麻豆约拍

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Bishop David Walker

Good Morning.

As a teenager, I often lay awake in bed at night, worrying about all the things that might possibly go wrong the next day. Rarely did any of them come to pass. Even when something bad did happen, my fretting did little to help me respond any better - it just meant I was more tired than I needed to be. When my faith came alive to me, in the months when I was preparing to go to university, I found that obsessive worrying fell away. Mostly, I slept peacefully, commending my cares to God, trusting he would be there with me, to face whatever the new dawn might bring.

Today, my thoughts, and those of many other Christians, will be on the parents of Jesus - Joseph, and the heavily pregnant Mary - as they made their way towards Bethlehem and the birth that would come, deep in the night. Did they panic over whether Mary would make it safely? Were they terrified of not being able to find suitable accommodation, at a time when many others were also travelling to ancestral homes? Were they tempted to turn back to the relative safety and certainly of Nazareth?

Such feelings are natural. But my guess is that their sense of God鈥檚 love and their place in his plan mitigated their fears, giving them courage to continue.

And so I pray:

Lord God, we hold before you our fears and worries, for ourselves, our loved ones, and for the society and world in which we live. Calm our troubled minds. Soothe us by the knowledge that, whatever we face, you are present with us. And may we, like Joseph and Mary, look beyond our troubles, to the gift of your son, born at Christmastime.

Amen.