It is an absolutely glorious day in Glasgow.  Cold, but lovely.  For me, it is a day when it feels good to be alive but of course it is not so for everyone...

Craig posts here about the potential deportation of a minor from Glasgow.  The smallness of the world and the interconnectedness of Baptist and Iona Community life means many readers know at least some of the people involved.  For Craig, for Rima and her family, the weather man may say fine today but it's raining in their hearts.

Likewise for Clare and Tim in Manchester, watching the demolition of the little chapel where they have faithfully exercised ministry for ten and twenty years respectively makes even the brightness of this day a little more chill, a little more bleak.

In moments like this I find myself reminded of the little phrase tucked into Paul's 'body' metaphor for the church that says 'when one part suffers, the whole suffers' (too lazy to look it up, hence the paraphrase.)  It does not diminish my joy in the sunshine or my delight in the full moon that hangs in the sky at night but it does mean that I am touched by the pain of their suffering.

On Sunday one of the passages I used was Ecclesiastes 3 - a time for everything.  Too readily we slip into a kind of dualism (or I do) of seeing the pairs as alternatives, one experiences either one or the other.  Actually part of the mystery is that birth and death, building and uprooting, gathering and scattering are intertwined and often roughly-speaking coincident.  Rather than 'either/or' this is 'both/and'.

Among my favourite prayers is the Jewish ghetto prayer that says (roughly)

I believe in the sun though it does not shine;

I believe in love though I don't feel it;

I believe in God though God be silent.

Today, when the sun is bright, and my heart is glad, and I have even seen glimpses of divine activity in apparently inconsequential decisions, so too I know that for others the shadows are chill, the heart breaks and heaven seems a resounding void... Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayers.