Jesus Christ

God is love, but don’t take it from me

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They say that more people are turning to God since the world began to ramp up its uncertainty. I hope that’s true. He is certainly talked about more on social media platforms now than at any time I can remember. Of course, though, that also means placing his name where some people can throw rocks at it – and they do.

I can completely understand why an unbeliever would say that they cannot reconcile belief in God with the maelstrom that seems to be breaking loose around us every day. Many live in perpetual war zones, their homes torn apart by conflict not of their making. There are countless displaced people, just existing as best they can. And, even besides the theatre of warfare, there are quietly terrifying dramas played out in every corner of the Earth. Families sit by the hospital beds of sick children; unwanted diagnoses are issued to men and women who still have life they want to go on living; and healthy people face the torture of watching those they love suffer.

I fully understand that this seems contrary to the idea of a benign power who loves us, regardless of what we are. And I don’t have the words to tell anyone that they are wrong. Who am I, who is any Christian, to take that task on? 

All I would say is this: get to know him yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for who God is; but please don’t dismiss him because you’re in pain. If you want to confront him with the reality of your suffering and ask him where his love is in that . . . do it.

I have done it. In the searing, raw moments of my grief at losing a beloved husband so young, I cried to God. It seemed hollow to me to sit in church and hear that I am the apple of his eye, that my name is written upon his palms, only to return home to a house empty of the man I always believed that same God had joined me to. In these hard, lonely hours, I was like Naomi, asking to be called Mara in my self-pity.

These comfortless seasons sometimes lasted for days, but not days and days. I can’t give anyone the formula for restoration to trusting God, because I don’t think there is one in these circumstances. You have to simply sit with him, and show him your heart – but, in return, you have to listen while he reveals his. Every time I have accused him in my bitterness, he answers me as soon as I open my ears to what I already know.

God is love. We think we invented it, but we only claimed it as our own, remaking an inferior version as best we could in our own image. And human love can be beautiful, whether it is between parent and child, between a man and a woman, between siblings or friends – even the love we can have for our pets. It has inspired countless poems, songs, novels, films, paintings, opera . . . and yet that kind of love, however attractive, is a pale imitation of the original.

God loves us because God is love. We question this because we really only know the fickle, human brand of love, which is rarely as unconditional as we would like. In our blinkered state, we judge the quality of God’s love by what we think we are due, and what we want.

His perfect love doesn’t always give us what we want. I didn’t want my husband to die, but he did. That wasn’t cruelty on the part of God because he is incapable of cruelty. It is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow for me, but in an enduring way, I know that this is part of a greater plan. Hard though this can be, it is made possible because I know God, and to know him is to trust him implicitly. Even if that trust sometimes falters into recrimination when I feel a stab of pain at my loss, in the end I always remember who God is.

God is love. We cannot understand that through any means but being with him. I cannot make you feel it, and vice-versa, no matter how many words we waste. No minister or priest can convince you of God’s love; no lecturer or textbook can QED you into believing it in your heart.

Only God’s heart can do that through a direct connection with yours. I can tell you so much about the reason for the hope that is in me, but why take my word for it?

We love only because he first loved us. That still wasn’t enough for mankind, but then God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we would not die, but have everlasting life.

He so loved the world, so loves you, that he inflicted terrible suffering, even death, upon himself. 

Our names are not merely written on his palms, but carved into them. He endured hell for our sakes, out of love. When we know this, our own sorrows are a little easier to bear.  

What’s love got to do with it?

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Just when I thought I was safe from our former minister’s pesky challenges, up he popped on Sunday, reminding us to love one another. Why couldn’t he just go off to Marbella like other retired Brits, and stop unsettling people leis an dol a-mach seo? I tried writing some of it down in the hopes that it would exorcise the persistent voice that whispered, ‘do YOU love the brethren, Catriona Murray’?

I will freely admit to all of you, because the only one whose opinion matters already knows, that this is a particular issue of mine.  Funnily enough, though, it would be an even greater difficulty if the command was to like my brothers and sisters. That’s a subjective thing, you see, based on whether you find people interesting, appealing, pleasant to be around. And not one of us can say that we like everyone we meet; nor would everyone say that they liked us. 

But something I have eventually learned is that when the Bible talks of love, it is referring to something much bigger, and much less whim-based. In a way, it’s a bit like the joy you find in Christ – that doesn’t diminish depending on your circumstances; in fact, I have found that it grows, often in proportion to how hard those are. You find joy regardless of what else is going on in your life.

Well, the love that God speaks of is surely similar to that. I think we have to love one another even if we are not always likeable. We love because he first loved us. He didn’t wait until we were perfect, or even good; he simply loved us, because his love is not subjective and does not – mercifully – depend on our degree of lovability.

On Monday, the devotional app that I use had a really timely study that spoke to an issue I have discussed here previously. While my particular problem related to a professing Christian, this study talked in wider terms about how we should respond to those who wrong us. Of course, the human instinct is retaliation – but that would be to ape the world, and we have a different, a perfect, example to follow. Christ is not only love, but he is truth, and he allowed himself to be crucified without uttering one word of reproach to his betrayers.

What did he say? ‘Father, forgive them’, and sometimes I think that’s the only prayer we need in the circumstances of which I speak. If the person, or people, who try your patience are unbelievers and persecuting you for your faith, pray for them. I don’t pretend that this comes easily, but it is possible.

‘What’, you ask, ‘even in your resentful and sarcastic heart’? Yes, well, I’ve adopted a strategy. Like I said, subterfuge is pointless with God, and he can spot an insincere prayer a mile off. ‘Oh’, I can hear you say, ‘so now you’re a paragon of sincerity’! No. I offer my inadequate prayers to God, and ask him to bless my enemies according to his mercy, and not mine. That way, it doesn’t matter so much what I may feel about them, because I am not the author of their fate.

I’ve had quite a lot of practice with this and have found that nothing takes the sting out of your dislike the way that asking God’s blessing on your enemy will.

That’s enemies, though. What about the brothers (and sisters)?

Well, last time I wrote a post, it was about this very thing. A man, professing faith in Christ, but openly practising hatred for me was causing some consternation. Aside from the variety of wise and Biblical advice you all gave me, I also received the inevitable enquiries as to his identity. Some people guessed correctly which is, I think, a comment in itself. I concealed his identity in the first place, not because I am particularly merciful, but because the blog was never about him. 

All any of us can control is our own behaviour, and our own response to these kinds of challenges. A person with anger management issues so bad that the mere sound of someone else’s voice throws them into a rage is really an object of pity. But after meditating on the matter for a time, I was brought to the verse, 1 John 4:20, ‘ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar’. It is a grave consideration because it implies that either his profession is false, or mine is. 

His, or mine? Well, I can’t answer that, nor can he, nor can you. And perhaps that uncertainty should be our gift to one another. There is, after all, nothing more dangerous than the conviction that your salvation is sure, if it is not. Such a person is possibly more lost than the loudest atheist.

And so, the best thing that we can do – any of us – is to try to make our calling and election sure. I can think of worse places to start than by praying for the brothers, and for those who have done us wrong. Yes, it’s mighty hard, but the power of prayer is in the one who hears, not the one who speaks.

Out of the depths, o Lord

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The news that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and the subsequent update that the injury was fatal, cast a gloom over much of the western world on Wednesday night. Like many, I prayed that he would survive, but it was not to be.

So, did the God in whom he so unswervingly believed fail Charlie? That is what the crowing mobs – and, sickeningly, yes, there are such people – would tell you. They are always there, in every disappointment, every terminal diagnosis, every loss, every bereavement, jabbing their fingers and asking, ‘where is your God now’?

He is closer to the broken hearted than any atheist would believe. Indeed, closer than any Christian who has not yet been broken can comprehend. The late Queen, quoting indirectly from Dr Colin Murray Parkes, famously said that ‘grief is the price we pay for love , but I would add – from my own experience, no less – that God’s comfort is the dividend of faith. I have no doubt that the believing family and friends of Charlie Kirk are experiencing that God, and that comfort more viscerally now than ever in their lives before.

‘Pain’, said CS Lewis, ‘is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world’, and so maybe this personal, human tragedy for Charlie’s family should be regarded as a wake-up call to the rest of us. The political responses have been predictable: hunt down the person responsible and deal with him as punitively as the law allows; suppress the far left: in short, meet violence and lack of understanding with more violence and lack of understanding.

This is not the way. Any hopelessness that I feel in the face of this tragedy does not stem from a questioning of God, but of the depressingly unchanging way in which people are responding. Yes, it may be possible to locate the gunman . . . and then what? Does dealing with what may be an act of unwarranted inhumanity from someone ideologically opposed to Charlie Kirk end the problem? Of course it does not. The world’s way, as we are seeing daily, is to meet brutality with brutality. We talk more than ever before about understanding, about kindness, and about walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes – but I don’t think this world has ever contained less comprehension of love than it does at this moment.

There is, of course, a way through; there is always a way through if we are prepared to humble ourselves. Therein lies the rub, however. We have made gods of ourselves, of our desires, of our feelings. Nothing must be allowed to hurt me, or even contradict me. If you doubt my word, or dare to pose a counterargument, you are not merely disagreeing, but hating. In their populist stupidity, successive governments have tried to legislate for petted lips, for offended sensibilities, and now stand amidst the wreckage, wondering who to blame.

Blame us, then, the creatures who have tried in vain to usurp our Creator. We did this. Our relentless pursuit of power and glory has wreaked interminable havoc. Ultimately, we tried to run this world on a rogue operating system, having tried every which way to disable the pre-installed software. And we have catastrophically failed.

That, atheists, is why people die in pointless wars and human conflict, and why every day is peppered with innumerable acts of cruelty and depravity, inflicted on one set of human beings by another. It is the reason why, no matter how well-intentioned we think we are, nothing goes to plan. And when – if – the person whose bullet killed Charlie Kirk is found, we still won’t be satisfied. Don’t look for justice in a world that no longer recognises truth, that no longer cares whether a person or an act is good or evil, as long as it aligns with their own world view. We, each of us, think of ourselves as the plumbline for everything: does it sit true against my ideology? No? Ah well, it must be wrong.

This is no nihilistic assessment of world affairs. It is a call, not to arms, but to peace. I was so moved by the words of Pope Leo (yes, Proddies, him again) earlier in the week in describing the role of tears in situations such as this one. Weeping is not a sign of weakness, but of strength; Christ cried out on the cross to his Father, and that type of anguished plea can be understood, the Pontiff said, ‘as an extreme form of prayer’.

Sometimes, love has no other outlet than to shed tears. I think we have now reached that point as a world. Cry, then, from the depth of your hearts, to the God of all comfort, because he understand us – better, even, I think – without words. 

Cymbals, symbols . . .

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The coronation service for King Charles III was exactly like a typical Free Church service. Okay, there was a bit more cloth of gold, a few extra nods to pomp and circumstance, and an awful lot more women in evidence, but otherwise it was just like being in any Wee Free emporium throughout the land.

The other way in which it was like the Free Church was the way in which sung praise ran like a golden thread through the entire proceeding. Yes, there was a choir, and what psalm 98 calls ‘jubilant song with music . . . music to the Lord with the harp, with the harp and the sound of singing, with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn’. It may not be the exact same tradition as ours, but really, what do mere traditions matter if the purpose behind all the clamour is the whole Earth singing to the Lord?

There was the familiar benediction, of course. Our fellows might not wave their hands about quite so much, but the words, the meaning – the intention – is surely the same. It was a service of worship, not of the newly crowned monarch, but his God. Many scoff at the sheer scale and expense of such ceremonies, but it is an unparalleled opportunity to place before the world this timely reminder: God, and he only, is sovereign. Earthly kings may rule, but by his grace alone, and not by anything in themselves, however exalted the family

God is the subject of our worship, whether we are the highest of High Anglican, or plainest of Free Church and all the offshoots thereof. The beautiful sounds that filled Westminster Abbey on Coronation Day testify to that fact. With my personal knowledge of the Lord, I’m inclined to believe that he’s more occupied with the origin of praise than the look of the thing. He’s an inside dealer, pleased – I am given to understand – by the intention of the human heart to glorify him. That being said, he’s almost certainly as pleased with Hubert Parry’s work, or Wesley’s, or Gobha na Hearadh’s as that of King David.

Yes, the psalms are extraordinarily beautiful and wise, speaking into every aspect of the human condition. It is hardly surprising that so many later works, those we consider ‘hymns’, are reworkings of, or meditations on, the work of the shepherd composer.

But David – mercifully – did not have a monopoly on praising God. All his creatures are called on to do likewise. Possessing zero musical aptitude, and almost no creative impulse, I am unlikely ever to write a hymn of praise for him myself. I can (barely) croak those composed by others, however, and depending on the content, and the state of my heart at the time, I can mean every word.

Nonetheless, some people are gifted in that way, and CAN compose beautiful hymns to God. Their words can articulate what the likes of me could never hope to do on our own. They don’t take anything away from the psalms of David; God’s glory, surely, is so great that we will never run out of praise. Indeed, the spiritually mute such as I am search in vain for ways to articulate our love, our gratitude, our imperfect recognition of all he is.

The book of psalms is not big enough. Those who love God want to say so in their own words. They want to sing the psalms, and they want to uplift their voices and their instruments in a myriad of ways to heaven.

When Lewis was blessed with spiritual revival, the people were loathe to part. They met late into the night, and they walked each other home, over and over. There were prayers, of course – ex tempore, not read – and there were readings of scripture. Psalms were sung, but so were hymns, old and new. 

If revival is the outpouring of God’s grace on an undeserving people, then their worship is surely a paean of praise to him, wherever it takes place. And if that praise was good enough on the hillsides, and by the roadsides, why would it not be deemed fit for formal worship?

What, even, is ‘formal  worship’? Please don’t write in – I actually know the answer. Organised, public worship has to follow some kind of form, even an unreasonable harridan like me sees this.

But if the structure is more important than the subject, if the formality trumps the  authenticity, it is not worship. However much we may grow attached to traditions, they are not more important than liberty of spirit; however much we may love the brethren, their preferences do not come before the free and honest worship of God.

Psalm 100 says, ‘Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs’. The psalmist’s vision does not prescribe the songs, but the spirit. Joy, love, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control come from there, not from blindly clinging to traditions that serve only to keep us comfortable.

How can I hand you over?

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Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘Remember’ has a particular resonance for me. It asks that she be remembered after her death, when ‘you can no more hold me by the hand, nor I half turn to go, yet turning, stay’. These lines came back to me when my husband was dying, because they reminded me of a particular weekend when he had to leave home on Sunday instead of Monday, in order to attend some work training. We had been having such a lovely weekend, and both of us were sad that it needed to end that much sooner. I was trying to put a brave face on it, when he suddenly took off his jacket, chucked his bag back into the wardrobe and decided not to go after all till the following morning.

I remembered this so many times as I sat by his bedside in the hospice. And I remembered Rossetti’s sentiment – that death revokes the option to remain. How I wished he could hug me as he had that Sunday, and tell me he was staying.

It came back powerfully to me again this morning in church. 

God restrained his own hand many times against the Israelites, never permitting them quite to suffer the fate they deserved. In the prophecy of Hosea, he asked himself, ‘How can I hand you over, Israel’? Yet, in the preceding verses, we see countless reasons for him to do just that, given the unfaithfulness of those who called him ‘God Most High’. Even though their words were not matched by their deeds, still God resisted giving them over to destruction. Such was his love for his own people that he was not willing that any should perish, and he has repeatedly held us away from death since.

But not his own Son. Jesus was not spared any of our punishment. The guilt was ours, yet the suffering was all on him. 

This is love. It is incomprehensible to our small minds but my word, it should leave a colossal mark on our hearts. God couldn’t bear to punish his sinful, disloyal people for their own dark deeds; but he willingly gave up his Son to that death on the cross, to the stark moment when he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’? 

We cannot know the mind of God, but it’s incredible to imagine the Father doing to Jesus what he would not do to us. And it is equally astonishing to think of Jesus, walking to Calvary and to death . . . and not turning back from it as any one of us would, given the chance.

Today’s sermon ended with the minister reading some testimony from a Pakistani Christian who – like many of his countrymen – has been disowned by family for converting away from their faith. Yet, he said, the empty home and the silent telephone are not reasons to pity him, because he knows that God has something far better for him, and there is no loneliness in Christ.

I can put my ‘amen’ to that, except in one respect. The awe I feel at this man’s sacrifice, is because it reflects God. Neither God the Father, nor the Son, spared himself in redeeming us. Painful, soul-searing sacrifice was willingly made. Ditto this Christian whose profession made such a moving end to today’s sermon.

Any losses I have sustained were not sacrifices  willingly given. I don’t think I would have had the strength, or the faith. But, there again, God’s infinite love didn’t ask me to give what I could not: in the light of Christian understanding, therefore, even his taking away is kindness itself.

That’s the heart of God.

Long-suffering in the Free Church (it’s not about the pews)

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Going to church can have unintended consequences – unintended by yourself, that is, of course. I went this morning, thinking that after a week on antibiotics for the mother of all dental abscesses, I knew the meaning of long-suffering. Indeed, perhaps I could even be perceived as the living embodiment of it myself. Three sleepless nights, endless pain which didn’t respond to any amount of ibuprofen, salty mouthwashes or stern talkings-to, and yet I had retained my sanity and even some humour. Perhaps, I allowed myself to think, I am a paragon of putting up with adversity.

You know, though, when you’re leaning towards seòladh àrd of any description, there’s always a Calvinist minister, just waiting to take you down. ‘Think you know what it is to be long-suffering’, they mutter as they stab their sermon notes out on ancient typewriters (in my imagination), ‘just wait till you hear what I have to say’.

Now, let me be clear on something. The take-down for myself this morning was in the substance and message of the sermon, not the delivery. I am in no way suggesting that a Free Kirk service is an object lesson in fad-fhulangas, however hard the pews.

This is all the more remarkable because it wasn’t a sermon on long-suffering, but on unity. It was Ephesians 4, and Paul’s call for unity in the church of Christ. Lack of unity grieves the Spirit, and it grieves him because he is a person of the godhead. In a quite beautiful image, the gift of unity was compared to the gift of Eden: just as the garden was given to Adam to tend, unity in the Spirit was gifted to the church for us – all of us – to nurture.  I am tempted into a segue here, but some things don’t need to be repeated, far less hammered home. We are all capable of meditating upon our own role in caring for what we have been given, and growing it to God’s glory.

I can and have picked holes in how we are as a church. Not gratuitously, I hope, but out of a real, prayerful concern that we are not as we should be. In reality, no Christian needs me to point that out – and there has to be some measure of gratitude for the fact that, to paraphrase Newton, we are at least not as we were. Crucially, though, we are not as we will be: we are the Spirit’s work in progress. And, listening to that sermon today, the unintended consequence for me was that I was both reassured and comforted, yet chastened and humbled also.

Christ did all that he did. He lived a life of service, putting everyone else first. A deserving everyone else? An impeccably behaved everyone else? Far from it. He poured himself out for a world that despised him. Even his own followers were not always faithful, taken up with a wrong vision of the Kingdom. James and John even jockeyed for a status of power within a government that was never intended to be built on any such thing. It must have been so disheartening for Jesus, not to have one wise friend, one close confidante to whom he could go for counsel. There was not one he could trust implicitly to do the right thing. 

This was why the answer to ‘whom shall we send’ and ‘who will go for us’ inevitably came back round to Jesus, for there was indeed no man.

Add to all this that he had no place to call home, no door he could close and be alone with his Father when disappointment and disillusion assailed his heart. Yet this same Jesus went willingly to the cross for those inconstant disciples, for a world that bayed to see him crucified and chose a criminal to be his substitute for mercy. Still, he elected himself our substitute for punishment, in the full knowledge that we deserved no reprieve.

And we fall out over the merest thing. Ironically, while waiting for the service to begin today, I overheard a whispered conversation regarding another congregation who are ‘together, but with undercurrents’. We are not long-suffering in the least. I forgive and excuse my own bad behaviour most readily, but I’m not so merciful to others. The slights and insults, the wrongdoings of my brethren are placed under my magnifying glass, while my own shortcomings, well, they’re easily excused.

What an absolute plate I have. Unity is a gift of the Spirit to which all of us who profess union in him must tend. The only way to that, the only way to anything worth the having, is through Christ. I am going back to one of the books I read assiduously as an apprentice secret disciple, ‘The Imitation of Christ’. Surely I should remember these words of Thomas a Kempis: 

‘Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be’.

Christ can, though, for all of us – and he will finish the good work once it is begun.

A House Divided

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There is an amusing scene in the Scottish film, ‘The Bridal Path’, when the naive protagonist goes to withdraw some money from his bank account, and is asked ‘what denomination’? He replies – of course – ‘Church of Scotland’.

In my own part of Scotland, denomination has been all too important, time out of mind. I wonder how many of us feel that we belong to the Church of Scotland, or the Free Church, or the Free Presbyterian Church before we belong to the church of Christ. And I equally wonder how Christ, the head of the one church there is, feels about denomination. 

How have we come, in a town like Stornoway, for example, to have two Free Church congregations, three Churches of Scotland, a Free Presbyterian Church, a Free Church (Continuing), an Associated Presbyterian Church, a Reformed Presbyterian Church, and sundry other congregations?  It would be nice if the answer to that was that no one building could contain all the worshippers. That, after all, is the only acceptable justification to have the saints of God distributed across a multitude of churches.

I know this is an awkward topic, and some people don’t approve of it being aired – but we are bound to review our own conduct in light of God’s presence. And like the adulterous woman at the well, we don’t need to hear any accusing words from Him to be convicted of this sin.

Because that’s what this is. It’s pride. Resentfulness. Self-righteousness. It’s putting ourselves and our traditions first. 

Now, I’m as guilty of this as the next person. I like the plain worship style of the island Free Churches, with no accompaniment to our Psalms-only liturgy. Heck, I even like the pews. But, if the necessity and blessing of online church has taught us anything (as I believe it was meant to), it’s that the building isn’t the church. And if the building isn’t the church, the denomination with all its committees and rules and manmade fol-de-rols sure as fate is not the church either.

Yet, we cling to these divisions as though they might be important or worthy. With no outward embarrassment, with no attempt at unity of even the most superficial kind, we have our own separate rule books, our own General Assemblies, our own identities.

As if the identity conferred by belonging to God is somehow less than that of some combination of the words ‘church’, ‘Presbyterian’, ‘Reformed’ and ‘Free’. We declare ourselves freed in Christ – free indeed – and yet, still, we entrench ourselves, not for Him, but invariably for some ‘principle’ that has us standing on our dignity. And while we bicker amongst ourselves (the children of God, mind you) about how to worship, He not only goes unworshipped, but the banner of His beautiful cause sags into the mud. The unsaved watch, open-mouthed, as those of us who profess Christ act like we have never even heard His name.

You think I exaggerate, perhaps – that I’m being harsh and judgemental?

There are four seats on Comhairle nan Eilean Sitar’s Education Committee, which are allocated to faith representatives. One, by statute, is occupied by the Church of Scotland and two, by custom, by the Roman Catholic and Free Churches as being together representative of the islands’ faith profile. The fourth has in the past been filled by the Free Presbyterian Church, but the Chief Executive of the council this week told members that he’d had representations from another denomination, suggesting that they should provide the fourth representative instead because – and I quote – they have a larger membership. 

Let that sink in: Christians – Reformed Evangelicals between whose confessional positions you could not slide one page of the KJV – trying to best one another for a seat on the Education Committee. 

Thanks to their unlovely one-upmanship, it looks like that seat will be shared with other faith groups, including some that are non-Christian.

That, folks, is an object lesson in what denominations do for the cause. The sad truth is that we show no intention of dwelling together in unity, and actually pour more energy into preserving superficial difference than pursuing the one thing needful: togetherness in the Church of Christ.

What a witness we are for the Saviour; what an example to the unsaved. My advice to the council would be not to let any of us near an Education Committee until we grow up.

Keep A Thing Seven Years

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There’s a Gaelic saying which suggests that if you keep a thing for seven years, a use will be found for it. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t take that long.

This Sunday, I will have kept my grief for seven years. Like many new possessions, I carried it with me everywhere for the first while, moving it around as self-consciously as a child walking in stiff, leather shoes. When it was worn in a little, I started to forget for minutes at a time, only to be assailed by the reality of it when I least expected. In the last few days of Donnie’s life, I had been painfully aware that some time very soon I would no longer be a wife, but a widow.

I didn’t like the word and still less the idea that it represented.

Yet, in seven years, I have been taught to wear the mantle with something approaching acceptance. Instead of being allowed to push the garment from me, God has gently shown me that it IS mine to put on, every day. Traditionally, it also took seven years to train a piper, before they would be allowed to perform in front of an audience. There was no such apprenticeship for me, though – just straight in at the deep end.

I often think how this might all have been, had but one thing been different.

These seven years would have seen me grow bitter, perhaps, or reckless. I might have spent my time in wishing my husband back, or wishing I’d never met him – anything, in short, to remove the excruciating pain. The memory of his suffering could have tormented me to who knows what depths of anguish.

The one thing, though, which saved me from all of that was the hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t simply Christ saying, ‘I’m here, you can lean on me’. That would have been wonderful enough. In fact, his message was subtly different. He was actually telling me, ‘Remember I’m here. You know what to do’. This wasn’t the beginning of a wonderful new relationship, but a life-changing development of one that I hadn’t truly known I was in.

While I have carried – and will carry – Donnie in my heart, it is not loss which dominates my reflections over these seven years without him. It is gratitude. I had such a marriage that I didn’t think I could live without him. But God used that blessing to show me a much deeper and more enduring love. He has fulfilled me in the years of my widowhood, and shown me that, in Christ, all situations are an opportunity to know blessing.

I have profited from his teaching. It goes without saying that I have benefitted in more ways than I can count from his love and mercy. From the very beginning of this journey, though, God has laid it on my heart to share my providence with you. He did that, and then he made it possible.

Most miraculous of all, he took what might have destroyed me and blessed it to the extent that I can say that the Lord gives more than he takes away. Last Sunday, our minister used the sermon time to remind us of the glory and holiness of this God. And, right at the end, that devastatingly beautiful flourish of truth: ‘Remember, though, he is also your Father’.

Glorious, holy, perfect – of course; but tender and loving to the last. Not ‘also in our hard providences’ but especially. If you don’t believe it, I will take you to see a man who told me all things I ever did, and loved me just the same.

‘Daddy, paste it’.

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In what would undoubtedly be considered revealing by any psychologist – especially the cod variety – I had an unfortunate childhood habit of removing my dolls’ heads. My father would then be called upon to reattach the noggin, which he did over and over again, without much complaint. I had an unshakeable belief that he could fix anything, therefore – an attitude also displayed in the film, ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, when Zuzu’s flower sheds a petal and she demands, ‘Daddy, paste it’.

This morning, I echoed Zuzu’s request. Our world – handed to us in perfect working order by our heavenly Father – has been broken and broken again. Today, the people of Ukraine are suffering the consequences of that, as their country is torn apart around them, and many are forced to flee for refuge elsewhere. As Putin’s relentless display of ‘strength’ continues, the collateral damage is immense. Homes are destroyed, families separated, loved ones killed in the midst of terrifying chaos. Other world leaders wring their hands hopelessly and look at each other, wondering how – short of military action – they can stop the despot in his merciless tracks.

Political leaders fear the might of Russia, and despair at the idea of China rallying to Putin’s side. These presidents and prime ministers do not know where to turn because what they see with their eyes is bigger than all their forces put together. The media invokes the imagery of World War II, when Europe and America last found themselves in a pickle to equal this.

But there is a vast difference between then and now. Then, you had leadership that, instead of wringing its hands in despair, might have clasped them in petition to the Lord; then, you had some people of faith, who knew that the mightiest army of all was fighting at their shoulder.

The helplessness we are witnessing in our leaders is the consequence of believing that you are the ultimate power, and that there is nothing beyond yourself to which you might look for guidance, for wisdom, or for strength. When you are strong, Biden, when you are strong, Johnson, then are you weak.

Yes, the church elders are praying, and calling upon their people to do likewise. But it isn’t at the moment of crisis, this witness is needed most. As a Christian community, we are doing what the Ukrainian leader is doing in his desperation: chucking weapons into the hands of civilians who have no idea how to deploy them. We ought to be testifying unceasingly to our political masters, interceding on their behalf with God and begging that they would see their own need of him – in all situations. Glancing through the March issue of the Free Church ‘Record’, I saw something incredibly wise in the prayer diary. It was a request to pray for people whose lives are so great that they see no need of God. No one is wishing them pain or suffering; but we do wish them the sincere yearning for the Lord that seems so absent in easy situations. I think we need to be in prayer, likewise, for our political leaders, that they would lean on God’s wisdom and strength in times of peace, so that it’s familiar and instinctive to do so when trouble comes.

Even now, though, as the tyrant batters down the gates of what we were pleased to call ‘peace’, it is not too late. Those of us who pray must put our shoulders to the wheel, and ask God to turn our helpless leaders into praying people also. I don’t know how many more messages we can expect him to send, signalling his displeasure, before we turn to him again in earnest. And those among us who do not pray, are you reading this? We have seen that people being the ultimate power does not work – it wrecks lives and it destroys this beautiful world. Ego always tries to triumph over humanity, imposing its will in a show of destructive strength, not caring who it tramples along the way.

The capriciousness you attribute to God is not his, but ours. Putin is a product of the way in which we have chosen to steward creation, with hardly a passing thought for the Author of all things. No wonder that men become drunk with power and blinded by self-importance when they think that they have actually taken God’s place.

Luckily for us, humanity is not the ultimate authority. When we look around us at the harm believing the contrary has done, however, surely we can admit that there is only one course of action left to us. We have got to humble ourselves, hold up this broken world to heaven and beg:

‘Daddy, paste it’.

The Compassion of the Christ

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Today was a communion like no other. The old traditions had all been peeled away, and only the essentials remained: the bread, the wine, the table, and a gathering of God’s believing people.

It was enough.

And the words that called to mind the loneliness of Christ’s suffering could not have been more apt for such a time as this. Many of us have gone through a protracted period of aloneness over the last two years. Families and friends have been separated, people have met death without loved ones to hold their hands. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have been bereaved during the pandemic, especially in communities which normally show their support by drawing alongside those who mourn. Who could forget those images of our newly-widowed monarch, sitting quite alone in St George’s Chapel? In that moment, she symbolised the loneliness of many across the nation.

Yet, she cannot feel your grief or mine, anymore than we can experience hers. For that, there is none but Christ.

Not only is he acquainted with grief, he has borne the unimaginable loneliness of being cut off from God. He chose to take that into his own experience in order that he might obliterate it from ours. Listening to the minister today, speaking of the peculiar loneliness of the Saviour on the cross, I was reminded of Derick Thomson’s poem, in which he speaks of peeling back the Lewis sky to behold:

‘the Creator sitting in full view of His people
eating potatoes and herring,
with no man to whom He can say grace’.

No man to whom he can say grace. No man to have compassion upon him in his pain. No man he can send.

Even in my more cynical or despairing moments, when I think there is no one to whom I can turn for advice, no one I can trust . . . there is. In these two years, during which I have been much alone, I have not been lonely. There are friends, there is family – but better than any of those, there is Christ. His advice never fails, his presence never departs; he has plumbed the depths of his own loneliness and so he is the soul of compassion in ours.

We are a society in sad need of compassion. I see a strange set of parallel phenomena creeping in. The more we say, ‘be kind’, the less able we seem to be able to apply that – as Christ does – to everyone. There is a drive to stand with victims of all kinds, which is as it should be. More understanding and not less can only be a positive development. But, are we unable, or simply unwilling, to offer a second chance to people who have gone wrong? Our world sends some into the wilderness forever, guilty of unforgivable falls from grace in our eyes.

That’s not how Christ deals with anyone. It’s not how he dealt with me; it’s not the example he set his followers.

He hung on a cross and endured the ultimate loneliness, to an extent we cannot begin to understand, in order to save us. To take that legacy of love to ourselves, we have to imitate him – he has always known the very worst and darkest details of our hearts, yet never abandoned us. Accepting his gift means sharing it abroad.

Sharing it abroad, means peeling back to the essentials as symbolised in those elements today. The death of Christ accomplished our salvation, but not so that we would keep it to ourselves.