Prayer in Advent

Traditionally, Advent is a time for waiting, in view of the Last Things. As it happens, this year, it is also a time for facing what comes to us in the form of illness.

Please remember in your prayers Peter Lawrence, Heather Waldsax's Training Minister, who has suffered a small stroke, which has affected his speech and his writing - which is very hard for an evangelist! Please also pray for his wife Carole.

Melanie Groundsell discovered two weeks ago that there was a tumour in the area of the bowel for which she had been successfully treated for cancer more than two years ago; she has begun a course of chemotherapy today. This is hard news; please pray for her, and for her father.

This Advent, please also pray for:

• the family of Claire Sankey, a former student of STETS, who died earlier in the year
• Val Hards' husband, Richard, who has been involved in a quite serious accident in Ghana;
• John Kellagher, whose father died in the autumn;
• Hannah Knight, in the Academic Office, whose grandfather died recently, aged 100;
• the families of the two teenage boys linked with the Fordingbridge school (where Jo Naish teaches) who both died in their sleep this term.

'Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ'.

Philip