Where is God in Manchester and Machynlleth?
Reflections from a terrible week in October
Peter Baker | 19:53, 7th October, 2012
The first week of October started with a UN publication predicting that, within a decade, there’ll be a billion people on the planet over the age of 60. It ended with dreadful uncertainty over the fate of the missing five-year-old Welsh girl, April Jones. That terrible question-mark still hovers over Machynlleth. People search riverbanks, fields and farms, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
And if we needed any more painful reminders of our human vulnerability, in that first week of October, we saw the poignant funerals in Manchester of two young police officers, Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone. They died young, unarmed, and in a hail of bullets and grenades, simply responding to what they believed was a routine call.
It's the apparent randomness of life that embeds questions in the conscience like fishhooks. In the deaths of police officers doing their duty, we ask 'Why do good people fall?'
In a world where population growth overshoots resources, we know that even those who do make it to enjoy older age, will be vastly outnumbered by those for whom their final decades will be characterised by poor social care, poverty and despair.
And why is it that some in our world experience a disproportionate amount of suffering while others remain largely unscarred?
We can offer theories, but none easily satisfy those caught up personally in the sort of tragedies we’ve been witnessing recently. And anyway, right now is not the time for textbook answers.
For families, friends and colleagues of Nicola & Fiona, and little April, this is a time to hope, to mourn, to remember, to recognise how quickly and unpredictably life changes.
If we are going to cope emotionally with that difficult reality, we need a faith for all seasons. The deep down recognition that somehow the good and bad times, the joys and sorrows have a purpose - that there really is a time for everything.
That’s the perspective offered by the famous poem in Ecclesiastes 3.
"There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace."
Though designed for eternity, we are also creatures of time. Someone once said that the real secret of life is knowing how to tell the time properly, by which they meant the ability to read and respond to the various chapters of life appropriately.
When I reflect on that passage in Ecclesiastes, I recognise how contradictory life can be. It’s full of opposites. Take the bookends of life, the cradle and the grave. We come home from hospital with a baby and before we know it we have a parent to bury. There may be a time to weep and a time to laugh but in some situations we don't know whether to laugh or cry. And then there’s the sense that life is relentless, pushing us on, waiting for no one, giving us little time to celebrate our victories or mourn our losses.
And yet ..... there's an overarching awareness that through it all, life has a pattern, and that time is a blessing and that each season has its own distinctive shape. Each chapter of life has a purpose, however confusing and difficult that can sometimes be to work out.
God 'has made everything beautiful in its time,' the poet goes on to say. Living with trust in the Lord of Time, life can be understood as a potter's wheel, not a roulette wheel.
What we all need - the friends, family and colleagues of April, Nicola and Fiona included - is through our understandable grief and pain to discover the Potter whose loving hands are in fact marked by nail prints.
For in the death of Jesus, Christianity has a unique answer to suffering. We have a God who experiences our world from the inside out. He is therefore able both to understand and rescue those who call out to Him.
The Lord of Time entered time so that we might live with purpose through time and into eternity.
