May
Monday 18th May 2020
Good morning everybody! Whilst thinking about the worship theme of Trust today, there is one story from the Bible that I felt this theme really applied to that we all know really well. I am going to give you some clues to see if you can guess what the story is;
Did you guess it?- It's a story we know so well. Can you retell it to someone using the pictures to help you?
Why is this story strongly linked to trust? If you were Noah do you think you would have been so trusting in God? What made Noah so trusting in God? At which other parts of the story did Noah also show trust?
Monday 11th May 2020
Can you remember what this half term's worship is? Watch the following clip from a well known Pixar film called; Finding Nemo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oQ628Seb9w
Marlin is a clownfish who is afraid of the ocean due to a previous terrible experience. Then, his son, Nemo, is taken by divers and Marlin sets off on a mission to find his son and bring him home.
On his journey, Marlin meets Dory, a blue tang with short-term memory loss. Dory tags along, much to Marlin’s dismay, and they form an unlikely friendship.
Dory has little fear and Marlin, who is full of fear, struggles to accept what she says. There are several times when Marlin fails to trust Dory, even though, ultimately, she is right.
In one instance, Dory has been told by a shoal of fish to swim along a trench, not over it, so she asks Marlin to trust her because that’s what friends do. However, the route along the trench looks dark and frightening, so Marlin is reluctant to go that way. Due to his fear, he convinces Dory to swim over the top. They end up in a jellyfish bloom – a huge mass of jellyfish – and Dory very nearly loses her life. She is left with scars from the encounter.
Later, when Dory asks Marlin to trust her again, he starts to object, but sees the scars left from the jellyfish and realizes that he has to trust her.
-Why is it so difficult for some people to trust others?
-Why is it important for us to trust people?
We need to earn other people’s trust. If we let them down repeatedly, they will lose trust in us. For example, if our parents trust us to be where we tell them and then they find out that we are not telling the truth, they will be more reluctant to trust us next time.
Time for reflection
Mostly, we instinctively know those we can trust and those we can’t, but sometimes, our trust is misplaced. Someone may have a different understanding of what trust is, and when their understanding and ours don’t match up, trust can break down.
To trust someone and then be betrayed is very hurtful. Love songs are full of betrayals and relationship breakdowns because, when a betrayal happens, it is often a loss of trust that leads to the relationship ending.
In All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare wrote, ‘Love all, trust a few.’ Many put their trust in God. Indeed, billions of people do so every day and this has been so for thousands of years.
So, who will we put our trust in today? How will we know when we can trust someone? The point is that we won’t really know – we have to take that leap of faith and trust that someone will take care of us and respect us enough not to betray the trust that we have placed in them.
If we know that we haven’t been as trustworthy as we expect others to be, perhaps that will cause us to stop and wonder whether we would like it if someone betrayed our trust in the same way.
Let’s remember that all of our relationships work on trust – both being trustworthy ourselves and trusting others and that trust is fragile. We have to work hard to gain it, but we have to work even harder to build it again after a betrayal.
Prayer
Dear Lord,
May we be as trustworthy towards others as we would like them to be towards us.
Amen.
Monday 4th May 2020
Today's worship focusses on the trust we have in ourselves. Sometimes we have to have the courage (one of our Christian values!) and trust in ourselves. This might be something like a decision we have to make, trust in our abilities that we can achieve something or trust in ourselves to give something a try/come out of our comfort zone.
Sometimes this can be referred to as having faith in ourselves.
What enables us to have this trust in ourselves? Can you think of a time when you have had to have this trust in yourself?
If You Have Faith Like a Mustard Seed. . .
The mustard seed is the smallest seed but when it is planted a tree still grows. Watch this clip about being like a mustard seed and trusting/having faith in yourself.