Prayer for the Day

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Prayer for the Day: 15/02/2020

15/02/2020

BBC Radio 4 - Prayer for the Day, 15/02/2020

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with writer Catherine Fox

Good morning.  I grew up in a home with no television.  The lasting legacy of that is my patchy knowledge of popular culture.  But it was also a chapel-going home, which means I know hymns the way most people know pop music.  

I carry my weird playlist around with me everywhere.  A hymn for every occasion.  Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?  (Rainy motorway journey).  Yield not to temptation! (Gazing at the carrot cake a colleague has brought into the office).  You’d think I’d have worn my hymns out by now; but like a pocket full of pebbles, the words shine with use, rather than getting duller.

When I’m in the dark, and everything around me seems to be changing too rapidly, I tune into my inner soundtrack.  In heavenly love abiding, no change my heart can fear.  

I hung onto that particular hymn last month on my morning commute.  We know spring will come, but I was leaving home in the dark, and getting home in the dark...  My little train trundled its way across the Peaks.  I was feeling miserable and stressed.  And safe is such confiding, for nothing changes here.

We stopped at a station in the pitch dark.  The doors opened, and a burst of robin song came in.  And in one of those glorious moments of serendipity, I realised where we were: Hope.  Hope, in Derbyshire, your next station stop.

It was still dark, but there was a robin singing, and I knew dawn was coming.  

The storm may roar without me, my heart may low be laid. 

But God is round about me, and can I be afraid? Amen.

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