An Adventure in Ministry

  This week as part of our Holy week celebration we, as a church will be participating in a passover seder, remembering the meal that Jesus would have had with his disciples shortly before he was arrested. Although my husband will be leading the experience and I will be at home looking after our daughter, I have been sourcing the food and helping with the preparation, and I have found it fascinating.  The passover festival is one that can be summed up as bittersweet. Bitter as they remember the Israelites time of slavery and oppression and sweet as they remember the freedom from it and their great escape. In fact bittersweet is a term that fits the Israelites well, and throughout the scripture we see times of bitterness intermigled with times of great sweetness. At the passover sedar the food that it eaten can also be described as bittersweet and at places, food are combined together to give exactly that experience. Bitter herbs called Maror (usually Horseradish) are dipped in...

At Christmas my beautiful friend sent me an amaryllis plant in the post. It arrived as a bulb with everything I needed to make it grow successfully. Along with the plant came a card declaring that this plant would be used by God to speak to me prophetically and oh how it did! My Beautiful plant While it grew and bloomed, God shared with me a number of things and I would love to share it with you today. So here are my lessons from my amaryllis.  It may look dead, but that doesn’t mean it is dead! - For the first month or so of having our bulb, nothing seemed to happen! The bulb sat in the most beautiful glass bowl with moss and even little fairy lights, but while we were waiting for the growing to begin someone did comment that it looked like I was displaying a rather large onion! On the outside it seemed that nothing at all was happening, but inside there was an awful lot going on.  How true can this be for each of us and true is it that where we see something dead, God is ac...