Time, Eternity and Cancer

Tomorrow, which we have always taken  granted, becomes uncertain with a fatal diagnosis.  And questions about God for some, become immediate and deeply personal.

Recently I wrote about cancer and time, encouraging those facing serious illness to turn to God while there is still time. But that raises a tender question: what if there is very little time left? What of the person who has lived most of life without God and only begins to seek Him when death is close?  Does God hear the prayer of someone who turns to Him at the very edge of life?

Luke's Gospel gives us a remarkable answer. Jesus is dying on the cross, and beside Him hangs a criminal who knows that he too is dying. We are not privy to all the conversation but it goes without saying that there is no time for this man to rebuild his life, undo his wrongs or spend years demonstrating the sincerity of his repentance. He has nothing left to offer except his plea: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43).

There may be no more comforting deathbed conversation in Scripture. Jesus does not tell the man that he should have come sooner. He does not ask him to prove himself, nor does He say that too much of his life has been wasted. The man turns to Christ with the little time he has left, and Christ receives him.

This goes to the heart of Christian grace. The person who has followed Christ for sixty years needs mercy, and the person who turns to Him with sixty minutes remaining needs mercy. Neither earns salvation by accumulating enough goodness. Both depend upon Christ. This is not a reason to postpone turning to God, for none of us is promised tomorrow. But there is a great difference between saying, “Do not wait,” and telling someone who has waited, “It is now too late.” The thief on the cross should make us very reluctant ever to say the latter.

The Psalms reveal the same tenderness in the character of God: “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them,” Those words sound especially precious beside a hospital bed, because there may be several broken hearts in that room. There is the person whose body is failing, but also the husband or wife watching someone deeply loved grow weaker, and the son or daughter wondering how life will continue without Mum or Dad.

There may also be an unspoken fear: I don't know what they believe. We never really talked about God. What if they have left it too late? Here we need both humility and hope. We cannot see into another person's heart, particularly during the final hours of life. Illness, medication or weakness may eventually make conversation impossible, but inability to speak to us does not necessarily mean that nothing is happening within.

God does not require an eloquent prayer. The thief managed only, “Jesus, remember me.” Elsewhere, the tax collector in Jesus' parable prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” A few faltering words can be a prayer. We should never claim to know that someone turned to Christ when we do not know, but neither should we assume that because we heard no prayer, no prayer was made. There are movements of the human heart that may be known only to that person and to God.

For someone already bereaved, that distinction matters. A person you loved died without giving you the assurance you desperately wanted.  You did not know every thought or witness every inward moment of those final hours. God did. We can entrust those we love to the One who knew them completely and whose mercy is greater than ours.

For those presently caring for someone with cancer or another terminal illness, this hope may also give us courage to speak gently about Christ. A hospital room need not become a pulpit. Sometimes love simply sits, listens and holds a hand. But we need not be afraid to tell someone that they can still speak to God. They do not need religious vocabulary or years in which to repair their past. They can simply turn to Him: Jesus, I need you. Forgive me. Have mercy on me. Remember me. These are not magic words, but the simple language of a heart turning towards Christ and in turn, turning towards righteousness.

Cancer can take an astonishing amount from a human being: strength, independence, plans and sometimes years everyone assumed were still to come. Yet it cannot, by itself, place someone beyond the reach of Christ. So yes, turn to God while there is time, and speak of Him gently to those you love while you have the opportunity. But when time has become desperately short, remember the conversation on the cross.

A dying man had no future to offer Jesus, no time to establish a better record and no years left to prove his faith. He simply turned towards Christ and said, “Jesus, remember me.”

And Christ did not say, “Too late.”

He said, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

Sometimes grace comes when a lifetime still lies ahead. Sometimes it meets a person in life's final hours. Our hope is not in how much time remains, but in the mercy of the Christ to whom we turn. For the dying person, and for the broken-hearted family keeping watch beside the bed, that is a hope worth holding onto.

There are are many other passages with the same heartbeat:

• Psalm 50:15 — “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor Me.

• Psalm 107:10–16 — People are pictured in darkness and the shadow of death because of their rebellion. Then comes the turning point: “Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress.

• Isaiah 55:6–7 — “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him while He is near.” The wicked person is invited to forsake his ways and return to God, “for He will freely pardon.”

• Luke 18:13–14 — The tax collector is unwilling even to lift his eyes to heaven: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Jesus says that man went home justified.

• John 6:37 — Jesus gives one of the strongest assurances in the New Testament: “Everyone the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never drive away.”

Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain.

 Written by Jim, with editorial assistance from ChatGPT.

“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.

“For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)

Dear Gen Z and Gen Alpha: A Letter to You

My dears,

You are entering a changing world, and much of what you will grow up considering normal is anything but. I do not say this because I want you to fear the world or become suspicious of everyone in it. There is enormous goodness in people, and I hope your lives will be filled with friendship, laughter, discovery and love. But I have lived long enough to know that appearances can deceive, that accepted ideas are not necessarily true, and that a crowd can be confidently travelling in the wrong direction. Because I love the human family, I want to leave you with a few things that may help you find your way.

Learn first to love truth, even when truth is inconvenient. You will live among powerful forces competing for your attention and allegiance, and sometimes truth will be exchanged for power, money, influence or approval and such traits can even be cultivated in a family. Lies are not always ugly things that announce themselves as lies; some arrive beautifully dressed, repeated by intelligent people and made attractive by those who stand to benefit from them. When an idea is repeated often enough, it begins to feel familiar, and familiarity can easily be mistaken for truth. So, remain curious. Ask questions, examine motives and evidence, and never surrender your conscience merely because everyone around you appears to agree.

Learn to observe people in the same way, but without becoming cynical about them. Someone may tell you that they love you, and perhaps they sincerely believe they do, but words alone cannot tell you what love is. Watch how people behave when there is nothing to be gained, how they treat those who cannot advance them, whether they respect your boundaries, whether they tell the truth when truth costs them something, and whether they desire what is genuinely good for you rather than simply what they want from you. Love reveals itself gradually in conduct, patience, loyalty, sacrifice and kindness.

This becomes especially important when you begin to fall in love, because attraction has a wonderful ability to interfere with clear eyesight. The person who attracts us can appear almost perfect for a while, and feelings that are intense can easily be mistaken for feelings that are deep. Enjoy the beauty of falling in love, but allow time to reveal character. The wider culture will have much to say about sex and relationships, and films, television, advertising and entertainment will quietly present certain ways of living as ordinary and inevitable. Remember that repetition is not evidence of wisdom. Save sexual intimacy for the person you marry, not because sexuality is something shameful, but precisely because it is something precious. Your body has dignity, as does the body of the person you love. Never allow yourself to believe that you must give something intimate away in order to prove that you are mature, desirable or liberated. Learn the difference between being desired and being loved, because although the two can feel remarkably similar at first, time usually reveals which one you were offered.

Time is a good teacher in other areas of life too. I hope you receive an excellent education, read widely, remain curious and never become frightened of an honest question. But do not make the mistake of believing that education automatically produces wisdom. Knowledge can teach us how something works, while wisdom asks what we should do with that knowledge. It is true that a tomato is a fruit, but it is wise not to ad it into a fruit salad. A person may possess qualifications enough to cover a wall and still make a terrible ruin of his life, while someone with little formal education may possess an extraordinary understanding of human nature. Seek out older and wiser people whose lives have produced good fruit. Ask them about their successes, but ask them about their mistakes as well. There is a great deal of wisdom sitting quietly in elderly people whom the hurried world has simply stopped asking.

The same humility will protect you when it comes to money. There is an old saying that I hope will make you smile and, more importantly, that you will remember: if a naked man offers you a shirt, be suspicious. Behind the humour lies a serious principle. Before accepting advice, consider the condition and motives of the person giving it. When somebody offers you an extraordinary financial opportunity, ask what they stand to gain from your decision. When you are promised easy money, ask where that money is really coming from, and when somebody insists that you must act immediately, wonder why you are not being given time to think. Greed and urgency have made fools of many intelligent people. Learn to live within your means, be generous where you can, avoid unnecessary debt and remember that money can be a useful servant but makes a dreadful master.

All these things—truth, love, relationships, wisdom and money—lead me towards what I most want to leave with you, which is the importance of seeking friendship with God. Human beings are capable of astonishing goodness, courage and tenderness, so love them, enjoy them, forgive them and allow yourself to be loved by them. At the same time, do not ask another human being to carry the weight that belongs to God. Even the best people will sometimes disappoint you, just as you will sometimes disappoint those who love you. If your deepest foundation rests entirely upon another person, you are asking a fragile human being to bear something no human being was designed to carry.

Psalm 15 contains a beautiful picture of the person who can have intimacy with God and enjoy friendship with Him. What strikes me is that the description has nothing to do with wealth, intelligence, social position or achievement. It is about character: someone who walks with integrity, practises what is right, speaks truth from the heart, refuses to injure others with his words, keeps his promises even when doing so becomes costly, and will not exploit another person for financial advantage. There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that picture. The world may measure you by what you possess, what you accomplish or how important you appear, but God looks at what kind of person you are becoming.

The world you inherit will undoubtedly be very different from the one in which I grew up. Technology will change beyond anything I can presently imagine, customs will change, and ideas considered unquestionable today may one day appear strange or even foolish. Your own generation will have its certainties too, and some of them may eventually prove equally mistaken. That is why I hope you will never build your life merely upon what happens to be fashionable around you. Build it instead upon things that endure, and when you are uncertain, ask whether something is true, whether it is loving and honourable, whether you are treating another person as you would wish to be treated, and whether you can do it with a clear conscience before God.

I do not expect you to think exactly as I think, nor would I want you merely to inherit my conclusions without examining them for yourselves. You will have your own questions, make discoveries I never made and undoubtedly make mistakes of your own. Some wisdom can be passed from one generation to another, but some has to be acquired through living. What I hope is that, wherever life takes you, you remain lovers of truth without becoming harsh, cautious without becoming cynical, strong without becoming hard, and humble enough to change your mind when you discover that you were wrong. Be kind to people who can do nothing for you, never mistake another person's weakness for an opportunity to exploit them, and whenever you can make somebody's burden a little lighter, do so.

Life passes more quickly than you can presently imagine. Perhaps one day you too will sit down to write to the children and youth of your world and wonder what you can possibly tell them about a world you will not live long enough to see. By then I hope you will have discovered for yourselves that a good life is not finally measured by what you accumulated, how impressive you appeared or how many people knew your name. Its deeper measure is found in what you loved, what you stood for, how you treated those who crossed your path, whether you remained faithful to truth when falsehood would have been easier, and whether your friendship with God shaped the person you became.

If you do, perhaps when your own grandchildren look at you many years from now, the most valuable inheritance you give them will not be something you possess at all. It will be the kind of person they saw you become.

With all my love,

Written by Jim, with editorial assistance from ChatGPT.

The CV for Eternity

I have often felt that I was born in the wrong place. I do not mean the small industrial town where my life began. I mean that I have felt out of step with the spirit of the age.

When I look at the direction Britain and Europe are taking, I worry about my grandchildren and the young people growing up around them. What will they inherit? What will they accept as normal?

Dishonesty, selfishness and disregard for others trouble me wherever I find them—in politics, business, families and religion. I also recognise these failings in myself. I cannot examine the world honestly without examining my own heart.

Yet I long for a world where kindness is dependable, promises mean something and people can trust one another.

Psalm 15 gives that longing a shape. It asks who may dwell in God’s presence, then describes a person who lives uprightly, speaks truth from the heart, refuses to slander, keeps promises even at personal cost and does not exploit others.

These are the qualities that make peace possible. When I think about the paradise Jesus promised, I think about the people who will live there. Who will be found worthy of that life? Surely their hearts and conduct must align with the qualities described in Psalm 15. Carry dishonesty, greed and cruelty into a new world, and the old suffering would follow.

I have come to believe that life on this imperfect planet involves an examination of the heart. Our choices reveal what we love, what we value and whose guidance we follow.

Second Chronicles 16:9 says:

“For the eyes of the LORD roam to and fro over all the earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are fully devoted to Him.”

God’s watchfulness gives me hope. He searches for devoted hearts and strengthens those who turn towards him. The One who examines us also understands our frailty and sees sincere efforts that others overlook.

This examination unfolds through ordinary life. We admit a mistake when concealment would be easier. We protect someone’s reputation when gossip would win approval. We keep our word when breaking it would benefit us. We help a neighbour when doing so interrupts our comfort.

Time reveals our character and gives it room to grow.

If I claimed to be stronger than another man, an arm-wrestling match could settle the matter in minutes. If I claimed to be more honest, it would take far longer to judge. Integrity becomes visible through changing circumstances, pressures and opportunities.

God already knows our hearts. Through our choices, we come to understand ourselves and can allow him to shape us.

This does not explain every sorrow. Some suffering leaves wounds nobody else can see. God understands those burdens, and his judgment takes account of what ours cannot.

Still, these years matter. Here, on an imperfect earth, we can learn to practise the goodness that belongs in a better one.

I cannot control everything my grandchildren will encounter. I can help them recognise goodness by making it something they have experienced. I can listen patiently, speak truthfully, keep my promises and treat others with dignity.

I am still learning, still failing and still beginning again. I depend upon God’s mercy and the strength he gives.

When his eyes search the earth, I want him to find in me a heart willing to be taught. And when I pray for the paradise Jesus promised, I am also asking him to help me become the kind of neighbour who belongs there.

Written by Jim, with editorial assistance from ChatGPT.

Capturing the Mist

I was reading Ecclesiastes today. “Vanity of vanities,” writes the wise man in verse 1:2.

Quite often, my wife and I drive over to Loch Lomond for breakfast at a hotel overlooking the loch.

On those early mornings, the mist sometimes seems so close that you could reach out and gather it into your hands. Yet you cannot hold it. Like a rainbow, it remains beyond your grasp.

That gives me a little insight into the Hebrew word hevel: breath, mist, or vapour. Something fleeting; something elusive.

Depending on its context, hevel can suggest transience, futility, or the impossibility of holding on to something. 

The writer of Ecclesiastes looks honestly at human life. We work, achieve, gather possessions, and seek wisdom. Yet we cannot stop time, guarantee what happens next, or keep what we have forever. There is a deep frustration in this: we long for something lasting in a world that keeps changing.

For capturing that picture, the Evangelical Heritage Version gets my award. It renders Ecclesiastes 1:2:

“Nothing but vapor,” Ecclesiastes said. “Totally vapor. Everything is just vapor that vanishes.”

Reading those words, I find myself back beside Loch Lomond, watching the morning mist.

Ecclesiastes 1:1-3 EHV - The Heading - The words of - Bible Gateway

What Is Life?

Two thoughts have been dancing in and out of my mind, rather like those shifting lights in the northern sky. At first they seemed separate, but gradually they began to illuminate one another. The first came from something the chemist James Tour said while discussing one of the most elementary yet mysterious boundaries in nature. Consider a single cell that has just died. Its molecular machinery and structures do not simply vanish at the moment of death, yet something fundamental has changed. Tour asks the wonderfully simple question, ‘When a single cell just dies, what is it we just lost?’ (Tour, 2024). It is a question that has stayed with me: what was living is no longer alive.

Science has revealed much about the death of a cell and the processes of decay that follow. Yet these discoveries leave room for a broader question about the nature and meaning of life: what is life?

That question takes my mind back thousands of years to the language of Genesis. We are told that God forms Adam from the dust of the ground, the adamah, and then breathes into him the breath of life. The human being then becomes what the Hebrew text calls a nefesh chayyah, a living being (Genesis 2:7). There is something profoundly simple about the picture. The material from which Adam is formed belongs to the earth, but when God gives the breath of life, that formed matter becomes a living human being.

There is also something beautiful about the biblical language of breath. Genesis 2 uses the Hebrew word neshamah for the breath of life, while another important Hebrew word, ruach, can mean wind, breath or spirit. They are not the same word and should not simply be treated as interchangeable, but together they belong to a biblical vocabulary in which breath and life are intimately connected. Anyone who has stood beside someone taking their final breaths understands why this imagery has such enduring power. Breath accompanies us through life, and its departure is a powerful sign of death.

I do not think that what takes place with a cell in a laboratory is directly equivalent to the first man receiving the breath of life. To equate them would confuse two different kinds of explanation. Science can investigate the mechanisms by which living things function and the processes by which they die—the how. Genesis addresses a theological question about the ultimate source and meaning of life—the why. The two questions are different, but placing them beside one another can be illuminating.

There is something deeply arresting about the comparison. A scientist can observe the processes through which a cell dies and identify the signs that life has ended. Genesis invites us to consider the opposite: the entryway to life.

Neither perspective diminishes my wonder. Together, they deepen it.

Standing imaginatively between the laboratory and that ancient Hebrew text, I find myself returning to the same deceptively simple question: what is life? Science continues to give us increasingly remarkable descriptions of how living systems work, and we should treasure those discoveries. Genesis asks us to look beyond mechanism to source and meaning, and answers in the language of breath, earth and gift. Humanity is formed from the dust of the ground, God breathes the breath of life, and the creature becomes a living being.

References

Tour, J. (2024) ‘The shocking truth about life’s origins’, interview with E. Huffman, Maybe God Podcast, 26 December. Available at: Maybe God website (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Berean Bible Translation Committee (2023) Berean Standard Bible. Available at: Berean Bible (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Written by Jim, with editorial assistance from ChatGPT.

Swans

On a bright morning, I find such satisfaction in visiting the swans and watching them glide gracefully across the water. I take care to feed them well—never bread or processed food, but fresh green peas, kale, lettuce leaves, or specially prepared swan food from the pet shop. It is a simple act of kindness, yet it brings peace to the heart and reminds me that every living creature is precious in God’s sight. “The righteous care for the needs of their animals.” — Proverbs 12:10

The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats

But now they drift on the still water

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Charlie Bucket, Golden Ticket and  Denouement 

Have you ever stopped and wondered why we are so fond of happy endings?

Dorothy gets home from Oz. Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket. The Magnificent Seven ride into town and put things right. Even when a story takes us through darkness, loss and terrible injustice, something in us longs for the scales to be balanced before the curtain falls.

We want a denouement.

And when a story denies us one—when evil simply triumphs, goodness counts for nothing and suffering is revealed to have been meaningless—we can feel strangely robbed.

Why?

Some years ago, I came across these words from the English jurist William Blackstone:

“[God] has so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter.”

It demands a little of the old grey matter, but Blackstone was making a profound claim: happiness and justice are not accidental companions. They belong together because they are woven into the moral fabric of reality.

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a related conviction in that famous line: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There is something deeply human about believing this.

Watch what happens when somebody casually jumps a queue. It can be in Japan, Australia, the Philippines or Britain. Immediately there is that little internal protest: That’s not fair.

Notice what we are saying. Not merely, I don't like that. We mean something stronger.

It ought not to be so.

That tiny word ought opens an enormous door.

Human beings seem to possess a gravitational pull towards justice. We want courage to matter, cruelty to be answered, sacrifice to mean something, innocence to be vindicated and love, somehow, to have the final word.

That is why denouement matters.

A satisfying ending does more than finish a story. It resolves its moral tension. Something that was broken is restored; something hidden is revealed; something unjust is answered. The world of the story comes back into alignment.

And we recognise that alignment almost instinctively.

Of course, real life does not always give us happy endings. Good people suffer. The guilty sometimes prosper. Some wounds remain open when people die. Christianity does not ask us to pretend otherwise. In fact, it looks directly at that terrible incompleteness and makes an astonishing claim: the story isn't over yet.

That changes the question.

If mankind is nothing more than matter in motion—creatures pirouetting to our DNA in a dark and ultimately aimless universe—our persistent hunger for final justice is curious. Nature could explain why we dislike pain or why cooperation helps communities survive. But our longing goes further. We want justice even for the dead. We want wrongs corrected that no living person can correct. We want the final chapter to make moral sense of all the chapters that came before it.

We want denouement on an existential scale.

Maybe that is why happy endings have such power over us. They touch something older and deeper than entertainment. They whisper that chaos is not ultimate, that goodness is not foolish, that suffering does not possess the final word.

The Christian story makes precisely that claim.

The God who formed the moon and stars, who gave the earth its gravitational pull, also made creatures who experience another kind of gravity: a pull towards goodness, justice, reconciliation and home.

Dorothy wants Kansas. Charlie enters the chocolate factory. The stranger rides into town and confronts the wrong that everyone else has learned to tolerate.

Different stories. The same ancient ache.

We want things put right.

And it may be that the human psyche embraces denouement because, somewhere beneath all our sophistication, we suspect that reality itself has one.

Image kindly provided by https://unsplash.com/@sickle

There is a beautiful piece of cinematography in Nikita Mikhalkov’s movie Urga, where one is presented with a vast panoramic field of emerald grass. There’s movement in the distance. The image gets closer and closer and slowly coming into focus. It’s accompanied by the sound of rumbling hooves and snorting. Wafts of agitated dust float in a state of suspended animation which hastens the suspense. The camera eventually centres on the focal point, Gombo,  a vigorous Mongolian equestrian shepherd mounted on his stocky steed fill the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j3jY_meJAM&t=3s

The scene acts as an apt metaphor for the personal essay. One begins with something out of focus. A word like ‘nostalgia.’ A sentence like ‘It happened like this.’ A quote like Soderberg’s ‘People want to be loved, failing that admired…our soul seeks connection at any price.’ An image like Avril Paten’s painting, Windows in the West or the German word Fernveh.

Then, my journey begins. I have no maps. I have no coordinates. Just the loose excursions of my mind. My reader joins me on this pilgrimage or saunter; a description that’s dependant on the subject. It’s often highway to seemingly nowhere, but the scenery is interesting, occasionally captivating.  It’s worth the effort.

It’s an image of what’s going on in my head, albeit a glass darkly. But the process of pen to paper sparks a chemistry that is leading to a place. The place appears and disappears in a literary eclipse. We appear lost, but in the large vat of editing, the destination emerges.

Like a camel on the road to Kathmandu, the personal essay can take the load I have to pack on. My memoirs, musings, my angst, the wanderings of my mind, my peculiarities and fears, my worldview, and philosophies. The introduction to the personal essay was like bursting out of prison and finding a voice for all I have to say.

Yes, I could have specialised in poetry, fiction or drama, but  nonfiction was the place I found my voice.

When Strangers Leave Footprints on the Heart

In the great theatre of life, there are people who walk onto the stage for only a little while and yet, somehow, never quite leave us. We may not remember every detail of the day on which we met them, or even their names, but we remember what they did. More than that, we remember how they made us feel. Years pass, circumstances change, faces fade from view, and still these people remain in some quiet chamber of the heart.

I think of a man from my sixties childhood who gave us a half-crown and told us hungry youngsters to go and buy ourselves an ice cream. To another person it might have seemed a small gesture, hardly worth remembering, but to a hungry child generosity has a different weight. That coin bought more than ice cream. For a brief moment it told us that somebody had noticed us, that somebody cared whether we had a little happiness that day. The ice cream disappeared long ago, but strangely enough, the kindness never did.

Then I remember two young schoolteachers from Södertälje in Sweden whom I met aboard the Princess of Scandinavia in the mid nineties when I was young as she made her way from Newcastle to Gothenburg. We were strangers brought together by nothing more mysterious than being aboard the same ship, travelling across the same stretch of sea enjoying a drink together. Yet sometimes human beings cross the distance between stranger and friend remarkably quickly. Something in conversation, some shared laughter or openness, creates a connection that refuses to be measured by the number of hours we have known one another. The journey ends, people go their separate ways, and nevertheless something of them travels on with us.

There was also a bitter Scottish winter when my car became trapped in a deep snowdrift. Somewhere along that motorway a man saw my predicament, continued on his way until he could turn around, and made a journey of some ten miles simply to come back and offer his help. I have often thought about that. He could have driven on. Most of the world would never have known that he had passed a stranded motorist in the snow, and no one would have condemned him for continuing his journey. But compassion made another demand upon him. He saw another human being in difficulty and decided that my problem had, for a little while, become his problem too.

And then, only this week, there was Steve, a man doing some work in my house. He went beyond what the job required, but what stays with me most is not simply the work he did. It was the human connection that grew while we talked. As the hours passed, we exchanged stories about our lives and discovered that both of us had known difficult childhoods. There was something almost unspoken in that recognition, as though two people who had travelled over some of the rougher ground of life could recognise the landscape in one another.

Perhaps suffering can do one of two things to us. It can harden the heart, or it can deepen it. When pain has not been allowed to make us bitter, it can become strangely fertile soil for compassion. Those who remember what it was to be frightened may become the ones who reassure others. Those who remember loneliness may notice the person standing alone. Those who once needed kindness may become unusually generous in giving it. We cannot always choose the wounds life gives us, but by the grace of God those wounds need not have the final word. Sometimes the very places where life once hurt us become the places from which tenderness grows.

Looking back, I wonder whether these apparently accidental meetings are quite as insignificant as they first appear. A man with a half-crown, two young teachers on a ship crossing the North Sea, a stranger turning back through a Scottish winter, and a workman named Steve sharing stories in my home: none arrived with trumpets or announcements. They simply entered my life, left something good behind, and moved on.

That is one of the quiet wonders of being human. We rarely know which of our actions another person will remember. A kindness that costs us five minutes may be remembered for fifty years. A few words spoken casually may give someone courage at precisely the moment they need it. We may forget the kindness we gave while the person who received it carries it for the rest of their life. There is something wonderfully humbling about that.

And for those of us who believe that God is gathering human history towards a purpose greater than the brief span of our earthly lives, there is another beautiful possibility. Perhaps some of life's unfinished conversations are not finished at all. The people whose goodness touched us and then disappeared beyond the horizon of our lives are not lost forever to us.

The apostle Peter speaks of this magnificent hope: “But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” — 2 Peter 3:13.

I love to imagine what that promise might mean when translated from theology into human experience. A world in which righteousness dwells would surely be a world in which goodness is no longer interrupted by sorrow, separation or death. No doubt there, in God's great tomorrow, paths that crossed briefly here will cross again. We will recognise persons we thought we had seen for the last time and discover that no act of love was ever truly lost.

Until then, their stories remind me of something I do not want to forget: we are all passing through one another's lives. We cannot know how long we will remain there, but while we are there, we can leave kindness behind.

And sometimes, that is enough to be remembered for a lifetime.

“The Creator has so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former.”

English jurist William Blackstone

The Happiness Evil Cannot Give

In my early morning today with the Word of God, I became fixed upon a single proverb:

“Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all things.” — Proverbs 28:5

My first instinct might easily have been the instinct of most of us: Well, I am not an evil man.

The word “evil” immediately summons people worse than ourselves. We think of the cruel, the violent, the corrupt and the obviously wicked. Whatever else Proverbs 28:5 might be saying, surely it is talking about them.

But perhaps that instinct itself should make us stop.

Psychologists speak of what is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.” Applied to ourselves, it describes our rather endearing—and sometimes dangerous—tendency to rate ourselves more favourably than is warranted. Most of us find it easier to recognise selfishness, prejudice, pride and questionable motives in other people than in ourselves.

Then we encounter the Hebrew word translated “evil” in Proverbs 28:5.

It is raʿ (רַע), a wonderfully uncomfortable little word. It can certainly describe what is wicked or evil, but its range is broader: that which is bad, harmful, disagreeable, morally wrong or injurious. Suddenly it becomes harder to keep the proverb at a comfortable distance.

The question is not simply, Am I an evil person. It is this: What is there within me that bends away from the good?

And now the proverb becomes intensely personal.

Its remarkable claim is that evil does not merely affect our behaviour; it affects our judgment. “Evil men understand not judgment.” The Hebrew word translated “judgment,” mishpat, carries the idea of justice, right judgment, what is fitting and what ought to be.

In other words, our moral condition affects our ability to see.

That is a profound observation about human nature. We like to imagine ourselves as detached judges of reality, calmly examining evidence and reaching rational conclusions. But human beings are not quite like that. Our reasoning travels in company with our desires. We are remarkably good at finding reasons for believing that the thing we want is also the thing we ought to have.

Greed can rename itself ambition. Pride can masquerade as self-respect. Resentment can call itself justice. Selfishness can present itself as freedom. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the moral compass moves.

And this matters enormously because we are all searching for essentially the same country. Namely, Happiness.

We may give it different names—peace, fulfilment, success, love, contentment—but behind so much human activity lies the hope that somewhere ahead there is a life worth having.

Here Proverbs 28:5 contains a warning of extraordinary importance. If evil distorts judgment, then evil may distort our understanding of happiness itself.

Imagine a traveller whose compass is gradually becoming unreliable. He desperately wants to reach home. He walks faster, works harder and covers enormous distances. His problem is not lack of sincerity or effort. His problem is that the instrument by which he determines direction is pointing away from his destination.

There is something like this in the relationship between goodness and happiness.

We may seek happiness through wealth and gradually become incapable of saying “enough.” We may seek it through admiration and become dependent upon the opinions of others. We may seek it through sexual gratification while damaging our capacity for faithful intimacy. We may seek freedom by avoiding obligation and eventually discover that the deepest friendships are built precisely upon loyalty, sacrifice and commitment.

Evil offers us the fruit while quietly taking an axe to the tree.

This is why goodness and happiness may be much more intimately connected than our culture sometimes imagines. Goodness is not merely the entrance fee God demands before allowing us to be happy. Goodness may describe the very kind of creature a human being must increasingly become in order to experience the deepest forms of happiness.

The grateful person can enjoy what he possesses. The generous person can delight in another’s flourishing. The humble person does not have to win every comparison. The forgiving person is gradually released from the exhausting task of carrying yesterday’s injuries. The faithful person can enter the extraordinary security of being deeply known and deeply trusted.

Virtue enlarges our capacity for certain kinds of joy.

And vice does the opposite.

Envy makes another person’s happiness painful to us. Greed makes “enough” perpetually inaccessible. Pride turns other people into competitors. Lust can turn persons into objects. Resentment permits someone who injured us years ago to continue occupying rooms within our hearts.

The terrible possibility is that evil does not merely prevent us from obtaining happiness. It can damage the person who must experience happiness.

And then comes the glorious second half of the proverb:

“But they that seek the LORD understand all things.”

Notice the word seek. It does not say that those who seek God already possess perfect understanding. They are travellers too. They can make mistakes, take wrong turns and misunderstand the landscape.

But their compass is continually being brought back to true north.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest lessons of Proverbs 28:5. In the great human race for happiness—indeed, for eternal happiness—the first question is not simply, How quickly am I travelling? Nor even, How happy do I feel at this moment?

The greater question is:

What direction am I becoming pointed in?

For if God is the source of goodness, truth, love and ultimately happiness itself, then seeking Him is not a diversion from the human search for happiness.

It is the recalibration of the compass by which we hope to find it.

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Simplicity

The world presents us with great mysteries, and strangely enough, we learn to live with them. Consciousness is one. We experience it every waking moment, yet what consciousness actually is remains profoundly difficult to explain. Time is another. Why does time seem to have a direction, carrying us relentlessly from yesterday into tomorrow? Then there are the quiet mysteries of mathematics. Why is two plus two four? Human beings discovered this truth, but we did not invent the reality behind it. Long before anyone scratched numbers onto stone or paper, two stars added to two stars still made four.

Last year I was sitting in an outdoor café on one of the Scottish islands when I fell into conversation with a physicist. Before long we found ourselves talking about quantum entanglement. It is one of creation’s strangest discoveries. Two particles can become linked in such a way that they have to be described as parts of a single quantum state, even when separated by enormous distances. Measurements reveal correlations between them that cannot be explained by imagining that each particle simply carried a set of hidden instructions from the beginning. Yet this does not allow a usable message to travel instantaneously between them.

There is something wonderfully unsettling about this; "Spooky" said Einstein. At the quantum level, nature refuses to behave according to the common sense we have acquired from living among tables, trees, stones and teacups. Reality is stranger than our everyday intuition tells us it ought to be. The universe does not owe us simplicity.

And this brings me to God.

If God is the creator of this astonishing universe, then all its mysteries ultimately exist within a reality known to him. Yet we human beings continually try to understand God, and there is nothing wrong with that. The desire to understand is one of the beautiful things about us. The difficulty begins when we imagine that God must fit neatly inside the categories our minds have constructed.

Christians themselves have wrestled with this for centuries. Jehovah’s Witnesses distinguish Jehovah from Jesus in a way traditional Trinitarian Christianity does not. Presbyterians, along with most historic Christian traditions, confess Jesus as truly divine, while Christadelphians understand him differently again. These differences are significant, and I am not pretending they do not matter. I am simply saying that a person opening the Bible for the first time need not solve every one of them before being allowed to enjoy the extraordinary story unfolding before them.

Read the Bible first. Let it surprise you.

As you read, you will encounter passages in which God the Father is in heaven while Jesus is walking the dusty roads of Galilee. You will see Jesus praying to the Father, loving the Father and obeying the Father. You will encounter moments in which Jesus speaks of things known by the Father that he himself does not know. Then you will turn another page and find astonishing language applied to Jesus. You will find people worshipping him. You will encounter the mysterious declaration that the Word was with God and that the Word was God, followed by the even more startling claim that this Word became flesh and lived among us.

Then Paul adds another piece to the mystery. He describes Christ as existing in the form of God and yet emptying himself, taking the form of a servant and entering fully into human life. Suddenly the reader is faced with something far larger than a tidy religious formula. God is not becoming easier to put into a box. He is becoming harder.

That need not frighten us. It can be exhilarating.

Think about something much simpler. Can God hear two hundred Christians praying at the same moment? Most believers would answer yes without hesitation. What about two million? What if they are scattered across every continent, praying in hundreds of languages? We do not imagine God frantically switching his attention from London to Lagos, from a hospital room in Glasgow to a kitchen table in Sydney. We instinctively understand that God does not experience presence and attention with the limitations that govern us.

So why should we be astonished when the Bible presents us with a God whose existence exceeds our ordinary categories?

Can God be present in heaven and make himself known on earth? If he created space, why should space imprison him? If he created time, why should time contain him in the way it contains us? If the deepest levels of his creation already overturn our everyday intuitions about distance, matter and relationship, should we expect the Creator himself to be less mysterious than the universe he made?

This is not an attempt to use quantum physics to prove the nature of God. Physics cannot do that. Proton entanglement does not prove the Trinity, nor can a laboratory tell us who Jesus is. The point is simpler and, I think, more beautiful: reality has already taught us some humility. Things can be true without being easy to picture.

We are very small creatures attempting to understand the One who, according to the Bible, called the universe into existence. At times I imagine us like ants living inside a little box in a garden shed. The ants might become remarkably knowledgeable about their box. They could map every corner and examine every grain of dust. Yet beyond the box is the shed, beyond the shed is the garden, beyond the garden are towns and oceans and continents, and above them is a universe whose immensity they could never imagine.

How much greater might the distance be between our understanding and the fullness of God?

So if you are new to the Bible, do not be discouraged when you encounter something you cannot immediately reconcile. Do not feel that you must arrive armed with a theological system and force every verse into its proper compartment like some kind of theological bento box. Read. Explore. Ask questions. Notice the tensions. Notice the beauty. Notice how often the Bible refuses to reduce God to something comfortably manageable.

There will be time to investigate doctrines and listen to the arguments Christians have made across the centuries. Some of those questions matter deeply and deserve serious thought. But do not let the arguments steal the wonder before you have even encountered it.

Open the Bible and meet its God.

Walk beside Jesus through Galilee. Listen to his words. Watch the way he treats frightened people, outsiders, children, sinners and the self-righteous. Hear him pray to his Father. Stand with the disciples when the storm becomes still. Sit at the table at the Last Supper. Follow the bewildered women to an empty tomb. Let the questions come naturally instead of being afraid of them.

You do not have to understand the ocean before you are allowed to stand on the shore and be amazed by it. In the same way, you do not have to solve the mystery of God before you begin seeking him.

Sometimes wonder is where understanding begins.

The  "Huts", Bogany Farm, circa 1960s AI enhanced

Home, Stars, Milkmaids and Bedouin Shepherd Boys 

Some songs seem to accompany us through life without ever asking to be noticed. We hear them when we are young, carry them somewhere beyond conscious memory, and then, years later, they return. When they do, they bring more than melody. They carry people, places, rooms, weather, and versions of ourselves we had almost forgotten.

Clifford T. Ward’s Home Thoughts from Abroad has always been such a song for me. There is something wonderfully restrained about it. It never reaches for grandeur, yet somehow finds it. Ward, an English schoolteacher before music brought him wider recognition, had a quality that made his songs feel less like performances and more like confidences. When I first heard him, I was young, and although I could not have articulated it then, I sensed that he was not singing at me. He was sharing something, and somewhere between his experience and mine we met.

The title reaches further back, of course, to Robert Browning and his poem Home-Thoughts, from Abroad. Browning writes of England from elsewhere, noticing the things absence has made precious: blossom, birdsong and the coming of spring. It is an old human experience. Distance alters our vision. We begin to see the ordinary things we once overlooked, and a place that scarcely announced itself while we inhabited it can acquire an extraordinary power once we have left.

Maybe that is because home is not merely geography. It is emotional ground. It is the place, or sometimes only the memory of a place, where something within us once settled and said, without words, I belong here.

I found myself thinking about this one Saturday evening while sharing a meal with friends. Among us was a friend from Mongolia, and as she spoke about home, I sensed that she meant something larger than the country marked on a map. It led me afterwards to the Mongolian expression нутгаа санах (nutgaa sanakh), commonly translated as homesickness or longing for one’s homeland. Yet “homesickness” seems too slight a word for what I heard in her conversation. This was closer to a tether: an attachment to homeland that survives distance because the landscape itself has somehow become part of the person.

I found myself envying that certainty. Not Mongolia itself, but the knowledge of where one belongs.

I have never really possessed it. There are places I love deeply. My heart is drawn to the Hebrides and to Norway, and to another place I shall come to, but I did not grow up in any of them. The landscape of my childhood was the heartland of the Clydeside shipbuilding industry, a world shaped more by labour than romance. It was soot, tenements, industry and function. Beauty existed, but you had to know where to look for it.

For me, one of the places where it revealed itself was across the water.

We had a cabin on the Isle of Bute, between Rothesay Golf Course and Bogany Farm, and when the summer holidays arrived, I would spend the full six weeks there. The distance from Clydeside was not enormous, yet to a child it might as well have been another country. Loch Ascog lay on one side, quiet and watchful, while the Firth of Clyde opened towards a horizon that seemed impossibly wide.

Then there were the stars.

City darkness is never truly dark, but on Bute the night seemed to reveal what the city had been hiding. The stars did not merely appear; they cascaded.

My days were spent fishing and wandering with the extravagant aimlessness available to children before we discover schedules. Friendships formed quickly because summer demanded it. We knew, without dwelling on it, that most of us would disappear from one another when the season ended, so we belonged intensely for the little time we had.

The cabin had neither running water nor electricity. One of my daily jobs was to take containers to the communal well. Cows would wander towards me with that peculiar combination of suspicion and curiosity that cows seem to have perfected. The smaller ones sometimes ventured closer, studying me as though I were the unusual animal in the field.

When evening came, we lit paraffin lamps. I can still remember their soft, sibilant sound and the warm, imperfect light they cast across the cabin. My father would read aloud to us: Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese folk stories. We ate pancakes with jam and were given small glasses of stout, which seemed to me less like a drink than participation in some ancient ceremony of adulthood.

As the kerosene burned down, the light softened and the cabin became quieter. Sleep did not arrive abruptly. It gathered around us.

I would lie in bed and look through the window at the stars. The stories my father had read were still alive in my imagination, and I wondered whether somewhere far away a Chinese farmer boy, a Bedouin shepherd or a milkmaid among the Swiss mountains might be looking upwards at the same sky.

I did not have theological language for such thoughts. I was simply a boy staring into the immensity of things. Yet I remember a sense of presence, a feeling that the world was greater, deeper and more mysterious than the visible things immediately around me. Looking back, I think those were among my earliest intimations of God. Nothing was spoken. Nothing needed to be. The stillness itself seemed full.

Then came the part every summer had been quietly moving towards: leaving.

There were bags to pack, the ferry to catch and school waiting on Monday. The wide skies disappeared and the tenements of Clydeside closed around us again. I remember a heaviness that I could not explain. It was not ordinary disappointment at the end of a holiday. It felt more like grief, as though I had left something of myself on the island.

Only by leaving did I begin to understand that the cabins near Bogany Farm had become home.

Not home in the conventional sense. We did not own the landscape and our lives there were temporary. Yet something about those summers felt complete. We needed very little. A paraffin lamp, a fishing rod, a campfire, pancakes, stories, friends and six weeks that seemed capable of lasting forever.

Many years later I encountered a word coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: kenopsia, the eerie atmosphere of a place that was once bustling with life but is now abandoned and quiet.

I knew the feeling immediately.

When I return to Bute and walk the stretch between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill, the world I remember has largely disappeared. Once there were fifty or sixty cabins scattered across the land. Now there is overgrowth. Nettles have reclaimed paths once made by human feet, and the outlines of our little summer civilisation are difficult to find beneath everything that has grown in its place.

The cows still look at me, though now they seem to have a stronger claim on the land than I do. In fairness, they are probably right. I am the visitor now. The landscape continued living while I was away.

Yet I can still populate that empty field.

I can smell barbecue smoke and burnt toast carried on the sea air. I can hear songs around campfires and children calling to one another through the dusk. I can see adults sitting outside their cabins, leaning into the last of the evening sunlight as though unconsciously storing it against the darker months ahead.

Memory cannot be trusted as a perfect historian. It edits, rearranges and softens. It illuminates one corner while leaving another in shadow. The people I remember may not have been quite as carefree as memory makes them, nor every summer day as golden. Childhood was no more immune to disappointment then than it is now.

But memory's failure to reproduce the past exactly does not make it false. Memory tells another kind of truth. It tells us what mattered.

Something about those summers made people seem more open to one another. Time moved differently. Nobody appeared to be measuring every hour for its productivity. There was space to wander, to talk, to sit beside a fire, to watch the sea or to do nothing of consequence at all. For a few weeks each year, ordinary people seemed permitted to inhabit their lives rather than constantly hurry through them.

The cabins are gone now, and most of the voices I associate with them have long since fallen silent. Still, when I walk through that landscape, absence does not feel entirely empty. Places absorb our stories. A path remembers us in its own way, even when grass eventually covers it. A field once filled with laughter cannot literally retain the sound, yet we retain it on the field's behalf.

This is one of the strange gifts of landscape. We imagine ourselves passing through places, but places also pass through us. They become part of our interior geography, and years later a smell, a quality of evening light, a bird call or an old song can suddenly open the door.

Time is cruel in that it takes away the world we knew, but it is generous in another sense. Only after something has gone do we sometimes understand what we were given.

That has changed the way I think about home.

I once imagined home should be the place from which you came, a homeland capable of producing the deep certainty I heard in my Mongolian friend's voice. I do not think that way now. Some people inherit a profound sense of homeland, while others discover home in fragments. It may be scattered across landscapes and years, held in people, rituals, sounds and moments of inexplicable peace.

For me, part of it will always lie on Bute: in the walk to the well, in the suspicious cows, in my father's voice reading by paraffin light, in pancakes and jam, in campfire smoke and in a little boy staring through a cabin window wondering whether children on the other side of the world were looking at the same stars.

I could return to the exact coordinates, but I could never return to that place. Not really. The place I long for exists at the meeting point of landscape and memory, and time has closed the road back to it.

Yet I no longer think that makes it less real.

Home may not always be somewhere we can remain. Sometimes we recognise it only after leaving. Sometimes it survives as a collection of moments in which, for reasons we barely understood at the time, life felt whole.

And sometimes it returns as an old song, heard in youth, carrying us across the years to somewhere we thought we had lost.

One final, rather lovely footnote: five years ago, I met a woman who had been taught English by Clifford T. Ward. Somehow that small connection pleased me enormously. A man whose song had accompanied my memories of home had once stood in an ordinary classroom, teaching English to someone I would eventually meet.