Friday, 20 April 2012

Francis Wheen


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.