Thoughts for the Day

Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

(Lectionary, New Revised Standard Version)

Thoughts

In my family there are two different ways of looking at the future, and indeed the past. Adrian, my husband, could remember everyone he had ever worked with, and was renowned for accidentally meeting someone at a busy railway station like Paddington in London, and stopping a seeming stranger and identifying them by name, even though they hadn't met for thirty or more years. But as for the future, well he seemed unable to look ahead, so when our first son was born, it wasn't until that day that he thought about buying baby clothes. On the other hand I look ahead. I plan for the future, but allow for lots of changes if things don't work out. But I am rubbish at putting names to faces and when teaching in the Grammar School would only remember the naughty ones and the clever ones in the different classes.

Having taken hundreds of funerals over the past forty years, I've become all too aware of the fragility of life, and the way death can catch us out, so that all our plans come to nought. James says we are 'like mist' which disappears and it is as though it has never been. While the analogy is rather lovely, I suggest we're often rather more like thick fog which while it exists causes accidents at sea; road crashes; and walkers to fall off mountains! At least a light mist over the stream in the valley behind my bungalow in Pembrokeshire left a wonderful memory of its beauty.

We need to learn to plan ahead certainly, but the refrain should always be "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that." Or perhaps just to end our plans with the words: "God willing!"

Heavenly Father,
we live as though our time on earth
was eternal,
as though accident or illness
will never come our way.
You give us a great task
but we never know when You
will call us home.
May the phrase "God willing!"
be our watchword.
Amen.