retired?

"Are you a retired minister, then?"

It wasn't the opening welcome I'd quite expected. And not having looked in the mirror recently I began to think I must have really aged.

"Pardon me?" I gently enquired.

I didn't want to get drawn along this line of conversation all that far. The lady's husband had died and this was me calling to see her. There were other more relevant matters we needed to talk through than the date of my retirement (alleged).

The problem was not to do with how I appeared, but what she had picked up from speaking with the funeral undertakers. She hasn't really done this sort of thing before and coupled with anxiety and grief, it was hard to take all she was told entirely on board.

She'd got the impression that it would be a retired minister who'd be taking the service.

Her husband was a good deal older than her (I'd have thought). He was 92 when he died some days ago. And she looked nothing at all like that.

I asked at one point how they'd met. It was, she declared, in a pub. She'd spoken to him and said that he'd looked so much like her Dad.

Which is an interesting opening gambit for your chat-up lines. And probably doesn't always work that well. So don't feel you have to try it, girls!

She's not had things easy in life. And I suppose she's not untypical of many today.

She'd been married herself before she met this man, now her husband, who'd died. And one of her sons had been killed aged 26, some twenty years or so ago.

A sore and painful memory. For a mother, not least, I guess a thing like that makes little sense. It's hard to see where God fits in at all.

Why are these things allowed?

And what about the Holocaust as well? How can events like that be allowed to go on in a world where God's in charge?

There are questions like that which linger for long in many a person's heart. And I don't have ready answers.

I was along in the morning at the local secondary school. They were hosting a one-act production, the life of Eva Schloss - Anne Frank's step-sister. It was powerful stuff, horrific the things that so many like her had to face.

The lady herself came on at the end and shared in a question/answer sort of thing. How do you feel about Germans now? What do you think of revenge? How did you manage to hold any hope?

All sorts of questions like that. No easy answers.

Strange how the service t lunchtime should have focussed on Joseph's experience long ago in Egypt. Long years of bitter darkness, hurt and misery. And then an amazingly sudden, remarkable reversal.

It must have seemed for long enough so hopeless for the guy. The cards all stacked against him. No light at the end of the tunnel and life itself conspiring right against him all the time.

Where is God? he must have often wondered in the corners of his soul.

Well, not retired at any rate! That's for sure.

I guess you must read to the end of the book before you make the judgments as to what on earth's going on.

Faith means believing in advance what only makes sense in reverse.

God's not retired. And I'm not retired.

And it's hope above all that the good news of Jesus imparts.

To this lady as well, in all of her grief, I trust.