Category: Thought for the week

Friends of ours are amazed at the number of clocks and mirrors we have in our house. Well, I suppose the clocks make sense – I always take off my watch whenever I come into the house. But the mirrors? Are we vain? Perhaps. There are certainly mirrors that I avoid as they make me feel rather overweight! Not at all flattering.
At the fairground, we often have halls of mirrors which distort our bodies in amusing ways. These are so extreme that no one can feel undermined!
In the story of the ugly duckling we have a baby bird that is shunned by the other ducks as his appearance is not right! Until one day he looks at his reflection mirrored in the water and realises he is a beautiful swan. He hadn’t realised something that others could see.
So ‘mirrors’ can be other people and how they react to us. We have a self-view but others will see us as they experience us. If they are open to us as an individual then their response can be a useful tool for us to tackle some of our annoying habits and to acknowledge our strengths and good characteristics. But if they only see our disability, our colour, our religion, our sexual orientation, our politics or even our football team and judge us as a category and not as an individual then that is potentially destructive – either of our self-esteem – or sadly, of our tolerance for them or even ‘them’ as a group.
What I find disturbing about the ugly duckling story is the judgement that someone (in this case a young bird) was ‘ugly’ and to be shunned or made fun of simply because he was different. At the time of writing this, we have just had the Brexit vote and worryingly a big rise in racial abuse and violence has followed. Distrust of others is not a new thing. Sadly it seems to be part of our human make-up, certainly our cultural make-up. Not just in England but throughout every culture. We all have our own personal likes and dislikes. Sometimes these are based on bad experiences and as long as we acknowledge how we feel – but try and act fairly, then that, surely is OK. After all, there are people I don’t’ like (and certainly those who don’t like me!) but I wouldn’t wish any one of them any harm – and would even help them if they I could.
What I do for someone doesn’t depend on whether I like them or even approve of them. Thus I try and avoid being prejudiced in what I do even though I have strong views about quite a few things.

John Belfield, Catholic Deacon, King’s Lynn

Radio and television constantly confront us with shocking news. Just recently we heard in close succession about the killing of forty-nine people in Orlando and the murder of an MP in Yorkshire. These were hate crimes. Hatred has a blinding force. For someone to be so convinced that they are right that they would kill another is to claim a power that does not belong to them.
St Paul in his Letter to the Romans says: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.’ He also says: ‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’. It is easy to say this, but extremely hard to do. Christianity preaches a doctrine which goes against our natural instincts.
The killings in Orlando and Yorkshire were not heroic. The very act of killing showed fear and hatred, a failure of reason, an obsession. The killers chose to kill rather than talk, testifying to personal prejudice rather than asserting the truth.
In contrast, in St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians we read his famous statement on love. ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always, perseveres.’ Each phrase merits careful consideration.
Clearly this is an ideal. But it exists for our imitation and guidance. Jesus told us that we can judge a tree by its fruits, but we cannot pick figs from thistles, or grapes from briers. It is from the mouth that the heart speaks, allowing the good person to produce praiseworthy thoughts and deeds from a generous heart. The evil person, on the contrary, creates wicked deeds from a mind that relentlessly ponders hatred. Clearly, our mind-set inspires our human actions.
MPs of all political parties praised Jo Cox for the respect she accorded to every person in the world. She showed this by her concern and love for people locally and globally. Her killing was an attack on our freedom, liberty and values.
We are asked to show respect to all persons, not just those that we agree with. Pope Francis has said: ‘we must have the conviction that violence can be overcome only by changing human hearts’. We must dedicate ourselves to uprooting prejudice and hostility and replacing it with tolerance, respect and our support for all peoples in need.
John Cairns, King’s Lynn Catholic Church.

What will you be remembering on the 1st July? Healthy young men riddled by machine gun bullets; healthy young heads smashed by shrapnel; still children bathed in mother’s love and God’s; the first day of the Battle of the Somme; 1st July 1916. Like Jesus, they held nothing back, but gave everything. Can God resurrect life from death; innocence from guilt; love from hatred?
While the future can be changed, sinners, who desire power and know best, organise communal death and lonely bereavement. But slowly, God gives the earth to the meek.
Violence oozes like pus from our fights over the future. Christians dream that a pure king with a perfect destiny will define the future. Then violence will die as we listen to the mercy of God.
For now, there is no conflict in true listening, organising a trial solution, listening to the results, modifying the trial and listening again. Evil, on the other hand, will never listen.
For centuries, pain has been used in the pursuit of power like a mediaeval horror. But pain is just the unpleasant sensation at the limits of ability, the invisible sphere surrounding each individual’s life, reminding us of our limitations, the walls of our prison. Pain exists to help us as a protection mechanism by which the body limits damage. Think of the man who couldn’t feel pain in his knee (Charcot’s joint). That knee was destroyed by living beyond its limitations. Bereavement is bouncing off the walls of our prison, our limitations. Pain controls and unites us in the mercy of God.
Jesus is the man who enters my prison and ‘the walls came tumbling down’. To me Jesus calls to us from his Cross –I would rather die than use violence. There is no violence in His Kingdom.
Emotionally we can try to ameliorate bereavement by reducing our desires; seeking justice; feeling the love of others through community and giving; developing skills which are of value to others; forgetting; diagnosing and treating mental illness; working for projects which address the cause of our bereavement; going through the grieving process which slowly tries to accept what has happened or if necessary seeking repentance.
Bereavements are always with us because love is eternal, but the service of others which Jesus teaches opens up new relationships with countless people and a new life of hope.
Glory be to you, Lord Jesus. If you wish it, don’t haunt us but resurrect us; life from death; love from hatred; innocence from guilt. ‘As the distance from east to west, so far from us does he put our faults’. Psalm 103: 12.

Peter Coates, secretary of Churches Together in King’s Lynn.
Linden, Bircham Rd, Stanhoe, Norfolk, PE318PT.

There has been much in the news recently about British astronaut Major Tim Peake and his arrival on the International Space Station. Personally, I would rather keep my feet firmly on planet earth! But there is something about space that has always fascinated and inspired us. When we see pictures of the earth from space it can make us feel incredibly small, but when we consider the mind-blowing vastness of the universe it is hard to see our significance at all. For me, the beauty of our world in its intricate detail and complexity, is best explained by the existence of a Creator. But would the Creator of such vastness be interested in us? The Bible answers that question clearly when it says, “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.” (Ephesians 1:4-5)
Just think about that for a minute, even before he created the universe the Creator was thinking about you and me! He already loved us and was planning to adopt us into his family. Maybe you don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, perhaps you don’t feel very significant or important, but the Creator of the universe loved you even before he created you! He already planned to offer you the chance to become his child. One of my favourite verses in the Bible is 1 John 3:1 “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” The Author of life, the One that personally took attention over creation – including you – wants you to know him as “daddy”. He offers us the chance to be born again into his family and this is made possible through Jesus. We can only come to the Father through the Son. Jesus made the way by becoming man – the Creator became the created – and dying a terrible human death. He died to take away the wrong we have done, and still do, which prevents us from knowing the Father. The invitation is open to all, will you accept?

Wendy Hill
King’s Lynn Christian Fellowship

Fashions change. Avocado bathroom suites are no longer the rage. The trousers and tank tops I wore in the 1970s would be ridiculed today. Music changes. I’m not as familiar with current chart music as I was 40 years ago. By the same token, some people don’t have the same appreciation as I do for the classics of the 1970s and 1980s! As we get older, things don’t work as well as they used to. Things wear out. Infections evolve to resist the antibiotics that we have developed, so that we need to keep looking for better drugs. Public perceptions of morality change. Things that were unacceptable a few years ago are now not only acceptable but to be welcomed. Or at least that’s the “politically correct” view.

Is change a good thing or a bad thing? A family member just celebrated his 100th birthday and it was fascinating to read through an enormous list of inventions from his lifetime, things that we believe we couldn’t possibly do without or that enhance our lives. Where would we be if things just stayed the same?

Change can literally be re-freshing. It’s good to move things around, to develop new skills, to meet new people, to visit new places, to get new perspectives. After all, change brings life. Or is it the other way round? Or both?

However, it’s good to have things that don’t change, that are fixed or permanent, such as cairns on a mountain, mathematical truths, a “moral compass”.

One thing that doesn’t change is our ability to get things wrong, every one of us, whether in the privacy of our individual lives, our families, our workplaces, our communities or on the global stage. We all mess up! So, is there a new, better solution for our ills and problems? Do we need to find new ways to deal with the problem of sin?

The good news is that God is unchangeable and his remedy for sin is unchanging and as powerful as ever it was. Strange as it may seem, the blood of Jesus, shed on the cross, has lost none of its power to wash away everything in our lives that isn’t right and enable us to have a relationship with Him. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever – just turn to Him and let Him change your life.

Andy Osborne
King’s Lynn Christian Fellowship

I can’t begin to imagine the grief of people who are bereaved by terrorism. Innocent people, going about their everyday business, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are killed by those enthralled by hatred. The terrorists’ desire is to destroy all that they hate – themselves and the human society of which they are a part. The bereaved, and those who suffer life changing injury, have their lives torn apart and care for them demands the greatest concern in any humane society, but they are not the only victims. The bombs and the guns are only the beginning. The terrorists’ ambition is to destroy human society by infecting it with fear; fear that will lead to suspicion and hatred. They want neighbours who had lived happily together, to turn against one another and suspect each other of being a threat. They want human society to break down as fear casts out love and hatred replaces kindness.
I can’t imagine the grief of the women who came to the grave of their dear friend on the third morning after he had been killed. Theirs was a world of terror, fear and hatred, suspicion of enemy collaborators, gratuitous violence and innocent suffering. Who knows what they had expected their friend to do, but they, and so many others, had hoped that he would somehow bring an end to their suffering and liberate them from oppression by foreign forces. But their own politicians had collaborated with the foreign powers to execute him: an innocent man sacrificed, crucified, to maintain control and order through fear.
What the women found, compounded their devastation – the body had been removed, the grave desecrated. The authorities had persecuted this man, tortured and crucified him, could they not leave his body at peace? Mary, one of the women, stayed by the grave: heartbroken, crying. Through her tears, she saw someone. “Why are you crying, who are you looking for?” he asked. Perhaps he was in charge, so she said, “If you have removed him, tell me where and I will take him away.” He spoke her name, “Mary,” and then she realised, she recognised him. This was her dear friend, Jesus, whom she had seen crucified, dead and buried. In that instant the whole of her existence was transformed – what had appeared evidence of desecration became a sign of the greatest hope. Jesus is alive, so the empty tomb is not a cause of compounded fear, but a sign of the greatest joy.
In a world surrounded by terror and violence, now as then, the message of Easter is that fear will never conquer love – love will always triumph.

Canon Christopher Ivory
Kings Lynn Minster

The Same Hands

There are approximately one billion trillion stars in our universe. That’s one with twenty-one zeros on the end. On a clear night with a dark sky, the unaided eye may be able to see around three thousand of them.
Our nearest star (the sun) burns with the energy of eighty thousand trillion power stations. That’s eight with sixteen zeros on the end. It burns 4 million tons of fuel a second – the equivalent to four thousand NASA space shuttles. It holds enough fuel to burn for another five billion years. Without the protection of the earth’s atmosphere, heat and radiation from the sun (which is on average 93 million miles away) would destroy us.
The sun is known as a yellow dwarf, which as the name suggests means that its size is dwarfed by its rivals. Every star you can see in the night sky is bigger than our sun. The largest known star in the universe, VY Canis Majoris, is around one thousand times greater (in radius alone) than the sun. If placed in our Solar System, it would engulf all planets up to and including Jupiter.
In the account of the creation of the world, in Genesis 1:16, we hear that God, with his hands “also made the stars”. A work of physics that utterly eclipses the greatest of human achievements- yet it merits the briefest of mentions. For as vast as the skies are (and as vast as His creation is – I could have talked about the 25,000 species of orchids or the 10 million species of organism that currently exist on Earth, the majority of which have not been described yet), God created the world because He is a God of love and a God who desires relationship with us.
The same God who created the world, created us. The same hands that flung stars into space “created my inmost being; knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:16). We were created in His image – to love, to weep, to laugh, to show compassion, to walk with him, to know Him in the minutae of our everyday lives. The same hands that flung stars into space, the same hands stretched out and cruelly nailed to a wooden cross – the same hands reach out in love to ours. We have a choice to extend our hands to Him, to seek Him, to find our true place on this earth in relationship with Him.

Andy King
The Gateway Church, King Lynn

Sale! Declutter! Storage to rent. Buy the latest! Such messages are fired at us in the press and on TV. It seems that we cannot have enough goods. We want the latest innovation. To be old-fashioned or out of date is reprehensible. Often garages attached to houses do not house cars, but unwanted possessions.
The bible says: ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’
Earthly treasures are attractive, but they do not satisfy us. We are never satisfied with what we possess. If we are not careful we will always want more: the big lottery win, the right this or that. There is nothing as fickle and temporary as human taste. We obtain something, and before long we have tired of it, lost all interest in it. If earthly treasure is our priority takes most of our attention, time and energy, then what about the type of treasure Jesus talks about.
How do we store up treasure in heaven? Jesus said: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ ‘Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” ‘The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”’

John Cairns
Kings Lynn Roman Catholics