prophet and loss

There are days when it seems there's a certain sort of 'heaviness' upon your heart.

Today's been that sort of day.

It's not as if I've had loads of time to brood over things. The morning was fairly non-stop. It's a Thursday, after all. Which means a back and forth to the school for an early years morning assembly and, later, the SU group.

Both of which were fine and full of fun. No time to pause and ponder things at all.

And in between there was time well spent with a crowd of folk preparing for the thing we're putting on next week for the pupils of Primary 7.

All about Easter. A chance to work through with them all, and that in some detail, what it is that Easter's all about.

It should be good and the thought of all these children here exposed to this amazing message that the Bible has to tell - well, there's nothing in that to bring about a heaviness of heart!

It's been the knowledge that today's the day we finally mark the passing of a man who in so many ways meant just so much to me.

Rev James Philip.

He was my teacher and my pastor. And though he's now long since retired and in these latter years has not enjoyed good health, his simply always being there has somehow been a comfort and a strength to those like me who owe the man so much.

He died last week. And I think since then the knowledge of the impact that his faithful, gracious teaching of the Bible has had across the years - that knowledge simply heightened all the sense of grief and loss there's been.

I recall to this day the first time that I encountered him.

A Sunday evening service in the dim and distant past when I was vainly seeking, as a mixed-up, struggling, adolescent lad, for something that would give my life some meaning and direction and assuage the churning conflicts in my heart.

I'd never heard in all my life a man pray quite like that. I hadn't a clue what the man was really on about at all. Except I knew that this man knew the Lord.

When it came to the preaching, he lost me. Entirely.

But far from being a switch-off, the fact that I was lost like that served only to instil within my heart a deep desire to find out more.

He might have been speaking double-dutch and I'd still have come back for more. Because every word was steeped, it seemed, with the fragrance and life of the Lord.

I became an addict, there and then, to the nectar that his preaching always was. And he was a pastor, too. A huge big pastoral heart with a warmth in his voice and his smile that could melt the hardest of hearts.

Well, there must have been more than 500 folk there today, the number attending a tribute to all that this preacher and pastor has been.

A gathering there of a wide-spread, loving family - and the very fact of being there brought streams of different memories flooding back. A kind of sanctified nostalgia, I suppose.

And, as the other, not so sacred song declares - those days are past now.

That's why there is, I think, that heaviness of heart. The death with this man of my 'youth': those days when I discovered, with the wonder of a little child and the thrill of a youth setting sail on the seas of adventure, that there is a God whom I may know, with purposes for my life.

This was the man who brought me to birth under God, in the deepest and truest sense. So there was for me particularly a certain sort of poignancy in our marking his death today.

Those days are past now. They must remain there.

Nostalgia is merely the scrapbook we keep of the shores we have long since left. The winds and the waves on the seas I now sail drive me forwards and into the future.

My Grandpa and Gran and my Dad and my Mum - and now my pastor, too - they all are now found on those further shores.

And it's there, with the salt of the seas in the tears of my sorrowing heart and the wind of the Spirit mixed in with the storms I must face - it's there that I'm headed as well.

They were the ones who launched me on this life of faith. I honour them best by my sailing boldly on.