We're conscious, here at The Good Book Company, of our need for prayer. We want to be working in God's strength - for God's glory - in God's Kingdom not just pottering about doing what we think is good and right. If you could remembers us in prayer, that would be so much appreciated. To that end, this Wednesday we're continuing to pop up some prayer requests - asking you to pray for us department by department. This week, customer services:
The Customer Services department looks after the end of the publishing process: getting books into people's hands. We are a team of 5 people in the UK (Andy, Robin, Neil, Bex and Dex) and we are the guys and girls who answer the phone when customers call with queries. We also pick and pack all the orders that are generated from phone, email and web sales.
Please pray:
We want to serve our customers in the best way possible. Pray that we would continue to do so, and to go the extra mile for our customers' needs.
As we follow the patterns and rhythms of an academic year, the start of September will be a busy time. Pray that the team would be able to manage the extra workload, and continue to be of excellent service to the church.
That we would be continually reminded that we are serving for the Kingdom. Often we don't see or hear what happens when the resources are delivered. Pray that we would trust in God, and what he's doing through the resources we send out.
I’ve got a friend who’s been a Christian for a while. She knows her Bible reasonably well. She can look back on some enthusiastic years. But now things have changed. She doesn’t look forward to church any more. Why? She’s been hurt by someone in the congregation. And she’s disillusioned by some of the policies and practises that are going on. The pain and frustration seems to have sapped every ounce of energy she used to have.
Sound familiar? It probably does. There are plenty of Christians up and down the land who struggle. There are plenty of people who can look back over a period of years and see the gradual waning of their enthusiasm. Maybe that can even be said of you?... continue reading
When Jonah walked the streets of Nineveh proclaiming the God of the Bible, the people's hearts were moved. Sackcloth and ashes were worn, lives turned round in repentance and God poured out his mercy.
Since then? Sometimes the church has thrived. Sometimes it has struggled. Today it is being systematically wiped out.
Few people can have been unmoved by the news in recent times. Terrified children, weeping mothers, men slaughtered and tied to crosses ... families fleeing, starving, dying for no other reason than they are followers of Christ (or are members of another minority group considered worthy of extermination by IS - it is right to remember them too).
Feelings of shock, disbelief and frustration at our inability to help can flood our minds. It seems impossible to grasp the enormity of the situation unfolding so far from our homes. We might change our photo on Facebook to show solidarity (and why not, it helps to start conversations) but surely there has to be more we can do ...... continue reading
God doesn’t play fair.
Much to my parents’ concern, I hadn’t been to church for a long time. And yet here I was, in my first term at university, sliding into a pew at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.
This, I can promise you, was not the result of any pious yearning on my part. Rather, it was because the congregation counted among its number a particularly lovely second-year student of modern languages.
Where earnest parental pleading had failed, she had proved to be rather more convincing.... continue reading
We're conscious, here at The Good Book Company, of our need for prayer. We want to be working in God's strength - for God's glory - in God's Kingdom not just pottering about doing what we think is good and right. If you could remembers us in prayer, that would be so much appreciated. To that end, this Wednesday we're continuing to pop up some prayer requests - asking you to pray for us department by department. This week, design:
The design department oversees all things visual here at The Good Book Company. This include the development of covers and internal layouts for our books and resources, typesetting, illustration, advertising, and working with freelance illustrators and designers on larger projects.
It's a busy time at the moment, with several large projects underway.... continue reading
“You’re 9 years old,” I say to my younger self. “What do you have to be sad about?”
The charcoal portrait, sketched in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur, now hangs in my father’s front room. And I look heroically gloomy. Presumably the artist did his best to capture the merriment of a family vacation, but the face is so sodden with regret it near drags the paper from its frame.
This was no isolated moment of childhood melancholy. "Cheer up," complete strangers would routinely say to me, "it might never happen." ("Too late," I would say under my breath, "it already has.")
I suppose some of us tend that way naturally. We’re always trying to swim back upstream to the moment just before we think it all went wrong. Our minds, sadly, aren’t well-behaved libraries shelved with orderly memoirs. They’re gothic charnel houses piled high with gaudy carousels, furiously spinning out past moments, past conversations, past relationships. What if I had done things differently? What if I had said something else? What if I had been someone else? The linoleum is worn through with pacing. We rehearse and re-rehearse dialogue as if we’re preparing for opening night on Broadway, except there is no play, these conversations ended long ago, and many of the people who shared them with us are long gone. Regret, the barbed wire hula-hoop, loping heavily around the brow, lacerating the skull with each revolve. Regret, the malevolent halo.
“What’s done is done.” “That tree has fallen.” “Why regret things you can’t change?”
Miserable comforters all. They may as well tell someone to ignore an itch they can’t scratch. The unreachability is what makes it so impossible to disregard.... continue reading
We're conscious, here at The Good Book Company, of our need for prayer. We want to be working in God's strength - for God's glory - in God's Kingdom not just pottering about doing what we think is good and right. If you could remembers us in prayer, that would be so much appreciated. To that end, over the next few Wednesdays, we'll be popping up some prayer requests - asking you to pray for us department by department. This week, print and logistics:
We're a department which goes unnoticed if we're doing our job. We look after getting a finished product from the editorial department into the right place at the right time, looking right! We liaise with printers, shippers, couriers and warehouses. We print paperbacks, hardbacks, spiral bound, Christmas cards, stickers, display boxes, booklets, tracts, DVDs and CDs. We maintain 7 warehouses around the world and dispatched parcels to over 100 different countries in the last year.
We'd value prayer for:
Thank you!
An interestingly named bakery in Tooting, South London. Photo Tim Thornborough
"The weather was really hot on holiday - but it was a mixed blessing, because we all got sunburnt."
"Nuclear power is a mixed blessing - it gives us electricity but also weapons with terrible destructive power."
"Children are a mixed blessing - of course they bring us incredible joy and happiness - but the sleepless nights, the expense, the worry..."
I wonder if you've ever used this phrase in conversation? Many of us have.
We might also be tempted to think that being a Christian is a mixed blessing. The "upside" is enormous after all - forgiveness, eternal life, a new family, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the sure rock of the Bible as our guide in life, joy... I could go on.
But with it comes a whole heap of other stuff that is less pleasant. Misunderstanding, persecution, a task in life that seems impossible, the inner struggle against sin and temptation. None of these things are minor - many of them deeply painful, and last our whole lives.
So if someone said to us: "being a a Christian is a mixed blessing", we might be tempted to nod in agreement - until we looked at our Bibles.... continue reading
They're going on now… and will throughout the summer. You may well know people you can pray these things for. If you don't, just pick a camp (Ventures is one place to find one) and pray these things for the people on it!
This post was originally posted on 24th July 2012.
Half way down a long stretch of the A3, on my way to work last month, the smoke started pouring out of the car radio. The only time this had happened to me before the car was a blazing wreck within 5 minutes, so my heart raced a little as I looked for somewhere to pull over. But this time, with a gentle "POP" the radio went silent, the smoke stopped, and everything seemed fine.
I'm a bit of a news junkie, so the Today programme is my usual companion on the morning drive to work. It has become part of my morning ritual. Thought for the day; the headlines; the ten past eight interview have all filled my mind with thoughts on the commute. But now there is silence. An enforced "news fast".
And like the other kind of fasting, it has taken me through some stages. First of all irritation (at the cost of replacing the radio). Then hunger: "I wonder what's happening?" Then wondering what to do with my head in the silence. And then working out that this is a great opportunity to use the time proactively. Suddenly, my journey to work has become an opportunity to pray. And I've developed an unusual prayer list.
I'm very thankful that the radio broke - and I'm in no hurry to fix it.
