What Matters

The Fifth Act

Wrapping up our Faith @ Work series, in this message I explore how it is possible for the impact of our work here and now to echo into eternity. In Christ, our labour is not in vain. Listen in here: The Fifth Act Or you can read the manuscript here:  Download Fifth Act

Faith @ Work: Three Questions

Last Sunday I had the privilege of preaching at our Pac Pines campus. In this message I reflected on three critical questions that will shape our experience of faith in the workplace: What is your posture? What is your aroma? What is your decision? You can downlad/listen to the podcast here: Three Questions

Thistles and Thorns: Work as Blessing and Curse

In this first message of our Faith @ Work series, I explore how work is both a blessing and a curse, as well as three other theological principles that should guide our everyday work lives. You can listen in here: Thistles and Thorns Or you can read the manuscript here:  Download Theology of Work Manuscript

A Prayer for Healthcare Professionals

Tash Yates, a doctor who attends Newlife, wrote and offered this prayer for healthcare professionals as part of our Faith @ Work series at Newlife.  The prayer is structured around the prayer Jesus taught us to pray:

Our Father in Heaven, Almighty and all caring God,

Lord Jesus, the Great Healer and Physician, the Wounded Healer who knows suffering.

Holy Spirit – our Counselor, teacher, strength and power.

May your Kingdom come, may your Will be done.

We pray for those who work in healthcare professions; those who are here this morning, and those who are currently at work, because disease affects people on weekends too.

Please give us each day whatever resources we need to mediate healing and hope to the patients you bring us.

Help us to ask the right questions, and to truly listen to the answers we are given. 

Use our hands, our touch, our skills. Help us discern whether our patients need medications, investigations, interventions, or advice.

As you are the Great communicator, teach us to communicate with excellence.

Give us a healthy curiosity that pushes us to continually learn and grow in our knowledge and understanding of disease, as we seek to help our patients attain wellness, wholeness, and healing.

Please give us friends, family and a church community to support us in our work, and who will help us to keep work in perspective.

Forgive us for the times (sometimes many times a day) where we forget that You are the one at work in our patients’ lives, and we are your assistants. We dress the wounds, but you do the healing.

Forgive us for the times where we find our primary identities in our roles as healthcare professionals, rather than in You.

Forgive us for the times when fatigue, frustration, and the pressures of the work affect the way we relate to others – when we become impatient, unkind, cynical.

Forgive us for when we forget that your very image is in every person you bring into our sphere of influence at work: even the demanding patient, the ungrateful relative, the annoying colleague, the unreasonable boss.

Please help us to forgive others as you have forgiven us.

Lord we ask that you protect us from the temptations that our work can offer us. The temptation to overwork , to think we are indispensable, to believe people when they try to give us glory for our successes.

The temptation to hide our failures, to pretend to ourselves and others that we are infallible.

The temptation to be working to please others rather than You.

The temptation to chase higher -paying jobs, to look for ways of earning money rather than ways of serving you through our work.

The temptation to treat others in our team according to their roles and positions, rather than treating everyone with equal respect and dignity.

The temptation to forget that we too are broken and need Your healing.

Please help us to face ethical dilemmas with courage and wisdom, to bring salt and light into every encounter, to be Christlike in all our dealings. We pray for our colleagues who do not know You, that we would lead such compelling lives that they would want to.

We ask that those in positions of influence, particularly in management and politics, would make wise and creative decisions about how the healthcare system is run. May the dignity and preciousness of each human being be more important to them than financial statements and political point scoring.

In the end we acknowledge that all healing comes from you, that despite our best efforts, there is still ultimately a 100% mortality rate for every person we care for. And so we pray that while people are under our care that you would be glorified, in ways that are meaningful to each and every patient.

We thank you for the privilege of working alongside You – the Great Physician and Healer, Wonderful Counselor, Sustainer of Life. Amen

 

A Prayer for Mothers

Through our Faith @ Work series we are taking the opporunity each week to pray for a part of our community who exercise their God-given gifts of creativity in a particular vocation.  This week we prayed for mothers, led by one of our Newlife mums, Liz Giovas, who wrote this prayer:

A Prayer For Mothers

Father God

Thank you for the gift of mothers. For the mothers who bore us, the mothers who raised us, the women who have acted as our mothers and for the women who long to be mothers but for whom that hasn’t been possible.

These women have performed physical, emotional, mental and spiritual tasks that we will never realize the true extent of.

Today, as a church, as a people together, we pray for mothers in all circumstances.

Married mothers, single mothers, mothers of ten right down to mothers of one, first time brand new struggling mothers and mothers with decades of experience, mothers who stay at home and mothers juggling children and a career.

We ask you to be near.

Father God,

Protect these women.

As a mother we ask you to guard our hearts when the mother guilt sets in, keep us healthy and safe as we carry out our daily tasks, make us strong enough to correct our children appropriately and keep us brave enough to parent in a way that glorifies you.

Jesus,

Befriend these women.

Help us know your constant presence, keep our marriages strong that we may feel supported, provide good, true, friends on the road and whether they’re peers, mentors, associates or anyone else, use them to be constant encouragement in the times mothers need it most.

Holy Spirit,

Comfort these women.

Be the deep peace when the tears for our children flow, be our strength in the night when the minutes seem like hours and please be our wisdom when we have absolutely no idea what to do.

God we ask you these things that we might understand how close you are. For no matter how much we long for human understanding, it is only you who truly understands.

You alone understand the depth of our quandaries,

You alone understand the width of our love for our children and

You alone understand the extreme joy that parenting can bring.

Help us know the closeness of you that we may walk with you, everyday. Talk with you everyday. Ask you to guide us everyday. For in living like this…the “With God” life, mothering will have deeper peace, greater understanding and fuller, wider, far greater joy, than anything we can ever dream up on our own.

Amen.