St Peter & St Pauls Church
Aylesford, Kent.
United Kingdom 

TEXT FOR THE MONTH

When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

Isaiah 43:2

 THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH

When trouble hits us we can react to it in a variety of ways. We can let it knock us out, so that we lose all hope and stamina. We can rebel and refuse to accept the rightness or merit of it. We can fill our lives with feverish activity so that we have no time to think about it. Or we can accept it -without defeat, rebellion or evasion - trusting that God will make clear tomorrow what is so difficult to understand today.

George Appleton, Journey for a Soul, William Collins Sons and Co., 1976, page 51

Dear Friends

The question of “why does God allow suffering?” is one that comes up in my mind often. This last month, I had the sad task of taking the funeral of a twenty year old man and a thirty four year old man. Although at the time of the funerals I felt strong enough to cope with the pressures, in the week afterwards I felt unsettled and without my usual sense of peace and joy, as I once again grappled with this central question that has taxed Christian thinkers down the centuries.

 I suppose it may come as some comfort that your own vicar grapples with these issues, as I am sure you do too from time to time. The fact is there is no clear answer, although many books have been written on the subject. Suffering is part and parcel of the human condition this side of heaven. However, we cannot simply leave it at that. I would like to share something that has been more and more on my mind over recent weeks, as I have been involved in these sad events.

 As a Christian, I am becoming increasingly aware of what I would call the “two dimensions” to our lives. You may not have heard of this concept before, so let me explain. The “first dimension” is our day to day life, our normal experience of life with all its joys and all its sorrows, its times of peace and its times of real stress. The “second dimension” is our inner life, or spiritual life - some would call it our “walk with the Lord”.

 So that I can explain what these two dimensions are let me quote St Paul. His life in this first dimension of daily life was often full of suffering. Listen to him explaining it to his flock in Corinth, “Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.  Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea;  on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren;  in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.  And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.”

Certainly, St Paul’s life was not an easy one.

 Yet, what is amazing about St Paul, is that in the same epistle (2 Corinthians), he is able to say: “ yet this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” Here speaks the “second dimension” - the life of faith.

 Increasingly I am beginning to realise that whatever life throws at us, providing we keep our prayer life going and our trust in the Lord, our inner soul will survive the storms of life. Indeed, the life of faith is by its very nature often a paradox. When the winds of life blow harder outside, the faith inside becomes stronger and provides more and more comfort.

The word “soul” is not popular in today’s world, but there is part of us that is detached from our day to day emotions, our moods, our stresses and strains - an inner part of us that the Holy Spirit can fill with his presence, even when we are going through the most horrendous experiences on the outside. This inner life assures us that whatever we go through, we know that the Lord is real and that there is a place that we can all look forward to - in the Bible this is often called “heaven” or “eternal life”. Indeed, the Christian boast is that this experience of heaven and eternal life does not just start when we die, but now, when we believe and receive the Holy Spirit.

 I realise that this month is a longer article, but there is no way I could abbreviate this important subject. If you would like to find out more, may I suggest you attend the course I am running on Wednesday evenings (fortnightly) in the Brassey Centre - the Finding Freedom in Christ course. Details are on page x. In the meantime, may God bless you, both externally and internally!