GLORY TO GOD ...

(Luke 2: 14; Judges 9: 8-15)

Glory to God,

Secured by God, in the highest;

 - be an olive tree

Its expressed fatness

Honouring God.

And on earth peace

In the Child who shall be peace

 - be a fig tree,

Bearing, already, sweetness

Of the day of the Prince of peace.

Good pleasure in men,

Through One it will please God to bruise;

 - be a vine

Producing that new wine

That cheers God and men.

(Ramsay Bing 20/12/2025)

More of Blackness Castle and the Firth of Forth

WINGS

How often, said the Lord, I would have gathered

You underneath my wings, as a hen would

Gather her chicks; unmothered and unfathered,

You would not take the way for your own good.

Yet long ago the Gentile Ruth had travelled

To come beneath the shelter of God's wing,

Orphaned and widowed, with her life unravelled,

To find God as resource in everything.

Come into manhood to endure the weathers

Of a sin-smitten world of suffering

Christ knew the refuge of the Almighty's feathers

And knew the refuge of the Father's wing,

Until He underwent the greatest storm

To shelter His new brood, and make us warm.

Blackness Castle and the Firth of Forth

And to whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed?

And to whom hath the arm of Jehovah 
Been revealed?

To those whom He has redeemed
With a stretched-out arm.

Whose pursuers, by the greatness of His arm,
Are still as stone.

Who have learned that underneath are
The eternal arms.

Whom His arm is not shortened

That it cannot save. 

On the Union Canal

This May's brood of swans on Straiton Pond