Jagged Edges

It's been a tiring week for me, but much more so for others close to me.

But, to start at the beginning ... it began in an orderly and planned way.  I may have mentioned that my friend and I have been working for some months on a plan to distribute our church Christmas cards.  Last weekend was the time of testing, when all the cards, bundled into 'walks' for easy distribution, were available for collection by the volunteers.  It was nice to see the whole thing coming to a conclusion, a week ahead of schedule and well before the usual pre-Christmas panic that seems to overwhelm everyone.

A little photographic game has been going the rounds on Facebook in recent days.  In common with many people, I was invited to post a series of black-and-white pictures illustrating, without comment and without the inclusion of people in the pictures, my everyday life.  Some had taken up the challenge by posting high points of their past or their travels, but I decided that my seven pictures would tell the story of a potentially real day, and the idea of being in black and white added a sense of drama.  I began with the bed I'd just got out of, continued through interests that might typically be included in a day of my life, and ended with the washing up that I might come home to after an evening out.  In the light of what was to come, such a return could be termed a 'jagged edge': something broken off, the threads of which would need to be taken up again.

On Sunday evening I attended a one-off performance of a new musical - so new that it was introduced as a 'work in progress' - at our local theatre.  Called 'The Navigator', it was set in the RAF of wartime.  Although the cast and musicians had only been working together for a fortnight, the acting and movements were smooth and convincing, the singing clear and powerful; in short, to my eye at least, the whole performance was faultless.  It told the story of the crew of a bomber, Q for Queenie, and movingly illustrated the effect of the war on these men and on their interaction with each other and with the women in their lives.  Above all, the image I was left with was the way that war, and the death that it brings with it, slices across the lives of all it touches, having its own way, and leaving the jagged edges of unfinished - often unfinishable - business behind it.  After such a performance, it was easy to recognise such an effect on my own family and others I knew, but it's important too to realise that the same tragedy is going on across the world today.

As I went about my 'everyday life' in the following days: the regular prayer breakfast, a visit to the hairdresser, catching up with my Welsh course (neglected for a variety of reasons for some weeks lately), preparing my own Christmas cards, and so on, I little realised how my life was about to be impacted in something of a similar way.

My friend's little boy had not been well for a couple of days and, instead of going to nursery as usual, had slept most of Tuesday.  By Wednesday morning there seemed to be an improvement, and all seemed well.  Suddenly around lunchtime, came an urgent appeal for prayers ... he was about to be rushed to hospital having difficulty breathing!  It may seem a strange admission but, as I later described it, I found myself learning something about what real love must feel like.  Although I have no 'actual' relationship to the boy or his family, I've become very fond of them all in recent months and, I confess it, I was in floods of anxious tears as I prayed earnestly for his well-being, and safe passage through whatever ails him.

These last two days have passed in something of a blur and, with the news that antibiotics and hospital treatment seem at last to have set him on the road to recovery, I'm only now able to focus properly on what I'm doing.  We had a Bible study meeting on Wednesday afternoon, and the number of times I lost track of what I should have been leading was embarrassing; yesterday I was ringing for a funeral, and my thoughts were very definitely not with either the deceased or his widow.  If I hadn't been ringing bells for nearly 50 years, it could easily have gone so terribly wrong!

Looking back from the sunshine of Friday morning, not just on these immediate events but the shape of the whole week, I begin to see a continuity, an understanding of the very fragility of life and how easily it can be dramatically disrupted.  Worse, I realise that what I have experienced is only from the outside.

How much more disrupted have been the lives of those actually involved, whether it be in illness, in the other dramas of normal life, or in the sacrifices of war.  No wonder, then, that many of those who had survived the horrors of the Western Front or the suffering of the Far East prison and labour camps - or the home-front shock of bereavement - were reluctant, perhaps unable, to share their experiences!