Today is the 3rd anniversary of the first lockdown in the pandemic. Boris Johnson appeared on our television screens and gravely told us we must stay at home and obey the rules coming in to keep everyone safe. As I began to write this they were scrapping about our former PM on Jeremy Vine whether he really was partying or was he motivating staff at a work event. Discuss!
I don’t do personal views in these blogs but I think the editor of the Yorkshire Post has a belter of a front page today, on the left “Johnson’s political career in balance” and in the middle the Dean of Ripon Cathedral lighting a candle to mark a day of reflection as we remember more than 200,000 people have lost their lives over these past three years. I went into the cathedral to stand by the candle this afternoon. For many this discussion about parties will bring painful stuff to the surface again.
I’m trying to write a book about journeying through painful experiences and I can’t get the chapter on Covid finished. It seems amazing what we all lived through when it was at its height. Lives were lost, families were separated, shielding was tough, a lot of people lost confidence and maybe life will never be the same again. We are still scarred by it.
Where has God been through all of this? Well, let this Jewish writer help us on this day of reflection. Overwhelmed by the situation when Covid was raging, he opened the Psalms and took a minute to pray. His 10-year-old daughter found it odd, because he usually prayed at particular times, as mandated by his religion. She asked what was going on and was everything OK “Probably for the first time in my life, I wasn’t praying because that was the order of the day or there was a particular holiday,” he told her, ‘I need to have this moment with God. I need to talk to him a little bit.’
He had an epiphany then, he said, a startling realisation that all he could do, all he could control, were his prayers.
Today the newspapers tell of Boris Johnson. The faith story to tell is that God has been with his people through the darkness and the chaos of the last three years. We’ve kept connected in the church and zoom is now part of us! We supported each other physically and mentally and we held each other up. As “normal” returns it would be a tragedy to lose that.
So today we mark an anniversary, we reflect on a journey, we hear of parties or work events, we pause to pray for those who still suffer as a result of something we didn’t know how to deal with and we thank God we aren’t abandoned in a crisis and like the Jewish writer when all else is spiralling out of control, we thank God we can control our prayers — and whatever we pray or scream God can take it. Thank God for that!
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