Formed by God

I'm obviously breaking my #silentsunday agreement but that's just the sort of loose canon I am :)

Yesterday LLMs in Oxford Diocese spent a day together in fellowship for prayer, reflection, sharing on our future, lunch and saying goodbye to our much missed LLM Advisor. It was an emotional day but immensely positive and healing for me to see how passionate us called lay people are to God's ministry.

Sheila led us through the morning wonderfully, as always, and the part that struck me most was about how we are each formed by God very specifically. She showed us how if you take a ball of clay in the palm of your hands and mould it, it becomes stone shaped. The result is different every time depending on the suze and density of the clay and the pressure and heat of the hands. But the result is always a perfect, stable, individual stone shape.

As a civil engineer I studied geology and was intrigued and beguiled by the formation of pebbles; yesterday took me back to that and put myself into the place of the pebble - perfect, always changing to fit and be as required. Of course civil engineers are also taught how to build - pretty important that. We are taught about the importance of uniform shapes and known densities and strengths and bending moments and various forces (wow, that takes me back). However we are also reminded about the ancient techniques of arch construction and even dry stone walling. A dry stone wall requires stones of all sizes that are put together, just so, to fit perfectly in a strong formation.



Sheila spoke of this; how we as LLMs are the various necessary stones in a dry wall, that it's together that we are strong and supportive and load bearing. How powerful a thought. And it's as true for families and communities and churches. It's fantastic because God formed us each individually, perfectly; knowing that together we would be even stronger.

Thank you Sheila for this message, thankyou for your inspiration; thankyou for reminding me that I am formed by God, in the palm of his hands, just as I am. The stone you made, that I selected, will forever be part of my prayer basket now.