Care and concern are especially necessary during difficult times, such as illness or death, when friends and family may need expressions of love, prayer, meals, conversation, and companionship. We also urge Friends to be sensitive to the special needs of children at such times; meetings can nurture children who feel bereft or disturbed.
We pray that our individual covenants with one another mirror the love that Jesus gave to us as part of his blessed community. In our concern for a definition that encompasses our marriage relationships, we also remember how God's covenant embraces each of us and commits us to each other as part of a universal covenant of trust, discipline, and love.
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Put on, then, garments that suit God's chosen
and beloved people: compassion, kindness,
humility, gentleness, patience. Be tolerant with one
another, and forgiving, if any of you has cause for
complaint: you must forgive as the Lord forgave you.
Finally, to bind everything together and complete the
whole, there must be love. Let Christ's peace be arbiter
in your decisions, the peace to which you were
called as members of a single body. Always be
thankful. Let the gospel of Christ dwell among you in all
its richness; teach and instruct one another with all
the wisdom it gives you. With psalms and hymns
and spiritual songs, sing from the heart in gratitude
to God. Let every word and action, everything you do, be in the name of the Lord Jesus, and give
thanks through him to God the Father.
--Colossians 3.12-16 (REB) |