Dear Friends,
“For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]
“Yesterday is but a memory, and tomorrow but a vision. But today well-lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness, and every tomorrow, a vision of hope.” [Sanskrit poem written 2,000 years ago]
As I write this we are in the between times of the announcement of the death of our Queen, Elizabeth II, and her funeral, and we have seen the proclamation of a new King, Charles III, and wonder what his new reign might bring. I know it is a time of uncertainty for so many reasons, apart from practical ones like how will we afford to heat our homes and put food on our tables this winter.
I also know that there is much uncertainty about what will happen when I retire – who will fill the pulpit, who will be our minister?
Faith, we are told, is one of the great qualities of the Christian life, an essential ingredient of genuine discipleship. But living with faith is far from easy, for most of us prefer cast iron certainties to promises we must accept on trust.
Nowhere is this more so than when it comes to the fact of death and our hope of eternal life. We believe in the Resurrection and the Kingdom of Heaven, but we cannot help wishing we knew a bit more about it. Where will it be? How will we get there? When will it come? What will it be like? These and a host of other questions all too easily play on our minds, insidiously undermining our confidence. ‘If only we knew’, we tell ourselves, then it would be so much easier.
But the fact is that we do not need to see anything more than God has already revealed, for true faith should be based on what we experience today as much as what we are promised tomorrow. When God is an ever-present reality in our lives, we need no proof as to the future.
I don’t have the answers to the questions raised above but I know that God does and it will be for the benefit of all, even if we don’t see it immediately. So I for one will be trying to live by the words of the Sanskrit poem, and live each day as well lived as possible and leave tomorrow to its own devices and God’s pleasure.
God bless
Yvonne