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"More than enough” Joan and I would like to thank you all
for your kind words, thought, cards and flowers after the tragic loss of Joan’s sister Barbara. I write this the day
after her funeral, throughout which, we felt aware of and uplifted by your prayers. The last couple of
weeks have been extremely difficult, and we wonder how people “in the thick of it” manage to even think
about
Christmas. The families who lost their cherished ones in that M5 motorway pile-up, the people of the Arab Spring,
Joan’s niece Maggie, having lost her mother, now separated from her new husband and one-year-old daughter until
her own mental health stabilises. I thank the Bishop for the prayer he gave us recently, and particularly the verse…
Give us, whose eyes are dimmed by familiarity, a bigger vision of what you can do even with hopeless cases and lost
causes and people of limited ability. Our eyes may sometimes
be dimmed by familiarity, but more often they are dimmed by tragedy. When looking for material for Barbara’s
funeral, I came across these words...
I
wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright no matter how grey the day may appear.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate
the sun even more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive and everlasting.
I wish
you enough pain so that even the smallest of joys in life may appear bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy
your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough hello's
to get you through the final good-bye
Nice sentiments, but hardly a Christmas
Carol is it? It’s not a patch on “He came down to earth from Heaven” and it doesn’t
hold a candle to “the hopes and fears of all the years are born in thee tonight”. I’m sure the Lord will
forgive those whose eyes are dimmed by familiarity (which probably includes all of us at least once in a lifetime) but what
about those who just plain reject the Christmas Story, and so miss out on the great hope that it brings? Barbara
was a brilliant mathematician. In trying to understand her death, Joan and I considered the theory that
the more analytical brains, like those of mathematicians and scientists, are less inclined to accept the ethereal things of
life. For such people, everything must add up and “click” into place or they are otherwise rejected. Faith of
course, doesn’t add up. Faith believes in the things that don’t make sense, the things that cannot be proven either
mathematically or scientifically. As I ended writing this piece, we heard that Gary Speed, manager of the Welsh football
team, had taken his own life. It is to these people and to their families my heart goes out this Christmas, with the prayer
that we His Church, may be enabled and inspired to take His unmeasurable love, His unquantifiable grace and His undefinable
peace to those people who are so overwhelmed with troubles that they just can’t see the brilliant light at the end of
a long, dark tunnel. “He came down to earth from Heaven, who is God and Lord of all”
—those who know Him, those who don’t, those who accept Him and those who won't,
those who love Him and those who are loved by Him, which of course, means all of us.
Joan and I wish
you much, much more than “enough” this Christmas.
In
His name,
Geoff
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