Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 6th July 2025

Dear Friends,

We cannot help feeling anxious about what is happening in the world, but it feels very important to me to find ways to walk “as children of the Light” (QFP 4.25), when everything seems so dark.

I came across this quotation from Barack Obama which inspires me:

“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort.”

I found it very moving the other day to read my 12-year-old grandson Stanley’s hopes for the future, written when he left primary school. He wrote: “If I could make the world a better place, I would get rid of all the rubbish in the ocean…My hope for the future is there will be no more global warming.” He then quoted Christopher Reeve: “Once you choose hope, everything is possible.”

It seems to me that to stay hopeful we need courage, love and a stubborn determination. Hope is perhaps not so much a feeling, as something we choose to do. To do hope we need support from one another as we seek guidance in the Light as individuals and as a Quaker community. We must stay hopeful, not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of Stanley and all those who will inherit the world we have left them. Hope is a gift we can give to others, by our actions and by our love.

Sue Hallett

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope it will speak to others.

Pastoral Care and Eldership Team: Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Theresa Samms, Emily Slater