Hear my prayer, O LORD; listen to my plea!
Answer me because You are faithful and righteous.
My enemy has chased me. He has knocked me to the ground
and forces me to live in darkness like those in the grave.
Let me hear of Your unfailing love each morning, for I am trusting You.
Show me where to walk, for I give myself to You.
Rescue me from my enemies, LORD; I run to You to hide me.
In Your unfailing love, silence all my enemies and destroy all my foes,
for I am Your servant.
(Psalm 143:1, 3, 8, 9, 12)

This psalm of David’s carries a familiar theme: crying out in anguish, praising the LORD, calling on Him for help.

After reading this psalm, I pondered it for a while, then formed my own prayer based on David’s. “Please guide me in Your ways, LORD, and destroy my enemies.” Even as I said these words, though, this last bit caught in my throat: “destroy my enemies” David had said it, right there in the last verse of the psalm: “Destroy all my foes.” He was begging the LORD, as I then was, to take the hells away. ….But did I really want Him to destroy them?

I pondered this a bit longer: these hells that I wanted the LORD to destroy, who were they? They were people, too. I pictured some dirty, scary, evil-looking beings like what I might’ve seen in an illustration somewhere. These were people, though, who’d made poor choices and ended up in hell. Nevertheless, they were part of His creation. And if they were part of His creation, and He doesn’t create anything inherently bad, He only creates what He loves – that is to say, He loves everything that He creates,….. then, by definition, He loves these evil spirits, too. I’d known that, theoretically – “The LORD loves everyone.” It had been a bit of a platitude up to that point, though, because in that moment it dawned on me how He loves everyone. Equally. He doesn’t just like some, love some others, and kinda not really like others much at all, and He doesn’t only like us when we’re behaving well: He loves us ALL, each and every one of us, 100%, all the time, passionately, unconditionally. WOAH.

Since mid-2019, New Churchwomen in Australia have taken to gathering for women’s weekends twice a year, in person when feasible and virtually when not. This is adapted from a session I presented at our April ‘22 weekend, just as applicable to this audience as to that.

When I think about our women’s weekends, I think about our group of ladies coming together, from various corners of the country (or world!), from various generations and various walks of life, and I think about the bonds we form, a sort of sisterhood, despite the lack of any blood ties.

Thinking about sisters in the Word, not many sister-sister relations come to mind. There are a number of sisters of men mentioned – Moses and Aaron’s sister Miriam, Absalom & Amnon’s sister Tamar, Laban’s sister Rebekah (Isaac’s wife) and King Ahaziah’s sister Jehosheba are the prominent ones. The only two sister-sister relationships that I thought of are Mary & Martha, Lazarus’ sisters, and Rachel & Leah, Jacob’s wives.

Mary & Martha are most well known for their interaction with Jesus when He visited them in their home: Martha spent time getting things ready for the Lord, while Mary didn’t seem to do anything except sit down at the Lord’s feet and listen to Him. Martha complained and Jesus chided her, saying that what Mary was doing was very important and that she must be left alone to do it. (Luke 10 / John 12)

“Give a hoot – don’t pollute!” You may recognise this as the cry of Woodsy the Owl in public service announcements for the U.S. Forest Service in the 1970s. Woodsy had a great point: don’t litter! Don’t be callous! Take care of the environment around you! This article isn’t an environmentalist plea, however; at least, mostly not. It goes deeper than that, and feels like a good way to start off a new year.

In a discussion with friends after church a while back, it occurred to me that Woodsy’s is a great all-around motto. “Give a hoot, don’t pollute __” – you can fill in the blank with just about anything, and it works. Don’t pollute your physical environment with litter or garbage. Don’t pollute your head-space with selfish or lustful thoughts. Don’t pollute your relationships with accusations or anger. Don’t pollute the air waves around you with foul or hurtful language. Don’t pollute any environment with any kind of garbage.

To think of it another way, ‘put the needs of others before your selfish wants’. The Heavenly Doctrines offer valuable spiritual perspective on this concept. ‘Pollution’, in the Writings, is held in contrast to ‘purification’ and is used in reference to a person’s regeneration – which is useful but doesn’t really address our effecting of pollution. If we consider that not polluting implies being kind and not selfish, we might find more to substantiate this notion:

Last year Jenn shared with you an article about Rebekah which had been presented at one of her Australian New Church Women’s Weekends. This November, in preparation for Christmas, they looked at Mary, Jesus’ mother. Below is a condensation of what was presented; it’s still long, but hopefully informative and enjoyable. It might be helpful to read the gospels to familiarise yourself with the different parts of the story as it is presented in the Bible. 

Mary is a well-known character from the Bible, because she was the earthly mother of our Lord, Jesus Christ – the cornerstone of our entire religion. Although she’s referred to earlier, in the prophecies about the virgin birth, she is named for the first time in the genealogy of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew where we read that “Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Messiah”. All we really learn about Mary from the Bible pertains to the conception and life of Jesus, in which she is mostly on the periphery – except for in the Annunciation, when the angel tells her and she accepts that she will bear a son. Little known to people in the New Church, however, there are books that deal more with the pre-Jesus Mary and tell more about her life during His, and afterward. These are the apocrypha, biblical books received by the early church as part of the Greek version of the Old Testament, but which were not included in the Hebrew Bible that we use. They are not considered divinely inspired but are regarded by some as worthy of study by the faithful as ‘useful for instruction’ – although by others as ‘quite unreliable, sometimes childish and fantastic’.

In these writings we learn about Mary’s parents and her own immaculate conception (meaning that she was conceived in the usual way but without any sin whatsoever; in fact, many believe that she was perpetually a virgin and completely without sin, throughout her life), about the fourteen steps she took at the age of only six months, her presentation at the temple as a young girl, her betrothal to Joseph as a young woman, additional details about the Annunciation and the birth of Jesus in a cave (at which midwives confirmed her virginity), and intriguing particulars about her reactions to each of these extraordinary events in her life – plus more, about her years after Jesus’ death and her assumption into heaven.