Tag: Theology and Spiritual Reflections

I recall being told once upon a time my name, translated, means ‘reckless bravery’. Is that why? So I ask. No, it’s because of my involvement with emergency services and disaster  response. Ah, but what has courage to do with that?

While away on holidays I have heard the Word and took notice of the context. A young girl shot because she was going to school was called brave. A woman swimming from Cuba to  Florida without a shark cage was called brave. A bystander jumping into the sea to help a person who had fallen off the rocks; a rescue crew responding to a road accident; fire fighters  responding to bush fires; a young child suffering a terminal brain tumour; a kayaker trapped on an island by a crocodile; a solo bicycle rider travelling around Australia on roads shared  with B-triples; someone walking across the Great Sandy Desert to raise funds for cancer research… the list continues.

Sick of turning the other cheek? Dianne Jensen explores what it means to forgive and to be forgiven.

Rev Julie Nicholson is known worldwide as the vicar who couldn’t forgive. The Anglican priest stepped down from her position because she was unable to forgive the suicide bomber who  had murdered her daughter at Edgware Road tube station in London in July 2005. She could no longer speak the words of reconciliation which were fundamental to her role.

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where –‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

Hmmm. I wonder what seven-year old Alice Plausance Liddell made of this story during a picnic on the river at Oxford, 151 years ago, when told them by her devoted Christian friend, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson? I wonder what we make of them now, as we read them again from that much loved story ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, written by Dodgson under his pen name, Lewis Carroll?

‘A rural community is people living across a wide rural-based area serviced by a small town (often with limited facilities) which is a central hub for interdependent activities which meet  social, commercial, educational and spiritual needs.’ Rural Ministries Working Group

Jesus came and lived amongst people, ministering to people, loving people. The church is a community of people who are bound by that rule of love, giving of themselves for one another  as Jesus gave himself for them (John 13). The community of the church is called to live that life of love in all aspects of its life which includes in the wider community.  Community in a rural setting tends to be far more intense than in the city. In our small country towns each person is known to the other through the network of community groups in the  town. In pastoral care of each other this both helps and hinders the local church community. Everyday pastoral care comes naturally to those we know, and the church community  relates easily to the whole community.