Living as Christians☀️🙏🏻

One year ago today ‘Blanketiers’, our WhatsApp group was born. Countless asylum seekers in our town, we could share with them. No files, no policy. No office, no queues. Needs met as they would emerge.

We began with four members. Now we are eighteen! Amazing awesome adventure. Attics emptied!

In the beginning folk were suspicious. I remember two young girls refusing everything we offered them. They told us later that they were beyond shocked to be offered stuff for nothing and were scared of what they might be letting themselves in for. 

Today, both of them received two fine winter coats with smiles of gratitude. As always we remind them that God owns all, ‘Blankatiers’, merely His stewards. (Someone kindly told me one time that ‘to be eternally grateful to any one person is a terrible place to be’. I share those wise words all the time).

God-incidence! Today’s Gospel reading right on target: ‘So with you: when you have done all you have been told to do, say; We are merely servants; we have done no more than our duty’. (Luke 17:10)

Why ‘Blanketiers’? In the beginning many folk’s greatest need was a warm blanket. Ireland colder by far than Africa! Mary came up with the name and we are so happy with it. Blankets needed and blankets bringing folk comfort too. 

In turn, our African friends pray for us all the time. Unashamedly they love God and whether folk realise it or not, our visitors shine a bright light in this post-Christian land of ours.

‘With prayer one can go on cheerfully and even happily, while without prayer, how grim is the journey. Prayer is as necessary to life as breathing. It is drink and food’. (Dorothy Day).

I love Dorothy Day. She is the inspiration behind what we do and how we do it! Her beautiful book ‘The Reckless Way of Love’, is forever within my reach. No home should be without one!!

Woke up this morning with these beautiful words on my lips: ‘No award for anything I do. All is hidden in You’. 

‘Sometimes in thinking and wondering at God’s goodness to me, I have thought that it was because I gave away an onion. Because I sincerely loved His poor, He taught me to know Him. When I think of the little I ever did, I am filled with Hope and love for all those others devoted to the cause of social justice’. (‘Reckless way of Love’ Dorothy Day)

‘There is no point dwelling on the past excessively. My mother used to warn us against that; she’d say, “doting on what’s gone is wasting precious time”. It’s stealing time, really, from the present and from the future. If you believe in the mission of Jesus Christ, then you’re bound to try to let go of your past, in the sense that you are entitled to His forgiveness. To keep regretting what was, is to deny God’s Grace’. (Reckless way of Love’ Dorothy Day)

I am so glad and grateful to my dear friend Barbara for gifting me this book. Divine inspiration without a doubt! Kindred spirits!

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