Dear Friends,
Groucho Marx once said, "It isn't so much that hard times are coming ... the change observed is mostly soft times going."
We live in another one of those now-and-again times in history when our security is completely shaken. Did the soft times leave us?
We’ve encountered a chain of frightening events — including a string of natural hurricane, tornado, and flood disasters, an economic crisis that threatens to undo us, and ongoing terrorist attacks that shake our nerves. Once again they remind us that you and I are not in control of God’s world. They remind us that, if we are at the mercy of the raging weather, we are even more at the mercy of raging evil. I mean by evil what the poet Robert Burns meant in his 1785 poem From Man was made to Mourn: a Dirge:
Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Our work, as Christian men and women, is to bring relief and hope to those countless thousands who mourn, and to bring transformation to those who treat others inhumanely. The evil of hatred, condemnation, and judgment is far more damaging than that of the greatest hurricane.
Bishop Krister Stendahl tells the story of the little boy who kept following his mother around the house, from one room to another, until she said: "What is it that you want?" The lad replied, "Nothing, I just want to be where you are."
That, Stendahl suggests, is prayer. In these times of physical fear and psychic angst, we simply want to be where God is. And that’s not a bad thing!
Pastor Ron
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Howland United Methodist Church