From the Chaplains

In the midst of days crammed with making the kids’ school lunches, doing the washing (help! my dryer is broken!), being an unpaid Uber driver and endlessly cleaning up the kitchen, I have been absolutely relishing the blessing it is to stop, pause, pray and breathe in our chapel each week.

What a privilege – to have built-in to my job the almost daily opportunity to be in such a beautiful space, to meditate and reflect on the Word of God and on the rich blessing it is to work with and walk alongside young people.

Last Sunday morning Reverend Bent and myself, Head of Boarding Carolyn Burgess, the Boarders and Boarding staff met together in the chapel for a service with the Pymble-Gordon Uniting Church congregation and Reverend Karen Mitchell-Lambert. Extra-special guests were the family of an ex-student, Victoria Judge, whose baby boy Teddy was baptised.

I thought I would share with you today an excerpt of the prayer of praise and confession from that service. The prayer is a meditation on the beautiful three-light window at the front of the chapel, which was designed by David Saunders and dedicated in 1980 to commemorate Jeanette Buckham’s (former Principal of Pymble) twenty-five years of service to education.

The window is titled ‘The Getting of Wisdom’. I have included some panels from the window here.

Loving God, we humbly come before you in prayer.

We know that while we are imperfect, You are perfect.

We know that while our lives are short, you are eternal, and eternally good.

We praise and thank you that even though you are a holy God,

you are also merciful and kind; slow to anger and quick to love.

Loving God, You carefully knitted us together in our mothers’ wombs.

You know and have counted every hair on our heads.

We thank you that while You did not need us, because You are whole, complete and perfect, You created us out of love, to be in a relationship with You.

But we know that the green serpent of sin separates us from You, and from each other, if we let it.

You never leave us and You hold us close.

We confess that we do not always live in the way that Jesus taught us to.

Help us to hold each other, and You, close.

Loving God, we confess that all too often in many subtle ways we exclude those who aren’t like us, those we aren’t comfortable around we disapprove of,

those we think responsible for their own misfortune we condemn –

those whose sins are different from our own.

Forgive us.

Loving God, give us the wisdom this day and every day to acknowledge that

You are the holy, living God,

who reigns over all the heavens and the earth,

forever and ever,

Amen.

Pymble Prayer Meeting

All Pymble parents and carers are warmly invited to a prayer meeting with the College Chaplains:

Date: Wednesday 23 August

Time: 7.45am to 8.00am in the Chapel

Refreshments will be provided.

Please contact Fiona van Horen with any questions vanhorencf@bigpond.com

International Peace Day – Interfaith Prayer Service at Knox Grammar School

---

Edwina O’Brien

Assistant Chaplain