The countdown to Easter will have begun by the time you are reading this magazine.
We will have moved from the season of Epiphany into Lent, in preparation for Holy
Week and the joy of our Easter celebrations. Our days will have more light, and our
nights will have less darkness as we move towards British Summer Time (the clocks
go forward on March 30th.) Around the Church grounds, buds are beginning to
emerge from the cold dark earth readying themselves to burst into bloom. As I
survey the wider world around me just now, with all of its depressing news on the
global political stage, these things make me smile and be a little more hopeful. I
recall a line from the poet, Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
Sometimes we must look hard to find hope amid the turmoil of life. And sometimes
we even find hope in the most surprising of places. On a grey bleak February mid
morning I had parked my car at Jonathan Harvey, Funeral Directors car park on
Kenmure Avenue. As I was getting ready to get out of my nice warm car into the
cold and damp, I happened to notice that over the fence behind the old police houses
someone had hung out their washing. Now, there was no sun to speak of that morning.
There was no wind either. How on earth would the washing dry, I thought to myself,
and I began to laugh? It seemed a perfect example of Scottish optimism in the face
of our weather and I carried that hope with me for the rest of the day. As we
approach another Lent and Easter we remember that whilst we have a difficult
journey ahead of us, there is a brighter and better future ahead of us. Whatever
the landscape and our emotions may try and tells us, as Christians we have something
else much more promising before us. As an old soldier and veteran of WW 2 once
told me, “It is better to live in hope than to die in despair.”

Or as St. Paul puts it so aptly,
“We wish you not to remain in ignorance, friends,
about those who sleep in death;
you should not grieve like the rest of mankind,
who have no hope.
We believe that Jesus died and rose again;
so too will God
bring those who died as Christians
to be with Jesus.
Console one another, then, with these words. “ 1 Thessalonians 4: 13 – 14, 18