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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Haydon Spenceley

Nina Simone

Good morning.

At the start of a new working week it is easy to feel that ‘it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good’ as the song famously performed by Nina Simone says and, if that’s how you feel as you get moving this morning then I am delighted for you. For others the opposite feeling can persist, almost like a fog that never seems to lift, and it can easily seem that everything is against us.

I’ve gone through a lot of my life as a disabled person being told that independently is the best way to live. I’ve been told that I need to work hard, to fight to prove myself. To be honest, as I’ve got older I’ve found that kind of narrative increasingly exhausting and dispiriting. It can settle in your mind, heart and soul and have a real impact. It also flies in the face somewhat of Jesus’s encouragement to ‘fear not, because I have overcome the world’. The world and all that it has to throw at us, as it had plenty to throw at Jesus, has been overcome.

If I trust and rest in the promise of his presence and peace today then it is likely that my need to prove myself, or to apologise for perceived failings which are not my fault will greatly diminish and I will be left with the kind of hope and life for which I was made.
Lord, thank you for freeing me to be joyfully obedient to your law of love today. I choose to trust you.

Amen