Personal Blogs

“If the brief meeting of a stranger can awaken in us a longing that this world has no time to satisfy, perhaps we were made for a place where no good meeting ends in goodbye.”

Where No Good Meeting Ends in Goodbye

My wife and I were wandering around Princess Square in Glasgow with that pleasant little problem familiar to anyone surrounded by restaurants: too much choice. We looked at one menu, then another. Perhaps Italian? Maybe something light? Possibly somewhere we had eaten before? All the while, I am balancing these ordinary decisions with the reality of pancreatic cancer, so choosing what and where to eat can sometimes feel like a decision of rather more than ordinary importance.

Then, quite unexpectedly, lunch ceased to be the most interesting thing happening.

We met a family from Lahore in Pakistan who were visiting Glasgow. There was nothing dramatic about the encounter, no great event to report; we simply began talking. Yet almost immediately there was a warmth about them that caught my attention, one of those difficult-to-define moments when strangers somehow cease to feel entirely strange.

I have a custom when I leave home each day: I often pray that God will bring someone across my path. I realise that may sound unusual to some people, but I have done it for years, and remarkably often someone appears. Not necessarily someone who needs anything from me, nor someone to whom I have something profound to say. Sometimes it is simply another human being whom, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, I am glad to have met. This family was like that.

What particularly moved me were the son and daughter. They were respectful and attentive while we spoke. There was none of that sense that the younger members of the family were merely waiting impatiently for the adults to finish. They were present; they listened and participated in that quiet way. When eventually we parted, every member of the family shook our hands.

It was such a small thing: a handshake, a smile, a few words exchanged between people whose lives, until that moment, had been unfolding thousands of miles apart. Yet something had happened. For a few minutes, the categories by which we so often arrange humanity became unimportant. Pakistani and Scottish, visitor and resident, Muslim and Christian perhaps; whatever our differences might have been, they did not need to disappear for us to recognise something more fundamental in one another. Here was another family: parents who loved their children, young people being raised with courtesy and dignity, human beings making their way through the strange and beautiful business of life, just as we were.

Then came the part of such encounters that has always troubled me a little. We said goodbye, they walked one way through Princess Square and we walked another, and within moments the crowd had swallowed them up. It is one of the peculiar sorrows of human life that we can sometimes feel an immediate affection for people we are almost certain never to see again. For a few minutes two stories touch, and then they separate.

They will return home carrying their memories of Scotland, while my wife and I will return to our own life. Their children will grow older. Years will pass. There will be birthdays and joys, disappointments and discoveries, marriages perhaps, children perhaps, and all the unexpected turns that make up a human life. Whole chapters will be written in their story of which we shall know absolutely nothing. And yet, for those few minutes in Glasgow, our stories crossed.

Why should that affect us? Why should someone who was a stranger only minutes before leave behind a faint sense of loss when they disappear? Perhaps there is something within us that protests against the brevity of human connection. We are forever meeting people for whom there is not enough time. We discover a kindness just as the conversation must end. We glimpse something admirable in another person just as the train arrives, the holiday finishes, the meal ends, or somebody glances at the clock and says, “Well, we must be going.” In a curious way, we spend our lives beginning relationships that time does not allow us to finish.

For those of us who believe in God, there is another possibility; some encounters are not meant to be possessed or prolonged; they are simply meant to be received. A stranger does not have to become a lifelong friend for the meeting to have meaning. God may occasionally allow two human lives to touch briefly so that each might carry away a little evidence of the goodness in the other.

That family from Lahore gave me such a gift in Princess Square. They reminded me that goodness does not belong to one nationality, one culture or one corner of the earth. We encounter it in parents and children, in courtesy and attentiveness, in hospitality and humour, and in the simple willingness to stop and recognise the humanity of someone whose life may be very different from our own.

I am convinced that strange sadness we sometimes feel when good people disappear into the crowd is telling us something. If the brief meeting of a stranger can awaken in us a longing that this world has no time to satisfy, perhaps we were made for a place where no good meeting ends in goodbye.

I cannot know whether I will ever see that family again, and in the ordinary course of things I probably will not. But my belief  has taught me to be careful with the word never. There is something wonderfully unfinished about the Christian understanding of human life: goodbye need not necessarily mean the end of the story.

For now, I am simply grateful that among all those people moving through Princess Square that day, our paths crossed. My wife and I had gone in looking for somewhere to eat, studying menus and wondering what might satisfy our hunger. Yet we came away having received something that was never written on any menu: a brief encounter with strangers who, for a few precious minutes, did not feel like strangers at all.

Written by Jim, with editorial assistance from ChatGPT.

I Will Miss This World

On our walks along Scotland’s west coast — something my wife and I have done for years — we often drift into our own quiet worlds. The sea, the sky, the wind off the loch lomond: they create a kind of gentle solitude we share without speaking. On one of those walks, I found myself thinking how beautiful this planet is, and how much I will miss it when my time here ends.

The thought was prompted, oddly enough, by a man I met who told me he’d abandoned his disappointing hotel and booked into another, taking the financial hit just to salvage his holiday. I understood him. Life is short, and we try to gather good memories while we can.

If you’re new here and haven’t read the backstory, let me bring you into it.

Three years ago, I learned that the very cells which had served me faithfully all my life had turned traitor. They staged a rebellion in my prostate, marched to my pancreas, and finally settled in my liver — a cancerous time bomb quietly ticking inside me.

The diagnosis arrived in September 2023. Neuroendocrine cancer. Spreading. Serious. Delivered gently, almost tenderly, by a consultant who knew there is no script for receiving such news.

And yet, I discovered there was a script — one written long before I knew I would need it.

On the morning I was due to receive my results, something extraordinary happened. Before I stepped into the hospital, before the diagnosis had a name or a prognosis, God spoke to me through words I hadn’t sought but that arrived like a lifeline dropped into deep water:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” — Psalm 91:1–2

I didn’t read those words casually. They were spoken into my spirit — not just read, but revealed. It felt as though God leaned close and whispered: This is for you. For today. For what you’re about to hear.

I turned to my wife and said, “We’re going to get bad news today.”

And He didn’t stop there.

That evening, my wife — who has walked every step of this path with me — showed me something I had missed. She had been reading the same psalm, but her eyes were drawn to its closing verses:

Because he loves Me, I will deliver him; because he knows My name, I will protect him. When he calls out to Me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him My salvation. — Psalm 91:14–16

In her quiet way, she revealed what I needed most: God was not only promising protection — He was promising presence. Not just a fortress, but companionship in trouble. Not just deliverance, but honour. And most tender of all: long life, whether measured in days here or in eternity with Him.

Cancer can make you feel absurdly small — like Sisyphus, condemned to push the stone of your own body uphill, knowing it will only roll back down. Camus wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, that the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. But unlike Camus’s Sisyphus, my life is not condemned to futility. The stone is heavy, yes — but I do not push it alone. God’s presence transforms the absurd into the bearable, and the unbearable into the meaningful.

Viktor Frankl, who endured the concentration camps, wrote that those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. My why is clear. It is anchored not in medicine or prognosis, but in God — my refuge, my fortress, my salvation. I know how easily this can sound like well‑worn Christian rhetoric. But unless you’ve walked this path with God yourself, you may never know how it feels from the inside.

Psalm 91 does not promise the absence of pain. It promises His presence in it. It promises that when we love Him and call on Him, He hears, He answers, He walks with us.

I may have been given a year, but I have been given far more than that — I have been given hope. Not wishful thinking, but anchored hope. The kind that steadies a man living with a time bomb inside him.

To anyone who has sat in that sterile room and heard the doctor say “cancer,” or who lies awake wondering what the future holds: God still speaks. And more than that — He stays.

There is a future for those who walk with God. John 5:24 says:

Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not come under judgment. Indeed, he has crossed over from death to life.

Before all this, I was working on a book called What It Means to Be Human, exploring the question from Christian, subjective, and objective angles. These days I write smaller, “word of the day” style pieces instead — finishing them when I finish them — many of which appear here. Thank you for reading.

And as for the man searching for a better hotel, a better experience, a better memory — I hope he found it. We all want our days, however many remain, to be good ones.