God knows

Early starts on a Monday morning are not a combination that I'd usually choose! (For obvious reasons - I'm generally dead beat after a Sunday: and last night was no exception)

But this morning I needed to see my son off at the airport at just a bit before 5.30am. An effort to roll out of bed at that sort of time of day, but Johnny Cash blaring his 'Walk the line' in my ear (on my mobile phone alarm) was good enough to get me up and going for the day.

I was glad to be up, I have to say, because I hadn't had the chance before to do much preparation for the service of thanksgiving being held mid-morning. So a good few hours without a soul around was just ideal for thinking through just what I'd say and how I'd paint the picture of a man I'd never met.

He'd lived in the village here for countless years - but I have no recollection of encountering him at all, despite my being here now for nineteen years myself. He was a quiet, private man, certainly; and there wouldn't have been much we shared in common, I suppose: so our paths were hardly all that likely to cross.

But it still seems strange to live and work so close to someone else for all that length of time and never really meet the man at all (well, not to my knowledge).

It made me think of the grave that there is on the beach at Inneanmor (down the Mull of Kintyre): the beach is pretty remote and only reached by a three-mile trek across the moors: and the grave that's marked out way down at the beach has been there since 1917 - an unknown sailor whose body was washed up on the shore.

There's a little cross and on the cross the two short words - God knows. That says it all. With a succinctness of which I'm envious!

God knows. I'm glad of that. Because I have to say I did not know a thing about the man for whom today, along with others, I was giving thanks.

It's like being blind when other people see (for mostly all those present would have known the man at least in part) - and then being asked to paint for them a picture or a likeness of this man I've never met which would at last enable them to see him as he really was! The blind illuminating those who see!

I find such funeral services pretty hard. Well, I find all such services hard. But such as these are doubly so because I'm really doing it 'blind'.

I remember from years ago a lady in Cumbernauld who'd once been able to see but had long since lost her sight. Ruby McTaggart was her name (strange how some names come easily back to mind): she was a lovely little lady, and I recall her very vividly saying one day that she actually 'saw' things better now that she had lost her natural sight.

I sometimes think of her at times like this, when I, too, am acting 'blind'. And the 'sight' I have to use is very much a 'sight' that's given me by God. God knows. Back to that again.

In some ways that communicates to those who gather at such services. For they must know themselves that I have never met the man and if I paint a picture that evokes for them the essence of the man they've known, then that can only be by God's good grace. Because I cannot know the man, the logic of it is that God must be the one who knows.

God knows. I hope that comes across - and maybe serves to wake folk up to something that is absolutely basic to our lives.

The down-side, of course, of an early start like that is that I'm ready for bed by the middle of the day! Siesta time. I try to stop for a little spell in the middle of each day (it doesn't always work!) - and I figured I'd need to today!

A ten-minute doze did me the world of good! Just as well. I had a lot to do preparation-wise, as I was to see Lisa and William tonight about the baptism of their little girl this coming Sunday and I wanted to have at least a draft idea of how the service might look.

I like a service like that to be personal for the family concerned - as well as appropriate for the wider family of God's people gathered together for worship. But because I don't really know the couple that well, it's a bit of a 'shot in the dark': in other words, I'm again obliged to do it 'blind', and trust the Lord to lead me in the choice of praise.

What a thrill, then, later on at night, when I called on them at their home to find that the very first item of praise that I'd picked was a hymn that they'd sung on their wedding day! God knows!

I was going to say it was obviously that sort of day. But, no, that's how it is each day and all the time!

Like this afternoon, as well, when I'd sensed I should call on a family who've just been bereaved (the service of thanksgiving for the lady who'd died will be this coming Wednesday).

Sometimes there's just this overwhelming burden on my heart to go and call at someone's door: I don't know why, I only know that I should go. So I'd gone to their door and the daughter-in-law who opened the door was really quite taken aback: they'd had a dreadful day - their teenage daughter, on the road down south to start back on her university course, had been involved in an accident: the car a total write-off, the girl herself (thankfully) quite safe.

So I think my pitching up like that just then was really quite a comfort. A sort of reassurance that there is, indeed, a God who knows and cares.

Just how important that can be for people in their need .. well, God knows!