Official Report 1133KB pdf
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev Bryan Kerr, parish minister at Greyfriars parish church, Lanark.
Presiding Officer, First Minister and members, thank you for the invitation to lead you in this time for reflection.
We all long for a better nation with better jobs, homes and care—and even better hope. Some will seek it publicly, others might pray, and still others will work in quiet and unseen ways to make life better for family, friends, neighbours, community and even strangers.
I am in the process of moving from Greyfriars church in Lanark, where I have ministered for almost two decades, to be minister in Kilmacolm. It is daunting when we move to a new community with different people from different backgrounds, yet, as I move, I see the same desire to make the community better. No matter the different circumstances of the community, the core drive of the church—to be love and to make better—remains.
We have a belief that we can do more and be more than we are. In the Bible, the prophet Micah asks:
“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Those words belong not to any political movement but to the shared moral imagination that shapes our common life, because, whatever differences we hold, most of us want the same things—that no one should have to choose between heating and eating, that children should grow in safety and promise, that work should bring dignity, and that older generations should be honoured and not forgotten.
We long for streets where belonging matters more than background, for communities where no one stands alone, and for a country where our measure of success is not wealth or winning, but kindness and courage. Demanding better unites and does not divide us. Our compassion is our strength, and our mercy is not naive. Our nation ought to be measured not in how loudly we speak, but in how gently we care. Jesus said:
“Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.”
Amid the pressure and noise of public life, we can forget that decisions affect lives everywhere. Choices that are made ripple far beyond this place into homes, schools, hospitals, prisons and care homes across our land. Faith still has something to say, not as a voice of certainty, but as a quiet conviction that love, when lived out, can still heal what is broken, mend what is divided and rekindle hope where it has grown dim.
May God grant each of us, in our places of influence, the wisdom to listen well, the courage to act justly and the grace to build together a Scotland that is, in every sense, better.
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