The morning after the night before
Dr Iain Jamieson
December 26, 2019
Add to Favourites
Listen to this daily worship
Luke 2: 19 (NIVUK)
19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
Now, reading the title, I’ll bet you all thought that I was going to talk about parties and carousing into the wee small hours. No, today I’m going to talk about that night, or that day, or that experience that changes us profoundly... and the morning after.
There are times in life when you find out that what you thought was going to happen doesn’t, what you thought your life was going to be simply isn’t, and that all the things you took for granted have just been blown to bits.
That stuff is hard and it rocks us to our very core.
We all ‘write the script’ for the next few hours, days, weeks, months and years. Sometimes life hits the delete key and all of that is just gone.
Now, we can spend hours pressing redo, searching for that file or even trying to simply remember what we wrote — but after the shock, after the “event” the “thing” whatever it is for you (and to be honest what I’m talking about can be so huge I’m not even sure there is a word the encapsulates it), you just…
Stop.
It is such a fundamental part of what makes us human and what makes our minds work that we necessarily imagine ourselves into possible futures. So when that possible future is just snapped away… you stop feeling human.
Slowly, slowly we begin to rebuild the pieces, pick up where we left off, try and pointlessly look back (as if we could change the past). It doesn’t just ‘work', it takes grace.
It takes grace to glue our shattered bits back together, grace to make sense of what’s happened, grace to take us gently by the hand and allow us to imagine for ourself a future at all.
It takes grace once again, to envisage something new, and different, and ours alone, and grace to walk with us as we are walking on.
PRAYER:
Father,
I’m pondering these things in my heart today
I’m in the aftermath of the storm
Picking through the pieces
Wondering what happened
Give me a helping hand
Help me put 'me' back together
Today
And every day after —
the day before.
Amen.
Login to comment.