“Earlier this week the moon was sighted… Eid here feels almost like a combination of secular Christmas and Halloween. Children get given new clothes, which they parade about in from house to house, receiving home baked goods or sweets along the way. Adults decorate their homes – new flooring, new curtains, new china or chairs. There are special prayers said in the mosque that morning and afterward men also go house to house passing on the Eid blessing and receiving cakes in return. Eid is the only day of the year in which it is acceptable for men to shake a woman’s hand as blessings are passed to the household through the ‘hand of Eid’… Please pray that people here would come to realise that true lasting blessing doesn’t come from a handshake once a year, but from the nail-pierced hands of our Saviour – ‘Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered’. Hands that weren’t afraid to touch the sick, the diseased, the outcast and the loner. Hands that weren’t afraid of getting dirty or of hard work. Hands that as you read this, are working to prepare a place for all those who believe and accept the gift these nail-scarred hands offer. Pray that Islanders would come to know and cling to these hands! Pray too for our hands, that they would point the way to his!”