There are times in my work when I meet some amazing and wonderful people. I recently had the privilege of meeting the daughter of some church members who is working in Gaza, this was not some formal meeting, it was simply a chat over a cuppa after a service. All we seem to hear about Gaza today is all the negative news, and let’s face it, there is plenty of that to keep journalists busy for a lifetime.
This lady isn’t a journalist, she is an educationalist and she is in Gaza to teach the thousands of children who have no real place to call home, often they are orphaned and their schools have been destroyed. School is now in tents and operates in three-hour long shifts throughout the day. The teachers are working long shifts themselves and have to be prepared at a moment’s notice to evacuate the makeshift school. I could have spent hours with this lady, listening to the challenges she faces in her daily life.
Last weekend was one of those occasions that I will remember for a long time. It was my privilege on Saturday to conduct a wedding ceremony, and that in itself was a special experience. I can remember a time around forty years ago when there were weddings every weekend in our Church in Bradford and sometimes several each Saturday. Things are different today with weddings being the huge commercial business that they are, with tens of thousands of pounds being spent on increasingly lavish ceremonies.
Saturday was special, it was the wedding of an amazing couple who are both in their eighties, there were no stretch limousines, film crews, streams of bridesmaids and all the other lavish necessities of the twenty-first century wedding. This was about the love of a man and woman and it was a true honour to be a part of their special day.
Two days later I conducted a funeral service along with a colleague minister. We had a modest service of interment at the crematorium followed by a service of thanksgiving in the Church. Normally on these occasions, I am the one person in the room that doesn’t know the deceased, this time was different, I both knew and loved this lady who, at just shy of her ninetieth birthday, still managed to fill the chapel and the schoolroom with a live link between the two and even then, some folk had to stand throughout. What was it that made this lady so special? Time and again as people paid tribute, one word was prevailed “Love.”
As I sit and write this thought today, I think of the contrast between the image above of Gaza in the twenty-first century. It is an example of how horrible and destructive the powers of evil can be. Why does this happen? Because of people’s greed, because of the continual hunger for power and supremacy. It seems to me that whether we are under the threat of scammers, who are continually try to steal from us, faceless cyber bullies who destroy people’s lives, those who sell drugs to teenagers getting them hooked and giving them a false place to escape, simply to make the drug barons wealthy beyond imagination.
It is good to be reminded every so often, that while there is so much evil in the world, love changes all that and even in the war-torn streets of Gaza, we see love at work and in very ordinary people, living ordinary lives, we see love at work. My lady whose life we celebrated in her thanksgiving service would almost certainly have said “why all this fuss, I was nobody special” Michael Ball singing Love Changes Everything was played in the service, and never was a truer word spoken.