Recently, clutching my letter telling ‘to whom it may concern’ that I work in the food industry and therefore should, in the words on my passport, be permitted to ‘pass freely without let or hindrance’, I was let out on an excursion to Scotland.
The purpose of the trip was not exciting; an insurance property audit. Facts and figures, risks and mitigations; improvements made and recommendations to come.
I opened the meeting in the usual polite way. We were grateful for each other’s time and so on – and then I said, innocently, ‘it really is nice to be here, with real people and no screen between’. In a meeting room in a grey and damp Fife, sitting well apart, there we were, four people: a young family man with a toddler excited about her first Christmas, a first time grandpa, a normally dure engineer relieved to be out of Glasgow lock-down and a man off that evening to catch a boat to Ireland to see his mother who has just completed another course of chemotherapy. All that because it was nice to see…and smile.
There is a verse in Hebrews [10:25] where the writer says… “not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another”. A verse taken out of context, as here, and used, in stricter days, as a swipe at those ‘not in church’. Yes, I refer to forty years ago and village chapels, but now the verse has taken on a new reality. The wider context of Hebrews 10 was the sacrifice of Christ for all, followed by encouragement to persevere in faith.
Go back to scenes that are now unfamiliar and think about all the chance meetings we have with people. All those life stories and problems of the moment that come out because of a remark or picking up on a facial expression. If ever there was a reason for “not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” that is it. The habit currently is forced on us because of the circumstances of the moment but let’s not pretend that present practices can become the new normal; they cannot.
This theme has come out of so many ‘Thoughts’ written by our friends in the Circuit; we are human and we need to meet, to love and to share proximity, body language and stories.
A prayer
Lord, who came among us in human form because we needed to meet to understand, we pray that you will guide our endeavours to get through and to the end of our enforced inhumanity. Grant us the wisdom to keep all that we have learned for the blessing of those who are not able to move about, but strengthen others to come out from behind screens and cameras and into the blessing of meeting. We ask this for the sake of the Christ who moves among us.
Amen.