Kitchen

Friends

Don't you just hate it when there are road works on the A4? Tonight I

was stuck in a tailback that hardly moved at all for nearly 20 minutes.

It's hard to focus on the road in those circumstances and I found my

eyes drawn to the verge, where a very young rabbit had hopped out to

have a nibble at the grass on the side of the pavement next to the road.

I couldn't quite believe that he dared to be so close to the cars. Then I

realised that what to me was only three feet of grass verge, to him was

perhaps seven or eight times his length. If it had been me, the road

would have been 40 or 50 feet away and the grass a good 5 foot high. I

would have had no reason to be afraid of the road had I seen it from his

perspective.

The other day, Mark and I were in the kitchen listening to someone on

the radio talking about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe,

when he noticed a tiny fruit fly on the window. Letting it walk onto his

finger so that he could throw it outside, he said to me, "This is such a

nuisance to us, and yet it's been perfectly formed over millions of years.

Can you imagine how we would feel about it if instead of finding it in our

kitchen, we discovered it on another planet?" We found ourselves

feeling quite emotional about this little fruit fly, although I am afraid that

we still threw it out of the window to fend for itself in the great outdoors!

Still, perspective is all.

Our perspective on Easter, a festival we should be continuing to

celebrate until Pentecost, is always different than for those first disciples,

because we view it from the other side of Easter Sunday. However

moving the Holy Week services, we always know that Sunday is coming.

Yet if we can try to imagine it from God's perspective, we are so tiny, no

more significant than that little fruit fly, and yet he sent his son to die for

us. Can you imagine choosing to die so that a fruit fly could live? Yet it's

even more than that, because he cares for us in a relational way. He

knows us. He understands our lives, our choices, our mistakes, our

strengths, and he died so that those would never be lost, so that

whatever happened in our time on earth, our soul would survive for all

eternity. It would be a wonderful thing I think, if we could try to see each

other from God's perspective.

God bless, Vicci