Hope

On Sunday morning we had to set out for church at 6.30 am. We were on our way to one of our last link church visits, to St Peters in Harold Wood. This church incidentally was the one I worshipped at for the three years before I first went to Zambia back in 1992, so this was my original main sending church. They gave me a big commissioning in church back then, and my home group had a great party. But in the nineteen years since those farewells, several of the older, prayerful people who were interested in Africa and in me have died, and most of the younger people who I really knew have moved on to other jobs and churches. But there are a handful of people I still know well including the leaders of my home group, and it was lovely to see them again. And I experienced the same bitter-sweet feelings of the sadness of ending a long-standing relationship, of perhaps never seeing some of these people again (since it is pretty far away from Gloucester), but also the relief of putting aside everything that goes with being on support  - the guilt feelings of splashing out on a pastry with that cup of coffee at La Patisserie (again), the self-doubt when writing the monthly prayer-letter - have I done enough this month to justify all the money people have given out of their own pockets to support me? But it was real pleasure to catch up with old friends at St Peters, and as always, we left feeling so pleased we had made it, and so thankful for the warmth and prayer and kindness of people.

Anyway, we set out early that morning, in the dark, having had to scrape the ice off the windscreen and warm up the car before we got in, all feeling still sleepy and cold and over-bundled in hats and scarves in the car. Half an hour later it was still dark and the roads were empty, and the bare trees were looming from the road-sides, stripped branches with twigs for crooked fingers poking out, and black clouds were moving ragged against the dark sky, and I thought about what it would be like if we knew that it was never going to get light, if there was no thought that the sunrise was coming. I imagined myself in some apocalyptic world, like in the movie "The Road", where it was never going to get properly light again. And I thought how horrifying it would be, and how hopeless. In fact I don't think I could go on, if I didn't know the light was coming.

Gradually, thankfully, the sky lightened at the edges, the clouds stood out more starkly against the pale, the silhouetted trees looked less scarey, and at last, directly ahead of us, the intensely bright, orange-rind rim of the Sun slipped up above a hillside, and light poured into all the sky.

Jesus being born into the world 2000 years ago was like the sun rising after years of darkness.

But the darkness is still here in many ways. And today, hearing the news, looking back at the events of 2011, it feels as though this year the darkness was as grim and perhaps hopeless as it has ever been. So many natural disasters, tsunamis and floods, financial recession returning for a "double dip", leaders losing popularity, an Arab Spring bringing with it persecution of Christians, rising prices all over the world, cuts and riots in England, no power in Uganda, Zimbabwe still suffering under the grip of evil... But knowing that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and knowing that he is coming again, is the promise of the Sunrise that will certainly come, and is the promise that gives us hope and enables us to keep going, even at the end of 2011.