7:28am Saturday 10th January 2009
By Mike Morgan, Editor of the Dorchester Parish Magazine
ALTHOUGH it’s over 22 years since ferry company Sealink left Weymouth, I can still remember all too bitterly what it felt like suddenly to find myself and all of my colleagues out of a job.
So the new prayer on the Church of England website rang true for me.
‘Redundant,’ it begins, ‘the word says it all – useless, unnecessary, without purpose.’ I remember feeling like that as I walked down South Street, Dorchester, in the middle of the day with no particular place to go.
The next time the feeling came was when someone at a party asked me: ‘What do you do?’ The prayer expresses the sadness, the anger, the uncertainty that comes from losing the direction and identity that a job provides.
‘Hear me as I cry out in confusion, help me to think clearly and calm my soul,’ it prays, ‘As life carries on, may I know your presence with me.’ That experience of redundancy taught me that people are more than what they do for a living.
I found people in my local church who supported and helped me to find a new sense of identity and worth, not because of anything I had done but because of what God has done for us.
The prayer goes on: ‘As I look to the future, help me to look for fresh opportunities, for new directions.’ At the time, I would have probably said something rude in response but I did find a new direction as well as a different attitude to life.
Not everyone was so lucky, though.
As more and more people in our area are living with the threat or reality of redundancy, it is important that the rest of us are on the look-out to support our neighbours, if only to be there with a listening ear.
We can all join in the end of the prayer: ‘Guide me by your Spirit and show me your path, Through Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life. Amen’
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/trade_directory/