Breakthrough

I was looking at my photos from a trip to Israel last March, and uploaded one of the Sea of Galilee as the desktop of my laptop. Now I can dream and remember, and imagine Jesus and his friends seeing the same sight, perhaps many times. 

It’s the breakthrough of the light that I find so breath-taking. It was dawning a rather stormy day, and we were due to go out on one of the Jesus boats in the picture. Perhaps a storm would brew up suddenly, like it did when Jesus was crossing the Sea a couple of times, recorded in the Bible. 

In the event, it didn’t. We had a calm boat trip and I found it amazing to be in nature, where Jesus was. So much more moving than being in a man-made church full of gold and glitz erected over a probable holy site. 

We are having grim weather here in the UK. Unseasonal they say, for March, though I don’t know. In nearly forty years of living here, I think I’ve gone through plenty of Marches where the weather continued to feel more wintry than spring-like. Snow, gales, ice. It can feel pretty grey and cloudy.

This morning, though, I received an email from a childhood friend, an echo down the corridors of time and space. A long and welcome communication full of memories and thoughts about our relationship and relationships with those we have loved and lost. An encouraging note – something we all need.

It was like the sunshine breaking through the clouds. The glory from heaven to earth. Jesus is closer to you than you think.