Hi folks I hope you are doing ok? This week our blog is written by Noreen, we will be meeting on zoom on sunday night at 8.00pm if you don’t normally join us, but would like to then send me a message.
We’ve been through and continue to journey through difficult times. In February 2020 at the Sunday@thepub weekend near Once Brewed, we shared dreams and hopes for the future. Did any of those happen I wonder, or did the pandemic mean they ceased to happen? However, as with anything buried, it could be possible to dig up those hopes and dreams and begin to resurrect them in the new future. But will those hopes and dreams have changed?
A few weeks ago, Phil and I went for a walk at Newburn. This was the first time since November that we’d ventured out of our ‘local area’ but we reasoned that Newburn would likely be less crowded than the coast. So it proved. Walking along the riverbank it seemed that Nature was renewed. Not quite in the way referred to in Revelation 21 (a new Heaven and a new Earth) or 2 Corinthians 5 (The old has gone, the new is here) but more that what we were seeing was part of a continuum, more Ecclesiastes 3 (to everything there is a season). So, as we’ve passed through this pandemic many of us will have experienced a time to weep, to mourn. Some will also have experienced a time of death—of relatives and friends, which will have been distressing. Undoubtedly this time has been difficult, but Ecclesiastes also talks of times when we will dance, laugh and build. Things move on, and in my experience this is driven by hope.
Shortly after our walk I wrote this prose poem on that theme.
Along the rutted river path the snowdrops appeared at intervals like ghosts in a pantomime—waving. The just-birthed blooms shape-shifted as the wind blew, and our viewpoint changed. The bright sun crafted shadows, making the ground look like hair being laid out and combed among the whiteness. The bare trees stood like sentries, while the river whispered our way. Soon, it said. Soon.
I felt that all around us there were hopeful signs that the world was unlocking, and that the long winter would soon be coming to an end.
In ‘Surprised by Hope’ Bishop Tom Wright writes, ‘What I am proposing is that the New Testament image of the future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future that is promised to the whole world, a future in which, under the sovereign and wise rule of the creator God, decay and death will be done away and a new creation born to which the present one will stand as mother to child.’ He writes about the ‘birth pangs’ necessary for this to come about, and that he feels this transition will not be easy and will also be painful.
St Paul in 1 Corinthians, verses 16-17 writes, ‘Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.’
The article (below) reminds us that even in the worst of times (and what could truly be worse than enduring life in a concentration camp?) there is hope.
British Lieutenant Colonel Mervin W. Gonin, commander of the 11th Light Field Ambulance, R.A.M.C. was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In his diary, he described that time, and how initially he felt angry that a consignment of lipstick had been sent to the camp.
“It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted. We were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it. It was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips. You saw them wandering around about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again. They were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on their arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”
So, providing lipstick not only meant that the women became renewed in themselves, but gave them hope for a better future. It reminded them of what they had been, but also what they could be again.
Louise (now Baroness) Casey, the former Homelessness advisor, has talked on Radio 4s Desert Island Discs about the person who gave her hope at a time when her life was troubled. A nun at her school in Hampshire, Sister Ita wrote her a note one Christmas to say that Louise had a future, she had a gift to give, and she was worthy. She kept it for a long time, taking it out at times when things were tough. Louise was quoted on the programme as saying, ‘People like sister Ita and others have the gift of giving a shaft of light and a shaft of love, and that can just make someone keep going.’
So, as well as having hope ourselves, it’s a gift we can give to others.
Questions
Hope or optimism? What do you feel is the difference?
What event during 2020 gave you hope?
What was your worse moment of 2020 and how did it make you feel?
Who/what helped you get through the worse moments?
Do you feel you have ever given another person hope?
Was there anything you learned about living through a pandemic, and how could you use this in your life going forward from here?
Rob Wylie is the founder of BeachcomberFX and guides its leadership team. He has worked in the North East for over 20 years and has vast experience from various roles he has held. He has a passion for Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry as well as beer, beaches and Miniature Schnauzers.