Friday 17th April Message

Friday 17th April Message
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April 17, 2020
in Minister's Daily Message
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Dear Reader

Thank you for your continuing messages and phone calls etc. It is good to hear from you.
It’s just coming up for 6.00am and I have you and your loved ones in mind as I write my ‘thought for the day’. I am enjoying the challenge of choosing and sharing with you a different bible passage each day and it is heartening that we can all learn something together.
Later this morning I will be taking a funeral and be with a family I have never met. All the arrangements having been necessarily at a distance. The service itself will be very different. A bible passage I will use at the funeral will be from Ecclesiastes which tells us that there is a time and place for everything.
We have just been told by the Government that it is not yet the time for the restrictions we are all facing to be lifted, however, that time will come and we will all be able to return to something resembling normality. Each day that passes is a day closer.
All of us know something of the wide mix and range of emotions and feelings we experience in our lives and how difficult life can be. Each one of us has our own particular life issues to deal with and face, and for some everything, it seems, is a constant strain and struggle.
All over the world, there are families finding it extremely difficult having to cope with the trauma of not being able to be with their loved ones in their final days. The dignity and closure in the rite of passage being denied them in this current crisis. There is much hurt and sadness.
Not everyone’s experience is sad, however, and for some, there is the discovery of a spirit of inventiveness and challenge, necessity being the mother of invention. There will be a time for embracing and dancing and all the enjoyable expressions of life. We will all need, for the time being, to wait till the time is right for rejoicing.
For everything, there is a time and place.
Today I ask you to think/meditate on these things.
God bless you!

Jim

JBoag@churchofscotland.org.uk

ECCLESIASTES 3: 1-14

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him

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