Friends

In “High-Flying Geese” by Browne Barr we are told the following story: A child who was late returning from an errand explained to her worried parents that she had come across a friend who had dropped her beloved china doll and it had smashed to pieces on the sidewalk. “Oh,” her father said, “You stopped to help her pick up the pieces.” “No,” the child answered, “I stopped to help her cry.”

Over the last three weeks, we have been stopping to help the people of the Ukraine cry, and for those of a generation that can still remember the Blitz, old emotions are being re-released by pictures on our television screens of bombed-out buildings and rubble-strewn streets. We haven’t just stood in solidarity metaphorically either. We have donated money and goods to organisations, particularly in Poland and Moldova where refugees are either passing through or remaining and of course the Ukraine itself. Meanwhile we hear that we have not, through lack of ability or political will, been able to help all those we had hoped to from the wars still raging in Syria and Afghanistan. Humans it seems, are not a peaceful people.

For we who are Christians, following the one whose name is “Wonderful, Counsellor, Almighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”, the call to peace is strong, but also difficult. “Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end” we are told in Isaiah chapter 9, and yet we struggle to follow in this way, not because we don’t think that peace is a good thing, but because it is an impossible thing. We have tried. We may know people who have refused to fight; we may have looked at countries that have successfully remained neutral; we may wonder what price that has demanded.

We cannot simply say that we think that peace is a good idea, we need to consider how peace can be achieved. We should pray, we should where possible act, we should speak to our children about our diplomats as if they are the super-heroes of the modern world, as perhaps they are, and imbue in them a desire to follow in such footsteps. And when we, like the little girl in the story above, take time out of our lives to help others cry, we should remember that after we have cried, it is necessary to get back up. Like Elijah in the desert cave, we need to listen for the still, small voice, and then we need to get up, go out and follow.

God bless,

Vicci.