Healing and Hope

It won’t surprise my regular readers that to get away from what someone yesterday called “stuff” I have headed to Holy Island for just over two weeks to try and think about the future. There is so much in my head I need peace. I love to just stand and listen when the tide comes in and we are cut off from the mainland and the hordes of tourists have gone home. Apart from geese flying over and seals singing and birdsong and the lapping of the waves onto the beach, there is silence. A real gift. 

It’s been good over the weekend to meet the new vicar here, Canon Sarah Hills. Sarah has come here from Coventry Cathedral, where she headed up their reconciliation programme. The church here feels lighter. She’s great fun and took time to listen to us last night when we met her for the first time. We’ve been invited round the vicarage! She helpfully told me you can’t go backwards. And sometimes healing only comes when we choose a different way. 

Lis commented on her vestments after service this morning.

“Nice frock!” she said.

“Isn’t it lush!?” replied the vicar. Probably the first time ever the word lush has been used in that church!!

Tonight Sarah offered us a service of healing and hope in candlelight. She shared a story she’d read from Gervaise Phinn, the Yorkshire school inspector. 

He tells the story of a little boy who sat shyly in the classroom. When he goes to look through his workbook he finds he has written a piece entitled 'Myself' that is full of self-deprecation, a sense of not being very good at anything. Flicking through the book he comes across something scrawled at the back that he thinks is wonderful. He tells the little boy how much he likes it and asks for a copy. This is what it says:

Yesterday yesterday yesterday
Sorrow sorrow sorrow
Today today today
Hope hope hope
Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow
Love love love

Phinn tells the boy it is a wonderful little poem, to which the little boy replies They're my spelling corrections, sir!

Sarah suggested to us the process of healing can be lengthy and it is a journey from sorrow which needs to be named and recognised, to hope things might get better, to finding love. Healing comes not diminishing our pain but recognising we are loved by God through it and beyond it. She quoted Desmond Tutu, one of her heroes: “ In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.” 

I found the simple service very powerful and helpful. I hope to get some clarity while here. I may be facing some things I have to face and I need to know it will all be alright. It’s about finding God in the confusion and seeking the still small voice. Here I find that listening to the silence, in conversations on the street, and in the church which has offered a divine fixed point since the 7th century and where every day since St Aidan prayers and hope have been offered as people come in all sorts of circumstances. 

In evening prayer the other night the reading was 2 Timothy chapter 3. Some of the chapter is famous but to read the whole thing reminds me where healing comes from. In the end the things that try to diminish or hit us hard will not last. I need this time to relearn this.

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.

People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,

without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,

treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God--

having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires,

always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth--men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected.

But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance,

persecutions, sufferings--what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.

In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,

while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it,

and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,

so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.