January’s Thought for 2008: -
I was thinking of a marvellous line in a Bob Dylan song, ‘I saw a shooting star tonight and I thought of you’.
Now let me try and join up some ideas that are in my head …
There is a verse in the Gospel of John that you could easily read and not really notice much. It goes like this, ‘It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple’.
Many of us, after the celebrations and over-indulgences of the Festive Season and the prospect of the long dark, dreech Scottish January nights ahead of us to thole … go S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) or in layman’s terms suffer a dose of ’winter depression’.
Perhaps you’re already on my case and can see where I’m heading with my verse from John’s Gospel … Jesus was and is a ‘man for all seasons’. When we follow him, we may face great trials, tests and darkness in our lives but we can take heart that he too has walked in winter.
I once overheard, when I was a wee boy, my Grandfather talking about seeing a shooting star. At that time I had never seen one. The reason being, I had never really looked for one. The only way to see a shooting star is to look up into the sky … and, if we do it regularly, we will regularly see shooting stars.
Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, ‘we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars’.
Take a leaf out of his book this dreech, damp, dark January and look up into the vastness of Jesus walking … and guess what? You will see extraordinary light even in the most mundane of Bible verses.
God Bless,
John
