What weather like yesterday's always makes me think of
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
-- Ted Hughes
So yesterday, whilst sat in church, my mind started to wander a little. Normally when this happens it means pointlessly thinking over everything to come in the week ahead, or wondering where my lunch is going to be coming from, or sometimes even thinking up grand plans to save the world with one simple twelve month gap year program. On this occasion however, whilst I was drifting somewhat from the sermon, it was still related. See, the sermon was about
Lot and his fleeing from Sodom. Basically, Lot has gotten himself into a real mess here. Not only has he found himself living in a pretty evil place but it seems to have messed him up pretty badly too. It seems that the usual way of treating a passage like this is to focus on all the mistakes Lot makes and use him as an example of what not to do. Whist it's incredibly important to learn from the mistakes of others, I kind of feel that's only giving half the story.
See, Lot did mess up pretty bad - he offered to let the men of Sodom rape both his daughters for starters! - yet God never turned his back on him. In fact God's angels physically drag him out of harms way and later rescue him and his family from the destruction of Sodom. The apostle Peter even goes on to call Lot
righteous. That's a curious response if you only see Lot as a sinner who's made mistake after mistake.
Looking through the bible as a whole, a pattern seems to emerge. Time after time, people screw up and sin big time, but God is always able to forgive them and restore them. Abraham went on to be the
'father of many nations' despite turning his back on God numerous times; David was described as being
a man after God's own heart even after being a murder and adulterer; Peter repeatedly denies even knowing Jesus but is made the head of the church just weeks later. It seems it is important to remember that although we are fallen beings and mess up lots, God can in an instant pick us up and put us back on track again if only we let Him. No matter how great our sin is, the forgiveness and patience of the creator of the universe is always greater. That's pretty amazing!
An exercise in triviality
In case anyone still thought that physicists play an important role in society, here's an example of the sort of exam question I'll be trying to answer in a couple hours time:
If the law were changed so that traffic in Great Britain travelled on the right-hand side of the road instead of the left, would the length of the day increase, decrease or be unaltered? Explain the reasoning behind your answer.
{10}
The Narnia Code
Just something that was on BBC One last night and is really worth
watching if you're at all interested in C.S. Lewis.
Uncertainty...
Uncertainty is a strange thing. It's one of those things that just seem to, well, define life - at least in my experience anyway. So you'd think I'd be pretty used to it by now. Yet for some reason it just overwhelms me every time. Right now the two big things are those that more or less characterise the student experience at this time of year, well apart from exams - finding a place to live and something to do with my summer that earns me some money. It doesn't matter that I've been here before. This is my fifth year of university and it's always roughly worked out. It doesn't even seem to matter that we have a God who
promises to take care of us and for whom any problems I can see must surely be no
match. But it should.
