brighter

This is the 'Easter week' along at the local secondary school.

At least in the sense that this is the week, in the run-up to the coming Easter holidays, when I'm in at the school to each of the year group assemblies. Each day this week, running down through the years and starting today with the 5th and 6th years.

It's that time of year. The weather last week was well and truly spring-like.

So good, indeed, that someone said it was a foretaste of summer. Someone else, who's plainly been over the course before, begged to differ.

This is summer, they said in the resigned and maudlin tone of voice which Scots have sometimes cultivated as their own.

The blossom's appearing on all of the trees, the daffodils are all coming through, and the days are noticeably longer.

We've passed the vernal equinox, after all.

And you really hear the birds now, good and bright and early.

Not quite the 'cock-crowing' sort of thing, but a gentle intimation that it's good to be up and about and getting on with things from an early hour.

Which is how it's been with myself today. A lot to be done and the sooner I started the better.

There was a piece for our up-coming magazine I needed to write. I've been tinkering around with this piece for a while, jotting down things and heading in different directions.

But today was the day, I'd decided, when I needed to get the thing done.

So that was completed and all sorts of e-mails as well. And some early preparation for the next little round of services there are this week. The Wednesday lunch-time service and the two this coming Sunday.

And some letters as well to write. Fairly lengthy letters, for which the electronic version which is widely used these days (and helpfully so) is in truth no substitute at all.

There was reading I needed to do as well. Some sustained and detailed reading which required a good long spell of thorough concentration.

And people I needed to call by and see as well.

Folk who are largely confined these days. And folk who have been bereaved.

Life's never all that easy. For any of us. But some have it harder than others. The pain and the heartache in sorrows and losses whose depth only God really knows.

A woman well on in her eighties whose husband died a few days short of his 50th birthday, three decades ago and more it now is. A burden on this woman's heart whose scarring grief remains across the years. And now herself no longer fit and able as she once had been and confined in large measure to home.

Another such woman whose first husband died in a tragic and premature way. And she got on with life and started re-building and married again - a fine and a wonderful man. And now he's gone as well.

What sorrow there is in this world.

And how we need the very world around us to remind us in this annual way of the promise that a day of new beginnings is to come.

The birds with the music of their lovely songs. The trees with the beauty of their colour-laden blossom. The days with their lengthening light.

All of them herald the message we so need to hear. A brighter day is coming and a better life is near.

Easter. The death and resurrection of the Son of God.

The searing, cruel pain to which we're all of us exposed.

And the promise of being raised at last to life.

The Easter card which we send round the whole of the district is meant to convey just that.

Life. He gave it. We get it.