One of Dame Vera Lynn’s wartime songs was ‘when the lights go on again all over the world’. The lyrics go on to talk about the permanence of love and marriage and ships sailing again after the dark years of the semi-stultified existence of war, or so I read it.
Sunset can be a very beautiful time of day. Occasionally the sky is lit spectacularly and if you add cloud into the mix the effect is almost surreal. My late father was a good amateur photographer and he it was who captured today’s image. The photograph is labelled ‘Dunwich’.
Dunwich is the scene of the lost city of Suffolk – not the same ring as Atlantis perhaps but just as mysterious. What was it like to be in the bustling little port all those years ago, and how did the locals feels as their lives were subsumed by time and tide? The lights cannot come on again for a city hidden under the sea but still the sun sets in the same serene way, day after day.
And so out flutters 2021. We thought it may be the year that saw the end of COVID. We think a lot of things and some thoughts materialise while others do not. What will you think for 2022 as you retire to bed tonight?
Whatever your wishes may be, try not to strain too much at impossible things like bringing old Dunwich back up from the waves, but rather, reflect on the permanence of God who first created sea and sky, night and day, moon and sun. The seasons come and go, as do we, but despite the seeming eclipse of the Church in our day as numbers erode, the light of Christ keeps coming on again all over the world in the same way that, for every sunset, there must be a sunrise.
This was not really meant to be my day for thinking and sharing with you, hence wishing you every good thing yesterday morning, but like the sun, it never hurts to repeat the same act so, once again, a very happy new year to all of you and may God bless you throughout its days.
A prayer
God of the end of the day and the end of things, bring me to a new beginning tomorrow, refreshed as the sun from its chamber and ready to run my course whatever you determine that course to be. May I serve you as your deserve, next year and always, for the sake of Jesus who has served me new resurrection life from the sunset of his temporary death. Amen.