Thursday, January 25, 2018

​He is not far from each one of us.  For “In him we live and move and have our being.”
                                                         Acts 17:27-28
 
We often want to complicate things.  But our God is a God of simplicity, directness, and small miracles,
and we should never underestimate the power of simple things.  In World War I, almost every family in Britain lost someone to the war-- a son, a brother, a husband, a father.  An entire generation of men was wiped out.  The end of the war brought the horrors of influenza.  People who were alive and healthy in the morning were dead by sunset.  Hundreds of thousands more lives were lost. 
​       A writer in that era, walking one day along London’s Richmond Bridge, saw that a chocolate shop that had been closed throughout the war was once again open for business.  Posted nearby were notices that a shipment of bananas from the Canary Islands had been unloaded in Liverpool, and more shipments of bananas were due from Jamaica the next week.  Chocolate and bananas.  For that writer, those two simple foods signaled the end to a time of incalculable loss and misery.*  “Lord God, let me always be grateful for simple things-- time for quiet rest, a cup of hot tea, a kind word, sunshine on my face, and … chocolate and bananas.”
 *Example taken from ‘The Great Silence’ by Juliet Nicolson
©Carol Dean Henn, 2018

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