Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be!

Welcome friends to a day to be treasured, blessed with blue skies and warming sun.
Let us begin with a song of thanksgiving!

Lord of Life and the one who blesses this day with beauty,
we are thankful that we can enjoy your limitless bounty.
Thank you for the velvet night, sleeping refreshment and eyes opening on fresh morning light.
Thank you for the colours there are to see, the warmth to feel, the smells to breathe into
and the creature-filled world of which we are a part.
Thank you for all these good things that are your gifts – showered on us without purchase or promise –
gifts so freely given. Life sustaining Lord, we give you thanks.

Amen

Our Cornerstone WhatsApp group has been sustained for over a year
with daily photos of living, flowering plants – thank you Katherine and others!
Despite heat, drought, hail and unseasonal snow, you have faithfully provided a daily, hopeful image.
In this time, we enjoy tulips and tree blossom – fleeting annual events of beauty to treasure.
Where your treasure is there your heart will also be!

Lord of Life we thank you for the people who sustain our fellowship –
the WhatsApp posters, the pray-ers and sustainers delivering hope.
Help us draw upon their energy today as we go about in your world.
Help us live up to our faith that others will see what it means to be a Christian
and come exploring along the way of faith.
Keep us safe today and full of hope.
In Christ the Resurrection we confidently pray.

Amen

If you wander into Matthew Chapter 6 today and make it past the snooty praying Pharisee, the glum-faced faster and the instruction to pray ‘like this’ you will come to the few verses everyone should read on a beautiful Spring morning:

‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.

…

See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.’

Matthew 6: 19–21, 28b–29

Laying up treasure: holding on to those precious memories of spring flowers, laughing children, singing voices praising God.
Remember how to do this so we can do it together again when life allows, so we can store up more memories.
What could be your memory treasure in heaven, safe in the cloud?
If you could keep just one memory from Cornerstone to store up in heaven, what would you choose to keep?

Lord of Life as we set off to work or to care or to nothing in particular, keep us within your safe keeping.
Look kindly on those we know who are in need of your care.
Look kindly on those who don’t know you and couldn’t care less.
Keep them all safe within your encircling arms.
Bless this day and all who move within it.

Amen

Wherever you have left your heart, that is where your treasure can be found.
Enjoy with God this lovely day.

Cheryl Montgomery