This will appear next week in the 'Yours Faithfully' column of the Milngavie and Bearsden Herald:
The trouble with listening to the
radio when you are driving is that you can become easily distracted. It happened to me listening to the news
the other day. There was an item
about the writer Francis Wheen (that's him on the left) who had seen his garden shed burned to the ground. No big deal, you might say. Nothing there, surely, that cannot be
replaced. The trouble was that
Wheen did not use his shed to store garden tools and other implements. He used it as his study. It contained at least 5, 000
books, including some first editions, along with notebooks, letters and
research documents which had been gathered throughout his lifetime. To add to the pain, he was well into a
new novel. Yes, he had backed it
up on a disc but do I need to tell you where the disc was? Everything was gone.
I can honestly say that I winced
when I heard of Wheen’s loss but was amazed at how composed he sounded when
being interviewed. He said
that he was not the first writer to lose a work in progress to a fire. For instance, Thomas Carlyle gave his
friend John Stuart Mill the manuscript of his history of the French Revolution
to read for advice or comment before he handed it to his publisher. Mill’s maidservant used it to light the
fire. Carlyle’s response was just
to start all over again. And that is what Wheen proposed to do.
It reminded me of something the
apostle Paul once wrote:
‘We are pressed on every side by
troubles, but we are not crushed and broken. We are perplexed, but we don’t give up and quit. We are hunted down, but God never
abandons us. We get knocked down,
but we get up again and keep going.
Through suffering, these bodies of ours constantly share in the death of Jesus so that the
life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.’ (2 Corinthians 4: 8-10)
Paul knew what it was to have
dreams dissolve, relationships sour, precious things lost, not least health and
strength. He was able to carry on,
not just because of an inherent toughness or an unusual determination but because
he believed in the power and purpose of the Risen Jesus. He believed that through the power of
the Holy Spirit Jesus was present
with him in every circumstance and that He was always working for good.
It is a challenge to live like
this but the more we know about this Jesus the more we understand that nothing
will ever separate us from His love.
