REFLECTION  from Revd Louise Grace

There is so much healing, physical, mental, spiritual, needed within community and within churches. This only ever comes, though, from self awareness, guided by and grounded in knowing one is loved.  Jan Richardson's poems speak beautifully to this theme:

THE HEALING THAT COMES 

I know how long you have been waiting for your story to take a different turn,

how far you have gone in search of what will mend you and make you whole.

I bear no remedy, no cure, no miracle for the easing of your pain.

But I know the medicine that lives in a story that has been broken open.

I know the healing that comes in ceasing to hide ourselves away with fingers clutched around the fragments we think are none but ours.

See how they fit together, these shards we have been carrying— how in their meeting they make a way we could not find alone.

—Jan Richardson from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief Image: “I Will Be Made Well” © Jan Richardson