As courage falters
I turn to You.
I know better now
than to hope
for answers.
I hope merely
for company.
Talitha Fraser
Tag Archive: belonging
We are running a fortnightly bible study following our community dinner looking at the exegesis (interpretation) of the bible passages that underpin each of our community values. You can read the list of Values here so you know what’s coming up next.
These values can be relevant whatever context you live and work in just make the Word you own.
Value 2: In it for the long haul
We value being a constant in an inconsistent world, expecting and persevering through hard times. Our long-term commitment allows us to build trust and respect with those in our community, as we try to reflect God’s unconditional love and grace.
Biblical basis: Hebrews 10:36
Let’s read the value together… what words/phrases stand out?
- persevering through hard times…
- constant…
- try to reflect God’s unconditional love…
Read the bible. What words/ideas stand out?
What can we learn from the bible about living the Value: In it for the long haul?
Hebrews 10:19-25; 32-39
19 Therefore, my friends,[g] since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.23 Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
32 But recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, 33 sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. 34 For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. 35 Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward. 36 For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. 37 For yet
“in a very little while,
the one who is coming will come and will not delay;
38 but my righteous one will live by faith.
My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.”
39 But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.
– NRSV
Reflection time… followed by sharing time.
The photos around the walls of this house are a testament to the “long haul” of this community, let’s get up and have a look at these photos…
- what can you see?
- what should we keep doing?
- what keeps you coming back?
- how can we “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds”
Here are some of the things that have kept us going for the long haul, encourage us when things are tough and inspire us to want to be here in Footscray for another 10 years!
⊕ celebrating people’s’ lives ⊕ birthdays ⊕ people coming and going ⊕ growing up together ⊕ smiling ⊕ gardening ⊕ sharing the hard things ⊕ participating in rites of passage like births, baptisms and marriages ⊕ celebration of big and small things ⊕ grieving together ⊕ serving the community ⊕ cooking ⊕ having fun and being silly together ⊕ focus on the poor ⊕ playing sport ⊕ playing music and singing ⊕ being creative ⊕ having mastery/learning of new skills ⊕ Other people come and go. People are always here. You feel like you are needed. ⊕ different age groups ⊕ sharing food ⊕
As we sat with this, Ash observed that there is a stripping down faith to what’s important that happens in all of this… what is that?
God
I acknowledge my
inabilities,
my smallness,
my powerlessness
to affect any change
least of all
to myself
take me and make me
something beautiful
to You
take me and make me
something beautiful.
Amen.
Talitha Fraser
I am changed, am I not?
All glory be to You Life-Changer
I am not who I was
I am made new
All of who I am, in You
Ruined for anything else
And grateful, bone-deep, for that
If I am rendered fit for Your purpose
Let me not lament what is lost
But give voice to joy what has been found
You are the belonging
My heart has hungered for
Fill and spill from me
And I will know a life well-spent
I will know a life lived
I will know life
Not death, never death
But life with You
Talitha Fraser
At the end of myself let me find You.
At the end of myself let me be found.
Show me what love is.
Amen
I go for a walk
and am reminded
the world
is beautiful
it is not given to me
to understand
all this
only to watch
and then,
we’ll see…
Talitha Fraser
Location: Gembrook Retreat Centre, 215 Beenak E Rd, Gembrook, (03) 5968 1211
Facilitated by Christop Booth from the Indigenous Hospitality House, in this bible study series we will seek to make connections between the story of the nation of Israel told in Lamentations and our own national story. We will look to see whether this book may help us to address our shared histories of displacement and endeavour to distill how we might move forward as a nation in light of the biblical example.
Connection to Community
Who do you think of as community?
What forms of sharing are undertaken within these communities? (what is personal, what is communal?)
Read Lamentations 5
What type of people made up the Israelite community?
What did they share together? What experiences/materials/stories?
How connected were the Israelite people to one another at the time this poem was written?
What do we think of when we think of Aboriginal communities?
Watch clip from move The Sapphires [singing for soldiers during the war, Manager is injured and they’re separated, have to decide to go on or go back]
What kind of sharing takes place?
What part does shared suffering play in the building of community or extent of connectedness experienced?
Does being Aboriginal increase the likelihood of connection experienced by an individual? Does belief in God?
Can we identify any other factors which promote community building and connectedness?
How might we offer and/or provide aspects if community connectedness for others and ourselves at a local, national and international level?
PRAYER
[p.31]
Lord Jesus, now that beneath those world-forces you have become truly and physically everything for me, everything about me, I shall gather into a single prayer both my delight in what I have and my thirst for what I lack; and following the lead of your great servant I shall repeat those enflamed words in which, I firmly believe, the christianity of tomorrow will find its increasingly clear portrayal:
‘Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding me there, burn me, purify me, set me on fire, sublimate me, until I become utterly what you would have me be, through the utter annihilation of my ego.’
[p.33]
Glorious Lord Christ: the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depths of matter, and the dazzling centre where all the innumerable fibres of the manifold meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; you who are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; you who gather into your exuberant unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy, every mode of existence; it is you to whom my being cried out with a desire as vast as the universe, ‘In truth you are my Lord and my God’.
‘Lord, lock me up within you’: yes indeed I believe – and this belief is so strong that it has become one of the supports of my inner life.
[p.34]
This is the criterion by which I can judge at each moment how far I have progressed within you. When all the things around me, while preserving their own individual contours, their own special savours, nevertheless appear to me as animated by a single secret spirit and therefore as diffused and intermingled within a single element, infinitely close, infinitely remote; and when locked within the jealous intimacy of a divine sanctuary, I yet feel myself to be wandering at large in the empyrean of all created being: then I shall know that I am approaching that central point where the heart of the world is caught in the descending radiance of the heart of God.
***
Through a marvellous combination of your divine magnetism with the charm and the inadequacy of creatures, with their sweetness and their malice, their disappointing weakness and their terrifying power, do you fill my heart alternately with exaltation and distaste; teach it the true meaning of purity: not a debilitating separation from all created reality but an impulse carrying one through all forms of created beauty; show it the true nature of charity: not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together shall break open the doors of life; and give it finally – give it above all – through an ever-increasing awareness of your omnipresence, a blessed desire to go on advancing, discovering, fashioning and experiencing the world so as to penetrate ever further and further into yourself.
[p.35]
It is to your body in this its fullest extension – that is, to the world become through your power and my faith the glorious living crucible in which everything melts away in order to be born anew; it is to this that I dedicate myself with all the resources which your creative magnetism has brought forth in me: with the all too feeble resources of my scientific knowledge, with my religious vows, with my priesthood, and (most dear to me) with my deepest human convictions. It is in this dedication, Lord Jesus, I desire to live, in this I desire to die.
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