WORLD AT PRAYER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 51, 22 February 1944, Page 5

WORLD AT PRAYER

SIGNIFICANCE OF FRIDAY NEST In a year when every nation on. earth is feeling" unusual pressure and facing an unknown future, the World Day of Prayer committee felt impelled to devote this: worship service exclusively to the sharing of one another's burdens the world around, in the presence of God, the only Power strong enough to guide us :into to-morrow's peace. In preparation for creating this programme, a call was sent out to over a hundred representatives from various countries who happened to be in New York City at the time —• nationals, repatriated missionaries, relief workers, etc.; they met for a remarkable morning to "pool their concerns" and to "face the realities of reconstruction." A stenotyped record was made of everything said, and each person present wrote out a prayer- telling the urgent needs in the land he or she represented— out of such statements and. such petitions this service has been prepared by one who has lived and worked in Alaska, in the Philippines and in Africa. Half of the beauty of the World Day of Prayer has always lain in the consciousness that Christians in fifty other countries were also using the same worship programme on the same day—all the way from the Fiji Islands, the first place, in the morning, to Alaska, the last place at. night. But this year marks an even more memorable milestone in our history—since the ascmbly out of which grew to-day's service was an astonishing cross-section of those very countries; for side, by side sat a Scotsman (head of the | British Information Services) and the Japanese cx-president ol Doshisha University" Tokyo, a Frenchwoman, whose family is still in Franco was next to a German refugee pastor and his* wife, both rather recently rescued from concentration camps in Europe ; but it was a Zulu woman, straight from Africa, who voiced everybody's warm delight in this fellowship: "I feel as if maybe [ am in heaven! For the Good Book says: 'They shall comei from thel cast, and from the west,, and shall sit down in the Kingdom of heaven.' " And there she sat, surrounded on all sides by persons from China, India, Burma, Siarn, Malaya, the Belgian Congo, Algeria,. Greece,. Holland, South America, Alaska the Philippines. This was indeed the Kingdom, in miniature. Therefore to-day this wider household of faith throughout the world will; join in these universal words of intercession suggested* by their own. members, as we all bear one an— ! other's burdens, and so fulfill the ! iaw of Christ.