It feels right to bring to you again words from an earlier prayer letter to bring encouragement and hope.
When we’ve been praying together recently deep-felt gratefulness to God for his faithfulness to The Magdalene Project in meeting need through the years has been a constant theme, alongside the thought that each of us is God’s Restoration Project.
We have sometimes simply rested before God in the prayer time, and drawn on his strength, his encouragement, his hope. We’ve also been acknowledging the Lord’s goodness in meeting Magdalene’s needs, both practical and financial, and meeting the needs of those accessing the Project for support.
Thank you so much for your prayerful support of The Magdalene Project.
We appreciate you.
Your prayer makes a difference. We see answers to prayer in people’s lives being restored, step by step.
Join us if you can on the 3rd Thursday each month 9.30am.
Recently I listened to‘Thought for the Day’ on the radio when Revd Dr Sam Wells was thinking about ‘waste’. I particularly listened for approaches to our own inner waste-places, those parts of our self or our life experience that we struggle with or reject, He describes waste as not just a practical issue but represents everything in our lives we don’t have a place for or don’t know what to do with: maybe part of our personal history we consider a waste, a decision or choice we made that we regret, a year at college doing the wrong course, a relationship that didn’t develop in the way we had hoped, or an apprenticeship or job with an employer who is a bullying swindler!!
Christmas gives us the opportunity to be joyful and grateful with those we know and love.
The Christmas season also heightens our emotions, and struggles that have been encountered during the year or long buried emerge, or relationship difficulties or loneliness from the loss of loved ones or their job can make any of us feel low.
Life can hurt deeply.
Many of those accessing support with The Magdalene Project face deep difficulties and losses.
It is my joy to write this June Prayer Letter and talk about our generous and faithful God. Faithful in every way! We have much to thank and praise Him for, not least as we see Him at work in people's lives, including our own If you have been able to join us, you will have experienced the fantastic prayer meetings that we have enjoyed, and been blessed by.
Please feel free to join us, you will be very welcome.
‘God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.’ ‘The God of freedom, the true God, is... not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.’ ‘When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this.’
These thoughts of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in The Crucified God over 50 years ago have helped us come to understand the humanity of God in Jesus, one who shares our sorrows and grief, and who is far from indifferent to our struggles and suffering, and not one who is distant or unfeeling. Jesus shares our sorrows and pain. It was radical thinking at the time but Moltmann was asking the searching question where is God when we have difficulties or suffer. Whatever our experience, God is with us, to give us hope and a future.
In the days leading to Easter I’d like to share some thoughts below from Sarah Ann from ‘Faith Along the Way,’ "To the hopeless and the hurting." Please join us if you can to pray for the work of The Magdalene Project to help and support hurting people in our local communities.
We meet to pray in the morning on the 3rd Thursday each month 9.30-10.30am at The Magdalene Project in Bacup - dates in the diary on this page.
Dear Friends,
