The slogan of the Society of St Luke is “Prayer and Care”. Please note the order Prayer followed by Care, not the other way round. Too often in life we leave prayer to be done later. The truth is that prayer should be at the centre of everything we do. In both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible people often want to act first and then wonder why everything goes astray. Acting without prayer is often a way of trying to do things my way, rather than God’s way. So we should place ourselves into the hands of God, then commend the people we will meet and the situation into God’s care. I am not in control, God is.
As Jesus taught, “love God, love your neighbour, love yourself”. That is the blueprint for everything we do. So who do we care for? Jesus’ answer to that was everyone. In other words we care for those in the church, those outside the church regardless of their creed, colour, gender, nationality and anything else that makes a person different to me. We are being asked to extend the hand of friendship and help. Now this is not easy, Jesus told us that helping others would be a challenge, the word he used was sacrificial! We will often act like the priest and Levite and walk by on the other side leaving someone else to do the caring. So be it, let us confess our failings to God, he will forgive us and we will try to do better in the future.
There was a third love in the list, to love myself. We cannot work alone and unaided or else we will burn out. This is where we need God, we need to spend some time in quiet to be with God, but we also need the support of our church family. We need each other to support us and pray for us, particularly when we are finding life difficult.
When I first became an incumbent I was in my mid twenties. I visited a lady called Ida who was old enough to be my grand mother, if not my great grand mother and she told me her days of doing things were over she could only walk short distances and was virtually house bound. She said that if each Sunday I gave her a rough idea of what meetings and visits I had for the next week she would pray for me at the appropriate time in the week. It was a wonderful thing for me because I knew that as I was going to a Baptism visit, a Funeral visit or a meeting Ida would be praying for me and those I was meeting. Sometimes this would be by name and at other times for reasons of confidentiality it would just be for me and two/three others. The interesting thing from my point of view was that because she was praying for me I was always more able to put myself into the hands of God but above all to thank him for the wonderful support that Ida was giving to me.
May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Andrew SSL