Peace Jigsaw and Poppy Petals

On Sunday we had one of those mornings when everything that could go wrong did, ending up with me apologising to the congregation of our local URC church that we would need to put the clocks back 10 mins to OBTT (Openshaw Baptist Tabernacle Time) in order to have our 2 mins silence at 11.10 am when the rest of the world had resumed the business of daily life.

It is then rather appropriate that having started from a place where everything fell apart we then focused our service on re-membering and putting peace back together. While Tim preached a sermon on re-membering and the difficulty of remembering if you have not lived through the experience of war, a group of children and adults who wanted a more active way of reflecting went to the back of church and made a "Peace Jigsaw" by drawing a picture of poppies and a cross and then cutting it up into jigsaw-shaped pieces. We then challenged the rest of the congregation to put peace back together by remaking the jigsaw - it was a lot harder than it looked and we reflected on the difficulty of peace-making!

We followed this with our intercessions in which we sang "Let us spread the pollen of peace" while coming forward and taking a handful of poppy petals (cut from red card) and scattering them on the fabric that cascaded over the communion table as an act of both remembering and re-membering and a commitment to peace-making.