It’s half term, and we’ve launched brand new children’s resources at the Sanctuary’s centre, thanks to brilliant help from Ailsa Cummins and Jemma and Lawrence Basham. This morning, a group of our regular adult pray-ers used them together in worship. It was powerful to use such simple visual and kinaesthetic tools to help us pray…
We wrote prayers on shapes, listened to children sing profound truths, and stuck plasters on nations we prayed for where we know many children are living in unsafe conditions…
And we also used a special symbolic tool we have made…
This box has come to the Sanctuary’s centre courteousy of Created… we’ve simply added some words and some precious contents to help young people pray for children all around the world…
Inside God’s world there are…
7, 000, 000, 000 people!
Just like he loves you, God loves each one of them. He made each one to reflect a special and different part of him. Psalm 139 says he knows how many hairs are on each one of their heads. That’s a lot of hair!
How many people do you know?
Children are being invited to ‘make friends’ with one or more of the children in this box… taking them to their relevant country on our world map floor and praying for them, their families and their nation… here is Esta from Tanzania*…
We had a couple of grandfathers with us during this time of morning worship. One of them was particularly struck by the morning. He said:
‘With the birth of my grandchild last Sunday, who has a loving mother and father, a warm home, water and food available, my mind was focused on the fact that for two thirds of the baby’s born in the last twenty four hours – who are also beautiful and created in the image of God – the present and the future looks very different… and then the cycle begins away. But one day this cycle will end forever as our Father promises in Isaiah 11:8-9.”
This is the ultimate hope we cling to as we partner with God – in prayer and action – to bring more of his kingdom of hope and safety to children in desperate situations today and every day until that time.
* The children in our world box are taken from Unicef’s book Children like me and we have simply copied and laminated them, with their country outlines on the reverse…