Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(Collect for the Day)

He sits astride the beams of heaven;
The clouds He numbers and arranges,
And he changes dust with their force.

And He laid the earth’s foundations,
Knows its height, its width, dimensions,
Holds them in His smallest grip.

And the stars! He was there when
First they sang their morning song.
He was there; He made them sing.

In the vast, wide, desert sands,
He commands the cloud, the fire,
Moves the gathered dust along,

Knows His moving desert flock,
Knows the years, the centuries
Of their cries of inner pain;

And He took to His eternal
Heart all cries, all weakness, death:
All to His immortal side;

All infirmities, all failure –
Taken as eternity
Terminated in our flesh;

And with arms that straddled heaven
And that held its beams together
Open now upon a tree,

Gathered in the scattered, dead ones,
Made them whole where they were broken,
In His body made them one.

Lord, shew me myself; nothing but “wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores,” and teach me to live by faith on Christ my all.
(From the journals of Henry Martyn, January 1803)

He gave himself –
That mass of sores
And deadweight heavy on his heart;
He dragged this weary weight around,
And, manacled, could sometimes not
Lift his hands or turn his heart;
And sometimes looked on brighter days
As if they were a foreign land;

He gave himself –
Though sometimes his
Mind was too disturbed within,
Stuck inside its own labyrinths
And winding, dusty corridors,
The knowledge of his dirt and sin,
And sometimes felt the word of life
As an arrow in his pride –

He gave himself
To other lands,
Learnt other scripts and other tongues
And gave them words and ways to read
The words of life; he let them see,
With words that were far beyond him –
Not of his tongue, nor from his mouth;
He gave them much more than himself.

He gave himself,
In all his shame,
And God made him burn brighter than
Those braver or those stronger flames,
The haughty or the proud who in
Their own assurance made no room
For the brightest, strongest flame
Which burned when he could no more give.

Because there are so many stories
Rattling through the winds of time,
So many heroes’ many legends,
Many tall tales, many lies;

Because so many hotly contest
What, how and who is the truth,
Because so many make their claims,
And so many yet will say

That here He is and this is He,
That He said this, gave this to me –
With all the grandeur of a legend
And all its substance too;

Let this account be orderly,
A catalogue of facts, arranged,
The truth put in a case that you,
Might know it and believe.

I am writing, dear brothers,
So that you may
Be established in Him
Whose truth you received.

I am writing to you
What I have been given,
So that you may
Hold firm in the truth.

Even now I
Wrestle with beasts
And am surrounded
By leopards and guards.

You are kept safe;
I am endangered.
I am condemned
But you have known mercy.

I write to you then,
That you may hold firm,
Living as one,
Held firm by the truth

I write that you may
Be all Christ-bearers,
A letter, signed, sealed,
Delivered, from Him.

So long as there’s breath –
And what breath have we that’s not His –
So long as we can stand and speak,
Though our faint tongues be silenced;

So long as we have light to give
(And we’ll light this day a candle);
So long as light is still alight;
So long as truth is still the truth;

So long as there is breath and then
Beyond the passing of our breath;
So long as life is still in us,
And longer, for He is our life;

So long as our two legs can stand;
So long as this wood holds us tall;
So long as flames can burn, we’ll burn
For He has said that He knows us;

So long as there is breath – O God,
My heart is faint beside their flame;
So long as there is grace, I too
May stand for that for which they stood.

Be still –
It is enough to sit
At His feet
(He is enough)
And see His scars
Where He was wounded
So that you, child,
Need not be.
It is enough,
Dear child, to let
His grace succour you.
Let Him be
Your everything
Who is enough
And is your all.

You brought me from the womb.
But in those days I swam in eternity
And plucked and grasped as I willed,
Owning all I saw and all
Beholden unto me.

You brought me from the womb, and yet
I neither knew nor took Your hand.
I built houses of hewn stone
And then sat before my empire.
All my days within my plan.

Yet You who brought me forth from my
Mother’s womb, You brought me low.
You pulled down my hewn-stone houses.
You set fire to my plans,
Gave me numbers for my days.

Now I take this scrap-heap house and
Count the stones and count the days and
From this broken altar, give faint praise
To You, who brought me from the womb,
Who taught me to number my days.

If a cut-down tree has hope then
I will find my hope in this:
The one who brought me from the womb
Is from eternity and yet He
Has my days within His plan.

Oh! my friends, whatever be the trials of you faith and of your patience, I sympathize with you; I desire that you may be upheld, that you may be strengthened, that you may find the grace of your Lord to be sufficient for you; and if we poor frail, feeble, unworthy mortals can feel as we do at seasons one for another, oh, what consolation is it to remember, that he who is infinite in mercy, infinite in love, and infinite in power also feels for us; we have a High Priest who is touched with the sense of our infirmities.
(Elizabeth Fry, from Sermons Preached by Members of the Society of Friends)

Kneeling before her Great High Priest,
Touched by infinite mercies,
She opened up arms that had received,

In her hands the keys to the cells,
On her lips the words of liberation,
In her heart transforming love.

How could she repay the Lord?
There was no price enough – only this:
Lips turned to praise, a life turned to give,

The gratitude of the debt-freed slave
Who would not turn to hate her brother,
Having known such grace.