Cinders

The readings last Sunday included the story of the call of Isaiah, when the angel takes a burning coal from the altar and touches Isaiah's lips with it. So we did something similar! At the end of a confession prayer, we invited people to come up to the communion table and take a piece of cinder toffee, from an impovised brazier made of a wok lid, and touch it to their lips (and eat it afterwards). It worked really well.

Actually one of my favourite parts of the whole exercise was that we worked out a way to make the coals glow too! I was just wondering whether there was a way to do this, perhaps by projecting something onto the coals, when I remembered that I had
some of those light-up ice cubes that you can freeze and put into people's drinks. They come in different colours, one of which is red. So we put three red cubes in with the coals, and it looked really quite impressive. Just shows you that it doesn't always have to be super complicated!

Our Broken World.

The other week I was doing intercessions at the family service in Acomb, and I wanted to do the prayer activity when we pass around the globe while a piece of music is playing, and people say the name of a country or place that they see on it. There were going to be about 60 people at the service, so I thought it would be a good idea to use two globes really. So I brought two inflatable globes with me.

Anyway, one of the globes refused to blow up. I spent about 15 minutes on it before I realised that the reason it wasn't blowing up was because it had a rip in the side. I almost threw it away and decided to just use the other globe, when I realised that actually I could use the "broken" globe as well.

So I brought both globes with me, explaining that the whole globe was the way God wanted it to be, and the "broken" globe
was the way it is at the moment. So we passed bother globes around and rounded up the prayers by offering God our "broken" world (hold up the broken one) and asking Christ to make it whole (hold up the whole one).