麻豆约拍

A reflection and prayer to start the day with the Rev'd Dr Craig Gardiner, a tutor at South Wales Baptist College.

Good morning.

Today is the day, when according to Tolkien鈥檚 legendary tale, Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit, returns from his long adventure. He, along with Gandalf the wizard and a company of dwarfs have defeated the great dragon Smaug, and Bilbo has discovered a mysterious ring.

As he walks towards his house there is one more twist to be told. His neighbours believe he has died, and all his possessions are being auctioned away. While he eventually convinces them that he鈥檚 alive and well, he never really settles back to life as it was.

That scene reminds me of another man who was once thought to have died but hadn鈥檛. Alfred Nobel was the Swedish inventor of dynamite and amassed a fortune manufacturing weapons of war. Mistakenly believing he had died, a newspaper printed his obituary, referring to him as the Agent of Death. Nobel was horrified and turned his life around, rewriting his will and leaving almost every penny to the Nobel Foundation, awarding an annual prize for Chemistry, literature, Medicine, Physics and most famously for peace.

Our lives may not offer such dramatic opportunities, but nonetheless every morning brings a second chance to be live life differently. The biblical prophet Jeremiah understood this when God sent him to a potter鈥檚 house and saw the craftsman working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping, wobbled and mis-spun and turned out badly, so the potter simply used the same clay to start again and make another better pot.

Most of us have something that has wobbled and mis-spun in life, but nothing is beyond the potter鈥檚 hand. Today can be the day when our future is refashioned into something better.

Dear God
Thank you for this new day
And the opportunities to start afresh
You are the eternal potter,
and we are the clay
Mould us, fashion us
into your beauty
and for your purpose
Amen