Sometimes it happens
It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.
- Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
- The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
- Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.
So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.
I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.
Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution1: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.
Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!