Revd Graham’s weekly message:
On my visit to Cape Town recently, I visited a part of the city known as “District Six”. District Six is an area of Cape Town city centre where in the early 1960s sixty thousand people were removed as part of the apartheid rules. A museum has been set up to give an idea of what it was like to live in District Six before people were forcibly relocated to the townships on the outskirts of the city. As you can see from the photograph below people could only take what they could carry.
It came to mind when I was thinking about what is happening in Gaza right now; people being moved from their homes in order to find safety, and even that has no guarantees that they will remain safe. I’m not going to take sides in the dispute because I hate violence of any kind and continually pray for peace in that region. I hope that people can find a way of living together in peace alongside each other, despite their differences.
It seems that this has stirred up high emotions in many peoples and countries – I hope that the many threats being made will not come to fruition, and things will calm down. I believe that no one has the right to take another life under any circumstances. We hear so much about gun and knife crime in our own streets and towns, not that far from us. I don’t begin to understand why it happens, but it makes me sad when I read about it. Life is sacred and should be treated as such, and not dismissed so easily. I hope that we all pray for peace.
With God’s peace and blessing
Revd Graham
