Spirit had created a community that broke through the
barriers of language, culture, race, sex – even possessions (see
Acts 2:42, 4:32, 35, Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11).

This new joy, and mutual love, emanated not from
a Divine mandate, but from their high conception of being ‘in
fellowship’. It was nothing short of a miracle! These early Christians
experienced a sense of oneness, unity, togetherness, unlike anything
they had known before. People didn’t just associate with a few
‘cronies’: Jesus said tax-collectors and other disreputable people
did that. The foundation of koinonia is nothing less than the
Incarnation: Jesus sharing his life with us.

Again, we repeat: the Christian good news is about
God’s acceptance of us even before we change. He loves us unconditionally.
This was essentially the difference between Jesus and the pharisees.
Jesus ‘accepted’, loved people before they had changed, he loved
them into change; the pharisees rejected people who were alien,
sinners, until they had changed and mended their ways. With Jesus,
acceptance preceded repentance, with the pharisees it was the
other way around. So we are to accept one another, as God accepts
us – as people who are made in his image, who are like him! (Romans
5:6-8, 15:7). This does not mean we ignore or gloss over others’
mistakes or sins: it does mean we will recognize their Godlikeness
before we barge in to ‘fix’ things. Jesus said to the woman caught
in adultery ‘I do not condemn you’ before he said ‘Go and sin
no more’ (John 8:11). Jesus understood others. Two proverbs express
it well: To understand all is to forgive all; if you can understand
the other person you can stand them.

We’ll all meet difficult people from time to time.
Jesus did. He didn’t get along with everybody. He condemned injustice
and godlessness and if you’re going to do that you’re going to
get crucified by the unjust and the godless. If we are ‘change
agents’, then we’ll suffer at the hands of those who benefit by
things staying the way they are. (But then, some of us want to
change things because we ourselves are not at ease with ourselves.)

Many interpersonal conflicts result from our idealised
picture of who the other should be. Others’ incompleteness reminds
us of our own. It’s sometimes called ‘transference’ – transferring
emotions to a person or situation which belong somewhere else.
He married to escape a dominant mother, so when his wife ‘nags’
and reminds him of a bitter past, he over-reacts. She’s trying
to make him like her father, who was so helpful around the house,
and he does nothing.

Acceptance is helped by empathy. Empathy is ‘the
imaginative projection of one’s personality into that of another
person’ – putting yourself into the other’s shoes, listening deeply
with mind, heart and soul. It’s not sympathy, which can sometimes
be a selfish emotion, where you’re hooked because of some unresolved
emotional conflict in your own life. And it’s the opposite of
antipathy, where you judge the other for not measuring up to what
you want them to be.

And after all, what do we mean by a ‘difficult person’?
Who of us is not abnormal in some sense? Who decides what is normal,
who is difficult? Maybe schizophrenics are sometimes the sane
ones! Perhaps we have to work harder at dealing with the log in
our own eye, before we take splinters out of others’ eyes!

The church is meant to be a therapeutic or ‘salvific’
community, a community of people-helpers. But to be a people-helper,
one must be committed to one’s own growth – physical, intellectual,
social- emotional, and spiritual. It is a community of people
who practise faith, hope and love: faith that people are loved
already in spite of their crabbiness; hope that with patience
and acceptance we and others can grow and change; love which covers
a multitude of faults and we desire only the good of others.
The challenge is to see Jesus in others, and practise ‘being Christ’
to others. And that’s tough work: overcoming prejudices is the
hardest work of all!

Mary Claerout, in her book Friday She Gave Him Flowers,
tells the story of Willings, a confirmed bachelor. Every Friday
his maid would put flowers on his breakfast table. The white roses
on the table must have cost her a fortune, so he imagined ‘she
must simply adore me,’ As he sat back and contemplated the flowers,
a warm feeling swept through him. He thought, ‘The woman is a
blessing; if only she weren’t so ugly.’

He thought about himself. He was a lady’s man. He
had himself. As a boy he loathed looking at his peer group with
pimples and acne and blackheads. He abhorred their wrinkles and
warts. His stomach turned over when he saw hair growing out of
noses and ears. He could hardly bear to look at others’ mouths.
All his life he had seen only one flawless mouth, his own. He
enjoyed himself, being alone… He decided to thank Emily for
the flowers and called her in.

She said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing to speak of really Mr
Willings. It’s just that I feel so sorry for the flowers. Hardly
used they are, when the undertaker puts them out for Friday’s
rubbish collection. So I always pick a few out when I go by.
I wouldn’t want them at home, you know, seeing where they come
from. That’s why I put them in your vase. I mean, it’s not your
own choosing that you are all alone and don’t have any friends.
At least you should have a few flowers.’

…..

From what I have learned in my own marriage, and
seen in others, there are not many questions more important than
this: ‘Am I willing to train myself away from selfishness toward
the point where I honestly care how the other person feels?’

Charlie W. Shedd, Letters to Philip on how to treat
a woman, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell, 1968, p. 19 [43]

If you share your bread in fear, mistrustfully,
undaringly, in a trice your bread will fail. Try sharing it without
looking ahead, not thinking of the cost, unstintingly, like a
child of the Lord of all the harvests in the world.

Dom Helder Camara, A Thousand Reasons for Living,
London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984, p.98 [41]

A famous English preacher named Alexander Whyte
was very disturbed one night because his closest friend was at
the point of death. Whyte was praying earnestly to God that this
man might be spared when suddenly a Voice said to him, ‘How serious
are you about this one’s survival? Would you be willing to divide
with him the number of years you have left to live upon this earth?’
With that, Whyte reports getting up off his knees in a cold sweat
for suddenly intercession had become more than a matter of words.
Now it was the precious substance of his own life that was at
stake. He pondered this question very deliberately for a while
and dropped back to his knees and said, ‘Yes! I hereby relinquish
half of the time I have left, if this will enable my friend to
survive.’ He got up with no idea what the ultimate outcome of
this agreement would be… Here I am with a given pool of physical
and emotional and psychic vitality. How will I spend it? How much
of it will I keep for myself and how much of it will I make available
to others?

John Claypool, from an unpublished sermon, ‘How
Much of Yourself Will You Give?’ [197]

Carl Sandburg talks about the ‘zoo’ inside each
of us – there’s a pig, and a lion, and a tiger, and a gentle deer.
We have all kinds of feelings within us: we are responsible for
some of them and not others. But although there is a zoo in me,
I am keeper of that zoo!

For example, it is not wrong to be angry, but what
you do with your anger could be very harmful. Jesus got angry
sometimes. And if you want to get mad at me, that’s O.K. I should
pray for the maturity to handle our conflicts constructively.
Just as friction between certain types of rocks produces sparks
of light, so it is the friction of our individualities rubbing
against each other that illuminates who we really are. There is
a sense in which I do not really know you nor you me until we
get to a point where we differ…

So the words ‘ought’ or ‘should’ mustn’t generally
be used in relation to feelings. Our feelings are like toothache
– they’re there – and no amount of exhorting will make a toothache
or the feelings go away…

When you are more in touch with your own feelings,
you’ll be more compassionate with others. Here’s Frederick Buechner’s
definition of compassion: ‘The sometimes fatal capacity for feeling
what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the
knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for
me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.’

True community is born from love that risks the
sorrow of rejection for the love of acceptance. Community implies
participation; participation implies action. True community means
walking in the light, being open, and perhaps vulnerable with
one another. Perfect love casts out fear. The root of war, Thomas
Merton has taught us, is fear.

Rowland Croucher, from an unpublished sermon, ‘Getting
along with the people you live with.’ [309]

To Victor, who agrees with me in nothing and is
my friend in everything.

Carlyle Marney’s dedication at the beginning of
his book Faith in Conflict. [14]

Some families readily express hostility and anger,
but fail to express tenderness, love and appreciation. Other families
appear to have unwritten rules that allow the expression of kindness,
concern and positive feelings, but then suppress irritation and
exasperation, shame, self-doubt and expressions of disagreement,
dislike and requests for what one wants for oneself. Healthier
families [are] able to express a wide range of feelings…

‘Letting it all hang out’ [is not recommended].
It is the range of feelings that can be expressed without attacking
other members that seems to create human development and intimacy.
It may be because the family members can modulate the intensity
of their negative feelings that they are able to express whatever
they wish. In fact, the modulation of intense feeling is one of
the prerequisites of effective conflict management.

Moira Eastman, Family: The Vital Factor, Blackburn:
Collins Dove, 1989, pp. 65-67 [132]

A generous mind does not consider itself as belonging
to itself alone, but to the whole human race (Ulrich Zwingli).
A friend adds to your joy, divides your burdens, multiplies your
happiness (Anon). If two people doing a job agree all the time,
then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both
are useless (Darryl F. Zanuck). We are invited to be thermostats,
not thermometers – affecting our environment, not merely reflecting
it (Charles Hembree). We keep passing unseen through little moments
of other people’s lives (Robert T. Pirsig). I am part of all that
I have met (Ulysses). If you wish to please people, you must
begin by understanding them (Charles Reade). People must help
one another: it is nature’s law (Jean de la Fontaine). If you
are gracious and courteous to strangers, you are a citizen of
the world (Francis Bacon). If your Christianity is not contagious,
it may be contaminated (Chester Johnson). I am as close to God
as I am from the person from whom I am most divided (Anon.) The
nobler your heart is, the more you will be inclined to make allowance
for others (F W Robertson). Kindness is one thing you can’t give
away: it always comes back (Anon).

Desk calendar quotes

Christianity is a community event. As Christians
we have always believed that the life of faith is not a private
enterprise but a communal venture. Over the past several decades
in the Church we have come to renewed awareness of this fact.
One of the most significant efforts within the Church today is
the movement of Christians to understand themselves as the people
of God and to experience their relations with one another as a
life together in community. We rejoice in this vision of Christian
life, taking hope in its challenge to the formality and bureaucracy
that can find their way into church structures. But, gradually,
many of us have come to sense that this goal of life together
as Christians is both a gift and a most difficult ambition.

The language of ministry today is filled with the
vocabulary of mutuality: mutual support, shared decision-making,
collegiality, and collaboration.

Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead, Community
of Faith: Models and Strategies for Developing Christian Communities,
New York: Seabury Press, 1982, p.xi. [151]

Christian community is… a gift of God which we
cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship,
of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us
may be great and glorious to God. Just as [Christians] should
not be constantly feeling [their] spiritual pulse, so, too, the
Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to
be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily
receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will
fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.

Christian [community] is not an ideal we must realize;
it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may
participate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1954, p. 30. [122]

The gospel tells of the triumph of the personal
in the silence of a technological world. The Word became flesh.
The Word dwells among us. The metaphor of the personal is carried
in the stories of Jesus again and again. The shepherd seeks for
a lost sheep, a father looks for a lost son. Here is a parent
who gives not a stone but a loaf of bread, not a serpent but a
fish. Here five thousand sit down together to share a simple meal.
Two men travel on a road and are joined by a third. In deep conversation
they end their journey with the breaking of bread and what is
hidden is revealed, what is a mystery penetrated with the joy
and wonder of communion.

Denham Grierson, A People on the Way: Congregational
Mission & Australian Culture, Melbourne: David Lovell Publishing,
1991, pp. 89-90. [127]

An Irish tenant farmer who died last century left
a widow and three little children. This was before the days of
social security. The man who owned the farm needed the house to
get another field hand, and so this poor widow was literally turned
out into the road with no resource whatsoever for herself and
her family. She went to the nearest town and began to go from
door to door explaining her plight and offering to do any work
to provide for her children. However, person after person turned
her away, saying, ‘I have problems of my own. What happens to
you is of no concern to me.’ After four days of no food and sleeping
out of doors in the park, the youngest child’s body was weakened
and she woke up with a burning fever. By noon all three of the
children were sick, and before the sun went down this little neglected
family was the centre of an epidemic of diphtheria that spread
to the whole town. Only at that point did it become clear that
this woman’s plight was the concern of the larger community. Their
failure to deal with the problem at one point in time meant they
had to deal with it later in a worse form.

Source unknown

‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad…’

One important rule for being happy and successful
is – don’t let things agitate you. This is vital… People get
sick largely because they cannot control and discipline their
minds…

Imagine that Jesus Christ is actually by your side.
When you start worrying, stop and say: ‘Lord, you are with me;
everything is all right.’ At night, before you turn out the light
have a word with him and say, ‘Lord, I’ll not worry, for I know
you are watching over me and will give me peace.’

Practise taking a detached attitude towards irritating
things. Practise lifting your mind above the confusion and irritation
around you. One way to do that is to hang pictures [of nature]
on the walls of your mind and think about them habitually…

Robert Louis Stevenson made a wise statement: ‘Quiet
minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune
or in misfortune at their own private pace like the ticking of
a clock during a thunderstorm.’

One of the surest methods for overcoming agitation
is to put yourself in contact with the re-creative process of
nature.

Norman Vincent Peale, ‘How to Avoid Getting Upset’
in A Guide to Confident Living, Kingswood, Surrey: The World’s
Work, 1955, pp. 128-142. [193]

An apology,

Is a friendship preserver, Is often a debt of honour,
Is never a sign of weakness, Is an antidote for hatred, Costs
nothing but one’s pride, Always saves more than it costs, Is a
device needed in every home.

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because
the one who forgives you – out of love – takes upon themselves
the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore,
always entails sacrifice.

The price you must pay for your own liberation through
another’s sacrifice, is that you in turn must be willing to liberate
in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, Faber, 1964, in Michael
Hollings, Hearts Not Garments, London, Darton, Longman and Todd,
1982, p.82. [103]

When you stand praying, forgive.

If you are not getting answers to your prayers,
check yourself very thoroughly and honestly as to whether you
have resentments on your mind.

Spiritual power cannot pass through a personality
where resentment exists. Hate is a non-conductor of spiritual
energy.

I suggest that every time you pray you add this
phrase, `Lord take from my thought all ill will, grudges, hates,
jealousies’. Then practise casting these things from your thoughts.

Norman Vincent Peale, Thought Conditioners, New
York: Foundation for Christian Living, p.24. [77]

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the
most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances
long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations
still to come, to savour to the last toothsome morsel both the
pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many
ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that
what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast
is you.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London, Collins,
1973, p.2. [86]

According to the Bible, we are to love others as
ourselves (Luke 10:27), and as God loves us (John 4:11). In other
words, there is an intimate connection between our love for ourselves
and our love and esteem for God and others. When we fail to love
ourselves, all of our relationships suffer. We fail to love our
mates, our children, or our neighbors properly. Think of your
own life . Remember the last time you were feeling miserable and
were angry with yourself, discouraged, or depressed? How did you
relate to your mate, children, and friends at that time? Were
you loving, sensitive, and kind? I doubt it. When we are uptight
about ourselves, we are usually uptight with others. We take our
frustrations out on them.

Bruce Narramore, You’re Someone Special, Michigan:
Zondervan, 1978, p.119. [125]

The past is, perhaps, not totally lost, but it is
no longer ours; it is in the hands of God and is his business.
It will be retrieved in the tota simul possessio of eternity,
but should not be stored away on earth. As far as we are concerned,
we must realize that we are like children, at the beginning, not
the end, of a road. Whatever past achievements might bring us
honour, whatever past disgraces might make us blush, all of these
have been crucified with Christ; they exist no more except in
the deep recesses of God’s eternity, where good is enhanced into
glory and evil miraculously established as part of the greater
good.

John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality, an Anthology,
London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p.65. [116]

I was amused to read of the adjustments Paul and
Nellie Tournier worked through in their first years of marriage.
‘I’m an optimist and she’s a pessimist,’ Paul Tournier reported
in Faith at Work magazine (April, 1972). ‘She thinks of every
difficulty, misfortune, and catastrophe that might happen, and
I cannot promise her that such things will not happen. But God
is neither optimist nor pessimist. The search for him leads one
beyond his own personality and temperament to a path that is neither
optimism nor pessimism.

‘Little by little I have learned that God speaks
to everybody – men and women, adults and children, blacks and
whites, the rich and the poor. To discover the will of God, you
must listen to him in everyone. Of course, I prefer to have God
speak directly to me, rather than through my wife, and yet in
truly seeking his will I must be persuaded that he speaks as much
through her as through me; to her as much as to me.’

Quoted in Philip Yancey, ‘Marriage: Minefields on
the Way to Paradise’, Chrisianity Today, February 18, 1977, p.
27. [168]

Abba Theodotus said, `Do not judge a fornicator
if you are chaste, otherwise you will be transgressing the law
too. For he who said, "Do not fornicate", also said,
"Do not judge".’

We are all, equally, privileged but not unentitled
beggars before the door of God’s mercy.

John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality, an Anthology,
London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p. 67. [47]

…..

In the Ravensbruck Nazi concentration camp – where
an estimated 92,000 men, women and children were murdered – a
piece of wrapping paper was found near the body of a dead child.
On the paper was written this prayer:

O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good
will, but also those of ill will. But do not only remember the
suffering they have inflicted on us; remember the fruits we bought,
thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility,
the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart which has
grown out of all this. And when they come to judgement, let all
the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.

Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True
Home, Kent: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992. p.238 [113]

Why do we look a the speck in someone else’s eye
but ignore the log in our own? The measure we use for others,
God will use for us.

If we do not judge others, God will not judge us;
if we do not condemn others, God will not condemn us; if we forgive,
God forgives us even more; so let us give, and God will give to
us a full measure, a generous helping, poured into our hands,
more than we can hold.

The measure we use for others, God will use for
us.

Jesus, you are the giver and the gift.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland: Collins, 1989,
p.131. [103]

Accompany me to-day, O Spirit invisible, in all
my goings, but stay with me also when I am in my own home and
among my kindred. Forbid that I should fail to show to those nearest
to me the sympathy and consideration which thy grace enables me
to show to others with whom I have to do. Forbid that I should
refuse to my own household the courtesy and politeness which I
think proper to show to strangers. Let charity to-day begin at
home.

John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer, London:
OUP, 1936, p.89. [86]

Jesus, friend of sinners, you call us to love our
enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse
us, and pray for those who treat us badly.

Jesus, reconciler, when someone slaps us on the
cheek, you call us to offer the other; when someone takes our
coat, you bid us give our shirt as well; when someone takes what
is ours, we may not demand it back.

Jesus, Son of God, our friend and brother, when
we love our enemies and do good we are children of God, who is
kind to the wicked and ungrateful.

Jesus, teacher without peer, you have turned the
world upside down.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland: Collins, 1989,
pp.121-122. [114]

Lord, we come before you, not alone, but in the
company of one another.

We share our happiness with each other – and it
becomes greater.

We share our troubles with each other – and they
become smaller.

We share one another’s griefs and burdens – and
their weight becomes possible to heal.

May we never be too mean to give, nor too proud
to receive.

For in giving and receiving we learn to love and
be loved; We encounter the meaning of life, the mystery of existence
–

and discover you.

Terry C. Falla, Be Our Freedom Lord, Adelaide: Lutheran
Publishing House, 1981, p.158. [88]

Lord Jesus, we hold our families before you; we
are ashamed because so many of them are broken or are about to
break. How foolish we must look in your sight as we express ourselves
so harshly to one another! Lord, forgive us, and help us to make
the necessary repairs on our families. We know that we cannot
do much by ourselves, we need the help of your Holy Spirit. So
please bring his power into our hearts. And, O Holy Spirit of
Christ, work mightily among those who have heard the gospel again,
and bring many of them to faith.

God the Father, look with your compassion and pity
upon those who are living within families in which there is much
tension and suffering. Use the message of your grace to help
those who are discouraged, and enable them to see that through
your power there is hope that their families can become good places
to live.

We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

‘A Good Place to Live’, The Radio Pulpit (publisher
and date unknown). [167]

O God the Father, good beyond all that is good,
fair beyond all that is fair, in whom is calmness, peace and harmony;
make up the divisions which keep us apart and bring us back into
a unity of love which may bear some likeness to your divine nature.
And as you are above all things make us one by the unity of a
good mind, that through charity and affection we may be spiritually
one, through that peace of yours which makes all things peaceful,
and through the grace, mercy and tenderness of your Son, Jesus
Christ.

Dionysius, cited in Praying with the Saints, Dublin:
Veritas Publications, 1989, p.37. [98]

Lord, speak to me, that I may speak in living echoes
of your tone; as you have sought, so let me seek your erring children…
Freely I have received, may I freely give.

Help me to remember that a cancerous cell expects
the rest of the body to nourish it: may I nourish others, and
contribute to their well-being, without being concerned too much
about any reciprocity.

In relating to others, help me to adjust to them
sometimes, to be flexible when I ought to adapt to them; to be
courageous when I am called upon to do or say something difficult
to help another; to live in hope, that little by little I can
have a part in the ongoing process of the divine redemption of
the human race.

Reveal your gifts to me, and the limits of my abilities.
I can’t do everything to help everyone, but I can do something
to help someone. Give me, please, wisdom to know how to help
without getting all messed up; and how to help without messing
others up.

Thank you Lord. Amen.

A Benediction

May God grant you the serenity to accept the things
you cannot change, courage to change the things you can, and the
wisdom to know the difference. Amen.