From the Chaplains
Prayer Meeting with Chaplains, Staff and Parents
The Pymble Parents’ Prayer Group warmly invites Pymble parents of all faiths, backgrounds and traditions to join the Chaplains and available staff members in a time of prayer for our College community.
Date: Tuesday 19 March
Time: 7.45am to 8.30am
Venue: War Memorial Chapel, Pymble Ladies’ College
RSVP: Please email Fiona van Horen at vanhorencf@bigpond.com to confirm your attendance.
The Easter Experience at Gordon Uniting Church
The Pymble-Gordon, Wahroonga and Turramurra Uniting Churches warmly invites Pymble staff, students and parents to come along to an interactive, reflective immersion called ‘The Easter Experience’.
The Easter Experience will run across four days, with local primary school students, including Year 4 Pymble students, coming to visit.
Members of the public are also welcome to come to the Gordon Church (8 Cecil St, Gordon, cnr Pacific Hwy) at the following times to be immersed in the first century world.
The installations, rooms and experiences are appropriate for all ages, interactive and designed to help us look inward and reflect on the cosmic significance of Jesus’ death and Resurrection as we near the end of Lent and approach the holy times of Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Resurrection Sunday. See you there! 😊
A time to fast,
a time to pray,
a time to look inward
and draw on God-given courage and resilience.
As we enter the holy month of Ramadan, and continue in the season of Lent, nearing the holy times of Passover and Easter, I invite you to look inward, to pray and reflect, and to draw on the courage and resilience that helps us to live our lives “to the full”.
This week in our chapel services, I have been telling the students the story of the unstoppable woman who stopped Jesus.
This is the story of an incredibly courageous and resilient woman who had immense faith.
This unnamed woman, we are told in the gospels of Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34 and Luke 8:45-48, had been suffering for 12 years with ongoing bleeding.
This is why she is sometimes known as “the woman with an issue of blood”.
She had knocked on every doctor’s door and tried every treatment, but nothing had helped.
There seemed to be no possible end to her suffering.
She was socially isolated, possibly shunned, and from the Ancient Near Eastern perspective, seen as ‘unclean’.
However, none of this stopped her search for a cure. She knew that healing was possible and that her life should not have to continue in this limited, unfulfilling way.
As I told the students in chapel this week, this woman had heard that Jesus of Nazareth was in the area. He was traveling through, bringing with him a message of peace, forgiveness and compassion, especially for the poor, the meek and the suffering.
Not only that – he had been healing people wherever he went.
This woman had such faith, and resilience, and courage, that she had a plan. It was a very simple but powerful plan.
“If I just touch his clothes”, she thought to herself, “I will be healed”.
So the woman goes out into public, where she should not rightly be.
She follows the crowd who is following this man Jesus, whom she is sure will be able to heal her – even with just a touch of his cloak.
Driven by something that is deep inside her, some urge to keep going and not settle for the life that she has been living, she pushes through the crowd of men, women and children who are crowding around Jesus.
Finally, she manages to get close enough.
She reaches out her hand, and touches the very edge of his cloak.
At that moment, the writer of Mark tells us;
“Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.”
And Jesus stops.
The text tells us that Jesus realised that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
Then the woman, knowing that she is healed, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
Her whole, shameful, messy, lonely story.
Jesus said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
What a beautiful moment – the unstoppable woman who stops Jesus.
As we journey together as a community towards Easter, into Ramadan, towards Passover, into Maha Shivrati on March 8, and indeed as we acknowledge International Women’s Day this week, let us remember the unstoppable woman who stopped Jesus.
My prayer for each of our students, and indeed for each of us, is that we will listen to that voice of God inside us, that is urging you to grow, to continue to transform, to learn, to push on, to not give up, to seek healing.
And that we will reach out to those around us who can offer hope, support, healing and love.
Take courage from the unstoppable woman, and know that God, too, will always stop for you – especially in the hard times.
Amen.
Edwina O’Brien
Assistant College Chaplain