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Jim McCrory

Strangers Today, Neighbours in Eternity

Saturday 7 March 2026 at 18:57
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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday 8 March 2026 at 08:08

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Strangers Today, Neighbours in Eternity

Wasn’t it Gwendolyn Brooks, in Maud Martha, who once wrote about all this life and what shall we do with it? Bless her for asking.

We may have met before. Perhaps on the West Highland Way. Or that day in Dubrovnik. Maybe Warsaw or Berlin. It might even have been at a Horslips gig in Glasgow or the time I was in Boston. Perhaps we went to school or university at the same time. Who knows?

Or perhaps we have never met at all. What are the chances?

I found myself pondering this as I wandered through Glasgow yesterday. The streets were full of people. Some bright with a ready smile. Some carrying their burdens like invisible luggage.

A woman stood quietly debating which jumper to buy. For her husband perhaps. Or maybe for her dad. A man in a wheelchair asked gently for a few coins. In Waterstones a fellow was buying six books, moving with the certainty of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for.

I caught myself wondering about him. Gifts, or indulgence? Either way he seemed a well read soul.

And there it was again. That restless longing the Portuguese sometimes speak of, the ache to know the world and its people.

As the city opened around me, it felt like moving through a tapestry woven from unspoken stories. Each person I passed was a quiet universe. Complete. Complicated. Immeasurably rich. Yet all I glimpsed were small fragments. A glance. A gesture. The turn of a shoulder as someone slipped past.

It is astonishing how many lives we brush against without ever stopping long enough to feel the contours of their humanity.

Still, something in me thrills at these brief proximities. I find myself imagining the paths that brought each stranger to that precise moment beside me on Buchanan Street.

Were they running late? Thinking of someone they love? Wrestling with a decision? Savouring a small secret joy?

There is a gentle magic in the not knowing. A soft wonder that asks nothing more than attention.

I suppose that is the heart of it. The warmth I feel does not come from conversation but from possibility. The possibility that any one of these unknown faces might have been a friend, a confidant, a companion for a few miles or a few years.

We pass through one another’s stories like shadows. Yet the passing leaves an imprint, however faint.

It reminds me that the world is wide and still full of people I have yet to meet. People who might change the colour of my days.

As I walked, the thought settled into me with surprising tenderness. Even in a crowd we are not alone. We share the pavement. The weather.  The faint smell of food drifting from a stall.

We share the quiet truth that life is happening around us constantly and vibrantly. And we are part of it whether we speak a word or not.

Perhaps that is why strangers draw my attention. They represent the untold. The unfamiliar. The chapters not yet written.

They remind me that the world is not exhausted. There are still stories waiting beyond the bend in the road.

By the time I reached the end of my walk dusk had begun to gather over the rooftops. The city lights flickered alive and scattered gold into the evening air. People hurried past with shopping bags swinging and scarves pulled tight against the cold.

I watched them for a moment and felt that gentle ache again. Not loneliness. Something closer to a longing for connection, however brief.

Perhaps we have crossed paths somewhere. Or perhaps our worlds will never quite collide.

Still, the thought of you. Another unknown face moving through its own landscape. Another story unfolding somewhere beyond my view. That thought carries a quiet comfort.

In the great weave of things we are all wanderers. Drawn toward one another by the simple warmth of being human.

And then another thought rose. Soft but steady.

Perhaps the warmth we feel toward unknown faces is not only for this world.

It may echo something deeper. A quiet recognition that in the long light of eternity many of these unknown faces may one day become familiar.

After all, life does not end with our brief crossings on a winter street. With eternity in view there will be time enough to meet those whose names are written in God’s Book of Life. Time without hurry. Time without loss. Time to see one another as we were meant to be.

Christians have long spoken of the promises of Scripture as carrying both a present glow and a future one. A hope we taste now. A fullness still to come.

Paul wrote of the hidden wisdom of God. Of things no eye has seen and no mind could yet imagine, now made known in Christ. Again and again Scripture points toward a restored creation. A world made whole. A place where sorrow, death, and decay no longer have the final word.

If that is so, then every stranger I pass may be someone I will one day greet not with curiosity but with recognition.

The woman choosing the jumper.
The man in the wheelchair.
The fellow with six books under his arm.

And countless others whose paths brushed mine for a moment and then were gone.

For now we move through a world filled with lives known only to God. Yet the day is coming when loss will have no place. When separation will end. When the warmth of unknown faces will become the joy of known ones.

Beloved. Redeemed. Gathered together in the same forever.

Most likely we have never met.

At least not yet.

But in the hope set before us there remains a promise. Someday, in the renewed creation God is shaping even now, there will be life enough to meet, to know, and to rejoice together in the great story He has written.

“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no heart has imagined
what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

1 Corinthians 2:9

Tags: 1 Corinthians 2:9, eternity, paradise, smilling faces in the crowd.
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Jim McCrory

But Seas Between Us Broad Have Roared

Sunday 25 January 2026 at 18:43
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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday 25 January 2026 at 18:45

But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
And there's a hand my trusty friend
And give me a hand o' thine
And we'll take a right goodwill draught
for auld lang syne

Robert Burns

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But Seas Between Us Broad Have Roared

I have a large plastic folder at home that I cannot throw away.

I have been careful about almost everything else. Since my cancer diagnosis, I have done what the Swedes call death cleaning: giving things away, discarding what no longer earns its place, loosening my grip on objects that once felt essential—like photos, which I have passed on to posterity. Books have gone. Papers. Mementoes I defended for years with elaborate justifications now seem strangely willing to leave.

But not this.

The folder is plain and slightly warped with age. Inside it are business cards and contact cards collected over decades, mostly from Christian conventions and gatherings in Berlin, Paris, Edinburgh, and other cities whose names still feel larger than my present world. The cards are from the French, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Swedes, and other nationalities. Names, email addresses, family photos, and phone numbers—sometimes with handwritten notes; details that felt important at the time.

There is no practical reason to keep them. Decades have passed. I will not contact these friends. Life, with its quiet and uncompromising turns, has made that impossible. Some of them will be dead. Some unreachable. Some so changed that even recognition would feel dishonest. I am no longer who I was when these cards were exchanged across café tables strewn with leaflets, faith, and optimism.

And yet the folder remains.

What it holds is not a network, nor even nostalgia in the usual sense. It is evidence. Proof that for a moment—sometimes only a very brief one—connection happened. That faith made strangers speak to one another as if they belonged to the same story, even if they would never share another chapter.

I’ve been thinking about this folder in connection with Auld Lang Syne, written down by Robert Burns, who once lived just along the road from me here on Scotland’s west coast. With music added, the song is often treated as sentimental—a harmless ritual for New Year’s Eve or other partings. But I don’t think it is really about the past at all.

Auld Lang Syne mourns the limits of time.

It recognizes something quietly unbearable: that some connections are real, even sacred, and yet cannot be sustained within one human lifespan, one geography, one changing self. The song never says we will stay. It only says we once held this together. And that restraint is everything.

There is a kind of honesty in that which feels almost moral. The song does not pretend that love, friendship, or shared struggle can always survive careers, illness, distance, age, or death. It accepts that finitude fractures continuity—not because people fail, but because life itself is short and fragile.

Psychologically, this is rare. Most cultures offer us stories that resolve connection into permanence: always, forever, till death do us part. Auld Lang Syne offers something more difficult, and perhaps more truthful: connection can be complete without being continuous.

Sociologically, that idea unsettles us—especially now, when technology whispers that nothing should ever be lost, that every relationship can be retrieved if only we try hard enough. The song gently frees us from that demand. It says: you did not betray the bond simply because time moved faster than you could.

That is why it is sung at thresholds. It is not so much a farewell as a witness. Someone stands with you—only briefly—to acknowledge that what existed was real, that it mattered, and that it has not been erased by silence or absence.

The handclasp at the end matters. People cross arms awkwardly, unsure who is holding whom. It is a physical admission of the truth the song dares to hold: connection can be briefly re-entered, but not permanently re-inhabited. We touch, and then we let go.

There is something almost theological in this, even though the song never names it. A sense that meaning exceeds duration. That what is shared participates in something larger than time, even if time itself cannot hold it.

This is why I cannot throw the folder away.

Those cards are not unfinished business. They are not failures of friendship. They are witnesses. Each one says: for a moment, this mattered. That prayer was shared. That recognition crossed borders that history works very hard to keep intact.

This life is not long enough to carry all the love it generates. Some of it must be set down without resolution.

And yet.

There is a moment in the Gospels where Jesus turns to a dying man beside him and says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” It is not explained. No map is drawn. No mechanics are offered. It is simply a promise spoken at the edge of time, where explanation would be too small.

But in these words of Jesus, we do not have a promise so much as a denouement: a new life where old connections, found worthy of that life, may renew—and where friendships, old and new, may meet again at the cusp of eternity.

So I keep the cards.
And I keep the question.

And still, the cup is raised.

'And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”'

Luke 23:43

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Tags: auld lang syne, Robert Burns, paradise, eternity, renewal, Luke 23:43
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