I've been noticing this difference in the angle of the Sun in daily life recently, too, and that sunrise and sunset times are now noticeably different, too. It's nearly a month since Winter Solstice, the Sun is higher in the sky, and the Sun rises earlier and sets later.
On Saturday, in Area Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business, we stopped at around ten past four to admire the spectacular sunset out the southwest-facing windows.
And on Sunday, in Sun-drenched Meeting for Worship, the original gospel version of Charlie Murphy's "Light is Returning" kept running through my head:
After some more silent worship (both inner and outer), Sally Rogers' "Circle of the Sun" came to me and stayed for a while:
...perhaps because I've been thinking and writing quite a bit lately on the circle of life and community, and some of my worship was centered on both community and isolation, there in the Sun-drenched Meetingroom.
There was some vocal ministry that spoke to me deeply; it sprang from from Advices and Queries 18:
How can we make the meeting a community in which each person is accepted and nurtured, and strangers are welcome? Seek to know one another in the things which are eternal, bear the burden of each other's failings and pray for one another. As we enter with tender sympathy into the joys and sorrows of each other's lives, ready to give help and to receive it, our meeting can be a channel for God's love and forgiveness.
I don't know if the vocal minister would have considered their ministry to be about diversity or individual differences within the Meeting community, but it's one of the ways their ministry spoke to me, resonated with me, and left me with more to worship about and think about. All good things.
Two other Friends gave vocal ministry about the importance of community during times of hardship -- again, speaking to me very deeply.
Most of Sunday's vocal ministry did me much good.
(I could even tell at the time!)
Blessed be.
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