RSTelfer

Monday Prep — 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 1st November 2026

RST

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20–30 minutes

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Built four Sundays ahead, as usual. No Preacher is listed against this week in the lectionary spreadsheet — normal for a week this far out, worth a check nearer the time. One thing worth flagging near the top rather than burying: 1 November is also All Saints’ Day, and the Women’s Lectionary sheet carries no All Saints marker for it. Section 2 says what that does to the set readings.

1. Hello, Richard

Here is a woman who, on the worst day of her marriage, does not draft a strongly worded email. She hears that four hundred armed men are on their way to wipe out her household, and she goes to the pantry. Two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five sheep ready dressed, a hundred clusters of raisins, two hundred cakes of figs, all loaded onto donkeys without a word to her husband. Abigail stops a massacre by catering. If you ever needed proof that the people who actually keep a community alive are mostly the ones who never get a line in the official history, the ledger of that donkey train is Exhibit A.

And then, as if the lectionary wanted to underline the point, it sets beside her a letter that opens by naming a woman, Apphia, and then says almost nothing about her at all. Two women, both addressed or acted upon inside male stories, both there on the page long enough for us to notice the gap. Add the fact that the calendar has quietly slipped All Saints’ Day into the same Sunday, and the week arranges itself with a certain neatness: the saints we celebrate are mostly the ones whose names we do not have.

It is also a week with real room to breathe. Nothing in either reading is brutal in the way last month’s Judges texts were, and the one hard edge (a husband whose name means “fool”) comes with a wonderfully dry sense of humour from the narrator.

If you want an opening: read the donkey list from verse 18 slowly and without comment, and let the room hear how specific it is: loaves, wine, mutton, grain, raisins, figs. Then say that the whole sermon is about who loaded the donkeys. You will want to close the frame, which is where recent openers have come unstuck: finish by coming back to the list and asking, gently, what is on our donkeys, and who in this room has been the one doing the loading for years without ever being thanked. That is also your natural All Saints turn, because the loaders are the saints. This opener needs no show of hands and no audience answer, so it should survive the seating.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament — 1 Samuel 25:2-3, 18-31 — Abigail. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).

“Then Abigail hurried and took two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five sheep ready dressed, five measures of parched grain, one hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs, and loaded them on donkeys.” (1 Samuel 25:18, abridged)

New Testament — Philemon 1-7 — Apphia. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).

“To Apphia our sister … and to the church in your house … the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.” (Philemon 2, 7, abridged)

(Excerpts — full text via the links above; NRSVue quoted here within standard permission limits for short liturgical/non-commercial use, with attribution: Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.)

Where these sit. 1 Samuel 25 is a single self-contained chapter inside the long David-and-Saul cycle, wedged between David sparing Saul’s life in the cave (ch. 24) and again in the camp (ch. 26), and it opens with a one-line obituary for Samuel. The set reading is a cut-down version of it: verses 2-3 introduce the couple (Abigail “clever and beautiful”, Nabal “surly and mean”), and then the reading jumps to Abigail’s action and speech. What it leaves out is the engine of the story: Nabal’s insult to David’s messengers (4-17), David’s oath to kill every male in the household, and the aftermath, where Nabal’s heart “died within him” and David marries Abigail (32-44). If you preach the chapter, you will want to decide deliberately how much of that to tell. The Women’s Lectionary trio of Michal (25 October), Abigail (this week) and Tamar (8 November) also hands you three consecutive women of David’s household, a larger arc worth naming in its own right.

Philemon is a 25-verse letter, and the set reading stops at verse 7: a greeting and a thanksgiving. The actual business of the letter, Paul’s appeal on behalf of Onesimus (vv. 8-21), falls outside it, which is exactly what the standard lectionary does not do (the RCL reads Philemon 1-21 in Year C). So either you preach the thanksgiving and the people named in it, or you reach past the set reading and tell the story of Onesimus, and that is a choice worth making on purpose.

All Saints. The Calendar of Other Commemorations lists 1 November as “All Saints, faithful servants”, with Revelation 7:9-17 or Revelation 21:1-6a as alternative first readings. Spill the Beans Issue 48 (2023) offered Proverbs 31:10-31 and James 2:14-26 as its Women’s Lectionary All Saints alternatives for that year. Nothing in the Women’s Lectionary sheet itself marks the day, so whether to lean into it is your call. Philemon 7 does some of the work for you: the one verse in the set reading that uses the word “saints” is the verse that says they have been refreshed by someone’s love.

3. What Have I Done Before

No sermon on either passage turns up in the sources I can reach, but here is what those sources actually are. I searched all six Sermon Log sheets, the Sermon Reference Log, the Voice Profile and the Sermons folder by title for 1 Samuel 25, Abigail, Nabal, Philemon, Apphia and Onesimus, and found nothing under any of them. The limits are the usual ones: the logs index by reference and many weeks have only a liturgy and no manuscript, so a topical or occasional service may have touched the story without being filed under it. It’s worth a moment’s thought before treating Abigail as untouched ground.

What does turn up is a set of close structural echoes, and these are the useful ones:

  • Abigail, by name, once. On 16 October 2022 (Luke 18:1-8, the persistent widow) you cited Amy-Jill Levine’s point that biblical widows such as Naomi, Ruth and Abigail “are not weak but agents advocating for themselves.” That is the only trace of her in the logs.
  • Rahab, 7 December 2025 (Joshua 2; Luke 1:39-45): “a woman the tradition calls a prostitute, who reads the signs, lies to the king’s soldiers and bargains for her family’s survival.” The closest sibling in shape, a woman who negotiates with armed men to protect a household. Songs that Sunday included TiS 286, TiS 181, TiS 259 and ATFG 580.
  • Esther, April 2026. Vashti on 12 April (“Saying No to despots”) and Esther’s whole book on 26 April (“a woman’s guile and nerve used to change the future for her people”). The Sermon Reference Log’s own warning on Esther was “covered extensively… avoid returning to it soon”, so Esther is better as a passing echo than a lead.
  • Enslaved and unnamed women in households, the Philemon neighbourhood. 28 June 2026 (Acts 16:11-19), the unnamed girl as “possibly the first preacher in Europe” and Paul “annoyed by her voice”; 21 June 2026 (Rhoda left at the gate, Refugee Week); and 1 June 2025 (Acts 16:16-34), where you argued Paul’s anger may be aimed at the owners’ exploitation rather than the girl. Onesimus has never been your focal figure, but you’ve spent several Sundays on what Paul does and doesn’t see in enslaved people.
  • Philemon itself. The only hit is 4 September 2022, when the RCL set Philemon 1-21 and you preached Luke 14:25-33 (Ocean Sunday, the Stuttgart Declaration, costly discipleship) instead.
  • The Pastorals and Paul as liberator. On 22 October 2023 (2 Timothy 1:3-7) you said Paul’s letters “are used to condemn and cage people… and yet, they were meant to liberate.” That line is very nearly the thesis of the Onesimus angle, and it’s yours already.
  • Hospitality and peacemaking. 12 July 2026 (Genesis 24, the servant hands over the gold “before asking for lodging”); March 2022 (Psalm 27, Ukraine); 23 February 2025 (“love your enemies and the lie of redemptive violence”). The Hesla prayer in the 4 October service (the one about thwarting evil with non-violence) is also still in the congregation’s ears.
  • 1 Samuel generally. The call of Samuel, 14 January 2024 (“Somewhere along the way, I changed from Samuel to Eli”). Nothing on David’s household.

All Saints specifically. The sermon logs have no All Saints entry in any year. The nearest things are the grief services (23 December 2021 Solace; 15 December 2024 Blue Christmas; 14 December 2025 with candles naming who is missed) and 2 November 2025, All Saints weekend last year, when a guest, Steff, preached on Luke 19 (Zacchaeus) and you first used the Flower Communion rite with Wendell Berry’s “The Sycamore” poem. That rite came round again on 4 October. The 2 November 2025 sermon isn’t in the logs, so I can’t say what it did with the saints.

Voice Profile threads that apply: the Women’s Lectionary itself interrogated (“why does it start and stop here?”, a gift this week, given how much both readings leave out); “who gets remembered vs. who is erased” (Apphia, and every unnamed saint); and women who act where men have failed.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Honest headline: I could not find a lectionary-site treatment of 1 Samuel 25 anywhere on the “Websites I use” list, and almost nothing on Philemon 1-7 specifically (only treatments of the full letter). 1 Samuel 25 isn’t in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is why Textweek, Vanderbilt and Working Preacher have no page for it. Rex Hunt turned up nothing for either passage. Searching by reference rather than date, this is what there is.

1 Samuel 25 — Abigail.

Philemon, and Apphia.

  • Working Preacher, Christian Eberhart on Philemon 1-21 (2013). I fetched it (a machine-generated summary rather than the full text): Paul appeals “on the basis of love” rather than commanding, the pun on Onesimus’s name (“useful”) is central, and the church is the witness. It reads Paul as modelling gentle transformation by someone with power, and does not press the structural violence of slavery.
  • Bill Loader on Philemon (Pentecost 16, Year C). An honour-and-shame reading: the negotiation turns Onesimus into “brother”; Paul embodies values rather than attempting systemic reform. Apphia isn’t discussed.
  • Journey with Jesus, Dan Clendenin, “Pay Up” (2016). Frames Paul as challenging the slaveholder to renounce the status quo as a matter of discipleship.
  • Marg Mowczko, “Apphia” (read). Makes the case that Apphia was probably an independent leader in the church at Colossae, not simply Philemon’s wife, and that her place in the address gives her a stake in what follows. Nicholas Quient at CBE International argues the same case from “sister” and her prominent position in the address; CBE is an evangelical egalitarian body, so treat it as a useful cross-check rather than a progressive or queer source.
  • Vanderbilt Lectionary (Proper 18 C) and Progressive Christianity’s “Paul’s Radical Egalitarianism” came up in search but I haven’t opened either; Sacredise has only a one-line mention. Textweek’s Proper 18 C page is worth opening from its own index, since I wouldn’t guess at a URL.

Queer readings — checked separately, as always

Philemon has one real queer-community treatment and one strong “from below” reading. Q Christian Fellowship’s Week 6 devotional, “Empathy” (read) uses Paul’s appeal about Onesimus, no longer a slave but a “beloved brother”, to think about empathy and moving beyond binaries; the author isn’t credited by name. Alongside it, Obusitswe Tiroyabone, “Reading Philemon with Onesimus in the postcolony” (HTS, 2016) is the strongest postcolonial reading I found: it centres Onesimus’s own agency (he sought out Paul to press for his freedom) rather than treating him as a fugitive in need of forgiveness. That is a reading of the later verses, not 1-7, but it changes who the thanksgiving is for.

1 Samuel 25 has no dedicated queer reading that I could find, and I’d rather say so than stretch one. The nearest relevant ground is the David-and-Jonathan tradition (Peleg’s article above; the Queer Bible Commentary chapters on Samuel, which I couldn’t reach online), which bears on David’s household rather than on Abigail herself. A student blog post from SMU Perkins, “Queering King David”, cites Deryn Guest and Ken Stone; it mentions 1 Samuel 25 only to note that David’s wives are treated as possessions, so it’s a weak lead for this week. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Laurel Dykstra, Queer Theology and the Institute for Welcoming Resources turned up nothing on either passage. On your shelf, Jennings’s Jacob’s Wound (section 5) is the book that actually does this work.

Two ways in

Lead angle — “who loaded the donkeys.” Abigail and Apphia as women who are named, or who act, in stories and letters shaped by men; and All Saints as the day the church remembers exactly the people who did the quiet loading and were never recorded. Sources: Berlin (Abigail as mediator and prophet), Mowczko and Quient (Apphia as leader), and the Calendar’s own All Saints essay about the unrecorded faithful. Caveat: no source I found puts the two women side by side, so the pairing is yours (and the lectionary’s).

Live alternative — “let it be charged to me.” Abigail takes the debt of her husband’s offence on herself (“Upon me alone, my lord, be the guilt”, v. 24, inside your reading); Paul, later in Philemon, offers to carry whatever Onesimus owes (“charge that to my account”, vv. 18-19, outside the set reading). That structural echo is this prep’s own observation, not a sourced one. Read it from Onesimus’s side with Tiroyabone and Q Christian Fellowship, and you have a sermon about what it costs the powerful to call someone “beloved brother”, with Abigail as the story that shows the cost being paid. Honest warning: it leans on verses beyond Philemon 1-7.

5. From My Library

All six catalogue parts searched.

On the passages.

  • Philippians, Colossians, Philemon (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 51), LibraryThing. Your catalogue lists Elsa Tamez as the author, but she wrote the Philippians section; per the publisher’s page the Philemon section is Alicia J. Batten’s, and it challenges the “runaway slave” reading and notes that we never hear Onesimus’s own wishes. That detail is from the publisher’s blurb, not the book itself. It’s the natural companion to the Apphia material, and it belongs to the Wisdom Commentary series you’ve drawn on repeatedly this year.
  • Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation), LibraryThing. The obvious commentary for chapter 25; I couldn’t confirm what it says about Abigail, so treat it as “held, unchecked”.
  • Jess Hill, See What You Made Me Do, LibraryThing. An Australian account of domestic abuse and coercive control. It isn’t biblical, so any link to Nabal and Abigail is yours to make, but if you read the chapter as a household where a wife has learned to manage a dangerous husband, this is the book that gives a congregation words for it. The argument I’ve described comes from a review rather than the book itself.
  • John Dear, Put Down Your Sword, LibraryThing. A call to creative nonviolence with nothing on Samuel, but it sits naturally beside David’s sworn vengeance and Abigail’s de-escalation.
  • Held but unchecked, in case they help: Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (LibraryThing; its subject headings include slavery), and Theodore Jennings, Jacob’s Wound (LibraryThing), on the homoerotic in ancient Israel’s narratives, which is where the David-household queer reading lives.

Fiction pairings. Three candidates, depending on which angle you take.

  • Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings (LibraryThing; two copies on the shelf). Best fit for Philemon. It follows Sarah Grimké and Hetty “Handful”, the enslaved girl given to Sarah as a gift at eleven, and the bond between them across decades; Sarah becomes an abolitionist. It is a novel about what happens when someone inside the household of slavery begins to see the person they own as a sister, which is about as close to Paul’s “no longer a slave but a beloved brother” as fiction gets. Confirmed from a plot summary, not a re-read.
  • Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (LibraryThing). Best fit for All Saints. Yale Tishman watches his friends die in Chicago in 1985, and the book mourns that generation across thirty years. It has nothing to do with the readings except the day, and it lets All Saints be about a queer community’s dead without strain.
  • Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus (LibraryThing), about Saul/Paul and the first Christian communities, with enslaved people in the story. Flag: it was a reference in last Sunday’s service, so it has already been aired; use it, if at all, as a quiet callback rather than a fresh pairing, and don’t promise the congregation Onesimus, since I couldn’t confirm he appears.

Watch for over-use. Robert Alter’s The David Story is the obvious shelf book for this chapter, and your own log flags him as spent for a while, so I’ve kept him to a mention here. A Room of One’s Own, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, Shankari Chandran’s Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Ashley Wilcox’s The Women’s Lectionary and Torah Queeries have all been used in recent weeks (and Torah Queeries sits outside the Prophets and the Pauline letters anyway), so I’ve left them out.

6. From My Articles

Two papers opened, and a short list of pointers.

Opened. St Mark’s Review no. 243, “When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches” (March 2018). A themed journal issue with essays by Julia Baird, Shane Clifton and others. I read the contents, editorial and parts of Baird and Clifton rather than every essay. Its argument is that “headship” and “submit” teaching has been twisted to justify abuse, that church leaders fail victims through shame and silence, and that women’s testimony needs to be believed. It doesn’t mention Abigail, Nabal or Philemon, but if you read Nabal as a controlling husband and Abigail as the wife who has learned to work around him, this is the Australian church context for doing so, and a warning against any reading that tells women to endure.

Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence, Melanchthon and Whitaker (SBL, 2021). Essays on texts of terror and trauma, many from Australian and Asia-Pacific contributors; the foreword argues that reading terror texts can itself be redemptive. There is no chapter on Abigail, Nabal or Philemon, but Gilmour’s essay on Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 is on David’s household and looks ahead to your 8 November reading. I read the contents, foreword, introduction and the conclusion of that one chapter only.

Pointers only (titles and keywords; I haven’t opened these). Sally Douglas, “Praying for Others?” (intercession, which is more or less what Abigail does with her body); Martin Luther King, “Principles of Nonviolence”; Osheta Moore, “Dear White Peacemakers”; Seforosa Carroll, “Homemaking” (hospitality); Ibrahim Abraham on queer hermeneutics.

UCA documents. The Assembly Standing Committee’s Issues, Challenges and Opportunities (on Drive; added 29 September and not yet in the Core Documents Index) I did open. Under “Liberating Justice” it commits the church to First Nations justice, becoming an anti-racism church, nonviolence, and “an end to gender based violence”, and it covers renewing the Covenant. That is the strongest denominational link to both readings this week. The 1994 Covenanting Statement is also there if you want the dispossession thread.

Nothing in either index is tagged to Philemon, to Paul and slavery, or to All Saints. That is a genuine gap in the collection, not a failed search.

7. Liturgical Resources

The best find for the week is a full resource on exactly these readings. Spill the Beans, file spill-Women's Lectionary - Pentecost 14 to Reign of Christ - Issue 48 HQ.pdf (Worship Resources shared drive, Spill the Beans → Women’s Lectionary), pages 66-72, “Abigail to the Rescue”, for Pentecost 22 (29 October 2023). Same pairing as this Sunday. It has a telling of the story, Abigail as peacemaker and diplomat, discussion starters, activities (“Load the Donkeys”, Gifts for Peace, Peace Cards), prayers (one in Abigail’s voice and one that names Apphia), a reflection (“Reconciliation, or retaliation?”) and a sending. The Spill the Beans index sheet has no row for these readings because Issue 48’s weeks aren’t itemised, so the PDF is where to look. The “Load the Donkeys” activity is also, conveniently, an all-age version of the opening in section 1.

Not reading-specific, and labelled as such: Words for Worship FW231029.doc (29 October 2023, Pentecost 22, Year A, same week of the cycle); wfw-Year A - 2020 - Pentecost 22 and All Saints - Joshua 3.7-17 or Revelation 7.9-17 (AS)... Matthew 23.1-12 or Matthew 5.1-12.doc, the only dedicated All Saints entry (faithful discipleship, joining the saints of every age, humility); and for Philemon in other years, wfw-Year C - 2019 - Pentecost 13 - Jeremiah 18.1-11; Psalm 139.1-6, 13-18; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14.25-33.doc and spill-Year C - Pentecost 13 to Reign of Christ - Issue 44.pdf (I haven’t read the latter). L3: 09.2 November 2025.docx (2 November 2025) covers the same season. Each service from 4 October now has a Bibliography - DD.MM.YY document; there isn’t one for 1 November yet, and the Special Liturgy folder in Worship Resources has nothing for All Saints.

Songs. There is no usage history for Abigail or Philemon in the Songs Used column, and no All Saints entry in any log, so what follows comes from the Songs Log and Song List rather than from what you’ve sung for these texts before.

  • Make Me a Channel (TiS 607 / ATN 95): the Spill the Beans team’s own suggestion for the Abigail week; Abigail as the channel of peace. Sung in Lent 2022.
  • Among Us and Before Us (TiS 259): for All Saints, those who have gone before. Sung once for Rahab (7 December 2025).
  • Also in the congregation’s books: Goodness is Stronger than Evil (ATW 463; sung 2 November 2025 and also Spill’s suggestion for this week, so it would be a second year running); There is a Line of Women (Iona, One Is the Body 60, a fit for a Women’s Lectionary year); Like a Candle (ATFG 582, remembrance); Freedom is Coming (ATOK 355) and Help Us Accept Each Other (TiS 648) for the Philemon angle.

No confident external weblinks found for any of these; I’ve flagged that rather than guess. Hymnary.org is the first place to check.

Where the music meets the reading. The Current Worship Season folder has no 01.11.26 folder yet (folders exist for 4, 11, 18 and 25 October only, and the 11 October one holds just a short untitled notes document that looks like timings for a conversation segment, not a liturgy), so I can’t tell you what the service will sing. What I can tell you is that last year’s All Saints weekend (2 November 2025) was a Zacchaeus service with Wendell Berry’s “The Sycamore”, For Everyone Born, ATW 463 and the Flower Communion, and that the Hesla prayer from 4 October (the one asking us to thwart evil with non-violence) sits well beside Abigail. The seam to look for once an order of service exists: any prayer or piece of music that names the dead or the unrecorded, because that is where All Saints and the donkey train meet. A standing prompt: the music is a sermon input, not decoration; if you decide on All Saints, say so early enough that the centring music can carry it.

Themes emerging. The material says the same thing from two sides: the ones who hold a community together are rarely the ones in the record, and the texts themselves keep trimming them out (the lectionary cuts the insult and the death from Abigail’s chapter, and stops Philemon before Onesimus appears). What you’ve done before pulls in the same direction (the unnamed girl in Acts 16, Rhoda at the gate, Rahab’s bargain), so this week sits comfortably inside a thread you’ve been following all year. The one real novelty is All Saints: the logs show no sermon for it in any year, so it’s unploughed ground.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

A lighter week than some: the Calendar’s index puts two entries between Sunday 1 and Saturday 7 November.

  • 1 November — All Saints, faithful servants. Falls on the Sunday itself. The Calendar’s essay for 31 October says the day began because the deaths of many martyrs and other faithful Christians were unrecorded, and describes a communion of the living and the dead, the known and the unknown; churches in Syria and Rome from the sixth and seventh centuries prayed for those never honoured on earth, and the 1 November date was fixed by 835. It then adds All Souls (2 November) as a festival of all humanity. Alternative readings given: Revelation 7:9-17 or 21:1-6a, and the “Faithful Servants” appendix includes Acts 9:36-42 (Tabitha), an excellent quiet-woman text for the day. The second collect (“Faithful God, whose will it is to be glorified in your saints…”) prays that we, in our generation, remain faithful with our lips and in our lives.
  • 4 November — Søren Kierkegaard, Christian thinker. A nineteenth-century Dane, born 1813, who lost his mother, three siblings and his father within a few years. He broke off his engagement and, on his deathbed, refused communion from a state-church pastor; the Calendar’s entry notes his jibe that even the cows in Denmark are Christian. Not a natural fit for the week, but a good sparring partner for a “saints are the unrecorded” sermon.

Just outside the window: 31 October (Reformation Day), and 16 and 17 November (Margaret of Scotland; Hilda of Whitby). Neither entry has a specifically denominational dimension this week, but the Assembly Standing Committee paper in section 6 is the document to hold in mind if you want the church’s own commitments beside the readings.

9. A Piece of Music

Brandi Carlile, “The Joke” (from By the Way, I Forgive You, 2018; on Spotify). It goes with the lead angle (the unrecorded, the people the powerful write off), and it survives a change to the alternative too, because it’s pitched at an arc rather than a scene: those treated as the butt of someone else’s story ending up having the last word. Carlile has said she wrote it for people who feel under-represented, unloved or “illegal”, which is as good a sentence as any for Onesimus, for Apphia, and for the unnamed saints of the day. It won two Grammys (Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance), it’s Americana (close to your usual listening), and it’s a new pick rather than one of the recent ones.

One honest flag: nothing I found marks the song as explicit, but I could not open a full lyrics page during this run, so I haven’t checked the words line by line. Please glance at a lyrics source before using it from the front.

10. In the News

“Woman who intervened in Glenelg beach fight speaks out” (ABC News, 2 October). A woman, “Kate” (a pseudonym), stepped between two males fighting at Glenelg; about 200 teenage onlookers booed her and pelted her with bottles. Police have started an early crime-prevention operation along the western beaches, and the Premier called the behaviour “completely unacceptable”. It is Abigail’s story in miniature, in your own city: someone steps between violence and a crowd that wants it to happen, and pays for it. It is also a useful corrective to the tidy version of Abigail, because it tells you what such an intervention costs.

From uniting.church: recent items include the Fijian National Conference in Fremantle (2 and 4 October: “700 Fijian voices unite for climate justice”), Waves of Hope (1 October, weaving new stories across Oceania), and “Held Together begins with listening” (28 September). One you may need to act on: the call for nominations for President-elect and for 18th Assembly representatives (24 September).

11. Just for You

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Showing 13, chapter 27. The wording is the standard rendering and matches across several sources I checked (Julian-focused pages at imhu.org and byfaith.org, and a longer discussion at patrickcomerford.com), but I could not open a named printed edition such as the Warrack translation during this run, so treat the exact wording as well attested rather than checked against a page. Chosen for All Saints, and for the quiet confidence of everyone who has loaded a donkey and kept going.

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