Tag: Maggi Dawn

Categories
Life(style)

#BIGRead14: Hospitality

Source: The Worship Cloud
Source: The Worship Cloud
Source: The Worship Cloud

#BIGRead14

Today’s focus on hospitality…

According to the SHAPE programme devised by Rick Warren, this is one of my spiritual gifts:

  • Leadership (24/24)
    The special ability the Holy Spirit gives to recognise and communicate the vision of God’s purposes, and to accomplish it through the motivation and direction of a group of people.
  • Hospitality (23/24)
    The special ability the Holy Spirit gives to make people feel welcome, accepted and safe in their home and in a variety of settings.
  • Organisation (21/24)
    The special ability the Holy Spirit gives to perceive the way an organisation works, and to conceive and implement procedures that maximise the church’s ability to function, and release people – especially leaders – to fulfil their calling/gifting.

and members of my previous housegroup always said I was good at accepting people as they are, and listening out for their stories. I’m not sure when I’m just nosy… but in life coaching I have always thought – people start where they are and they cannot start anywhere else, so we have to try and put ourselves in their shoes.

I love this cheeky little photo which seems to scream ‘welcome’ from Anna Rabe:

Come_in

Checking out Bible verses:

  • Romans 12:13
    Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
  • Hebrews 13:2
    Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.
  • 1 Peter 4:9
    Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.
  • 3 John 1:8
    We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.

and as I approach the last few hours as a 38 year old, I’m expecting around 25 people to squish in my house tomorrow for a birthday pasta party!

Ironically #Do1NiceThing today is about shopping locally, and I went to a supermarket for the first time in a while…

Maggi Dawn

The two things that really struck me from Maggi’s material today, is how Lent has become so much of an individual exercise, whereas it used to be more of a community exercise – caring for each other and each other’s development (this is what #BIGRead14 was intended to overcome – let’s work through the same material together and see what each of us brings to the table).

The other is that often we feel overwhelmed by the problems of the world – and feel that nothing we do will make a difference, but:

We may not be able to do everything, but we can do something rather than nothing. We can’t bring inequality to an end from our own kitchen, but we can begin there.”

Kitchens/hospitality – the two words are almost synonymous in my mind 🙂

Categories
Life(style)

#BIGRead14: Bread

Bakery_stall
Image Source: The Worship Cloud

#BIGRead14

I LOVE bread … especially crusty fresh granary bread… the smell of it, the texture, the taste … although after this reminder of cheese/Marmite toasties today I might buy an ‘ordinary’ loaf of bread! 

Today’s poem talks about bread – and we’re quite used to the idea of Jesus as the bread of life, but not so much about ourselves ‘as bread’ – to be prepared to be ‘dispersed’, but still – we can receive also:

You are the bread of life.
I trust you to feed me with a
fragment;
to fill me with the smallest
crumb.

Side Note: Thinking back to earlier posts re food waste, as I was looking for bread, I came across a BBC news story that someone has invented bread that will last for 60 days – which sounds a little wrong to me, although they are suggesting that it will cut food waste (have they not heard of freezers)!

#Do1NiceThing: Call in on an elderly neighbour – take some cake, have a cup of tea and a chat

I’m not sure I’d describe any of my neighbours as elderly – but we do regularly chat over the fence – usually in the summer though – up north we all dash in to get away from the wind!

Maggi Dawn

If we treat Lent as somewhat of a chance for a detox, a stoic event in which we seek to please a harsh taskmaster God – we have missed the point of Lent, and we have misunderstood God and his ‘graceful’ nature… In previous Lent, people gave up essentials as well as luxuries – to understand that ‘man shall not live by bread alone’!

Fasting in the Christian tradition is essentially about recognising that there’s nothing we can  do to improve ourselves. We are fallen creatures and need redemption, not cosmetic surgery. No amount of self-improvement will change God’s view of us – God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who is not fooled by the way we present ourselves in prayer or religious observance, and who loves us anyway. We do not need to put on a show for him, and we cannot save ourselves apart from him.

Categories
Academic Life(style)

“Women on Your Bookshelf” by @MaggiDawn

maggi-dawnI saw this post come through my feed earlier today, stuck a bookmark on it (I was being focused on #bigread14 … for which I do need to Skype Maggi to get a recording of Evensong – and which I’ll be reading alongside Maggi’s Giving It Up!) and thought, great to go and look back at next week – and then tonight realised that I was mentioned on it (just published in time!), which is a great encouragement to go to sleep on – especially looking at some of the other women on the list!!