Still Quarrying: Ten Thousand Places.

I have a thing about kingfishers.  Kingfisher curtains in my wee study, kingfisher print on a house wall, kingfisher ornaments.  I don't try to analyse it too much but the shape, the colour, the flight, it all just seems to come together and make a deep impression on me.  Not  to mention the thought that this is just one more evidence of God's Goodness to us in Creation.

Yet in all my seventy  years of life I have only actually seen one kingfisher in flight.  I was walking on the bank of the Forth and Clyde canal with Gabrielle and one flashed across the surface of the water, brightening up an otherwise overcast morning.  Just one sight of a favourite living creature but the impact has lasted with me and, please God, will last forever. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins touches on this in his poem: As kingfishers catch fire . . .’    The things we hear, touch and see have the power to touch us in the depths because they all come from God.  Those great lines:

‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.’  

So, it’s not surprising that even a brief glimpse of something beautiful can stay with you forever.  This is Christ playing out in ten thousand places!  Even more so when the Word who was there in the beginning speaks clearly to you and draws you close to His heart, perhaps for the first time.  Or perhaps with a word of assurance when live is hard and challenging to faith.  Or when He strikes you with a truth hitherto not completely understood.

In the long run of things these are moments, drops in time, but in Christ  they are eternal.  ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and touch the heart of one man forever so, as the apostle Peter would say, the Word is a seed eternally planted.