Thought for the Day
20th May 2022
Tyndale has begun to establish a link with the First Baptist Church in Wroclaw, Poland, helping to support them in looking after refugees who have fled across the border from the war in Ukraine. There are upwards of 26 million such refugees worldwide, half of whom are children. Add to that those still within their own country, but who have been forced to leave their homes because of natural disaster, persecution, conflict, human rights violation – and the total number of displaced persons globally exceeds 82 million. Each one of them is not ‘at home’ tonight; will not sleep in their own bed; will not wake tomorrow to their own shop, school, place of work, club, or meet with familiar neighbours. Most will have no prospect of returning home in the near future, and will have to find a home for their heart in a strange place, in an alien land, at least for a time, maybe for ever.
I heard in an interview on radio yesterday: “Home is where the heart is – but what if the heart has no home?” Even when we are ‘home’, we may not be at ease; we may long for something more; we may feel restless and unfulfilled?
In his ‘Confessions’, St Augustine says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”. So, if we are at one with God, in a very real sense, it is possible to feel at home, wherever we might be.
David Bell
16th May 2022
What a contrast! I watch the television news: grim and grey, full of danger and suffering, flattened streets and skeleton blocks of flats. I picture the people who lived there, happy and secure, now dead, wounded, scattered. I want to scream out against the wanton, deliberate cruelty, all so unnecessary. I look outside: blue sky, […]
13th May 2022
I am writing this thought (for Friday 13th…) on Thursday evening, empathising with the students I have seen over the last few weeks who have needed extensions to assignment deadlines. It’s a frantic time in the academic year, with exams starting next week and students predictably stressed and full of the kind of questions that […]
9th May 2022
As we often do, Denise and I went to the theatre last week. We saw an amateur production (a very good amateur production I must add) of the musical ‘Rent’. I had never seen the show before and knew very little of the story. In short, it’s set in East Village New York City (a […]
6th May 2022
Did you know there are “Red Indians” in one of the stained-glass windows in the church? No, not really, but one of our sons, as a small child, came home asking about them. The stained-glass windows, especially the huge Tyndale and Bunyan windows are an unexpected glory of our church sanctuary. Many Baptist churches have […]
4th May 2022
If I had to summarise the laws of the universe in just two words it would be “things change”. Wherever we look, and we can now look a very long way indeed, things are busy changing. The day when things stop changing will be a very sorry day and we are fortunate that it is […]
2nd May 2022
Sir David Attenborough is on record as saying that the text Genesis 1:26, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth’, must take much of the blame for the human despoliation of our planet right down to […]
29th April 2022
Last evening a dozen of us spent an hour in the sanctuary sharing some of our doubts about faith. It was interesting, instructive, and I hope useful for us who were there. Personally, I’ve always had place for doubt. In my twenties I came across a quote: “Doubt is the essence of religious progress.” I […]
27th April 2022
Recently there have been lots of colourful posters around Nailsea announcing a forthcoming ‘Fun Run’. To me that’s a contradiction in terms – ‘Fun’ and ‘Run’ do not belong in the same sentence! Put it down to having to do cross-country runs round the school playing fields and the local lanes on damp, winter afternoons. […]
25th April 2022
The conflict in Ukraine impacts on all of us – not just in terms of material shortages but also the way it dominates our thinking and our praying. How should we pray for Ukraine? How specific should our prayers be? Is there a danger of telling God what to do by the way we frame […]