So I arrive at the last blog post before Holy Week begins and I’m writing this just leaving Kings Cross station on my way back northwards after journeying south to Frimley in Surrey to celebrate my Aunt and Uncle’s Diamond Wedding.
We’ve been reflecting today on life’s journey. It was fun to look through their wedding album from 1963 and to see my Mum and Dad amongst the throng as well as my Grandma and Grandad. It’s been good to see my cousins Graham and Mandy again and to meet Graham’s wife to be Pippa. We will gather again in August as Graham and Pippa have their wedding. When we meet as family, we naturally think about our journey through life so far.
Any journey brings good and bad experiences. Today I’ve been on a train for the first time since 2019. I’ve hit London for the first time since 2019. The amount of people in the crowds coming at you was a shock. I got a taxi to Waterloo and another from there tonight to avoid the underground and too many people. On any journey, particularly when we don’t know where we are, we need help. I arrived in Frimley at lunchtime and it was very funny my uncle had asked both my cousins there to pick me up forgetting he’d asked the other one so Mandy saw me first and I got in her car. Then we saw Graham in another space looking bemused why I’d walked past his car! I guess two lifts are better than one.
A journey also involves trust. My late mother wouldn’t get on a train because she wouldn’t trust the train was going where it said on the front of it it was going to. I trust this train will arrive in Harrogate about 9.30. I trust that my car will still be in the station car park.
Tomorrow we embark on a spiritual journey. A journey where Jesus reminds us of love like our family love when that works, a journey where Jesus goes through good - popularity - and bad - rejection, a journey on which we are called to trust and stay the course wherever that leads.
From tomorrow my blogs will focus on the raw Holy Week journey. Thank you for staying with me these last thirty nine days. Let’s see what this year’s remembrance of the passion journey brings us and how we might help each other do it faithfully and openly noting what it does to us now.
For Uncle Peter and Auntie Janet, today marks sixty years of companionship, tenderness and trust sharing life’s journey. It was worth getting out of bed at 6am this morning with only three hours sleep to be with them. As Holy Week opens we pray our journey even through the hard bits might bring us as today has brought me, joy and life…
Oh and as I haven’t been on a train in ages and I got a good deal to do this first class, I got a plug this morning to get three services for tomorrow written (by the time we got to Stevenage!) and now some dinner is coming. Sometimes a journey has to have some treats on it. Really!
(Picture of that London but from my library not today. I did see the Houses of Parliament from Waterloo Bridge but I was in a taxi - all £20.20 of it.)
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