Radio Leicester Thought for the Day
© John Denney 6 December 1999
Life is full of little irritations, isn’t it? You know:
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You programme
the video recorder for the wrong channel and get some awful American chat show
instead of that film you wanted.
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Or you leave a
paper hanky in your pocket when you put it in the washing machine and
everything comes out covered in white fluff.
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Or you’ve
bought a Christmas present for someone and you get it out of the box to check
it’s not broken before you wrap it, and the wretched thing just won’t go
back in the way it came.
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Or what
happened to me when I was preparing this Thought for the Day: you reach under
the table to pick something off the floor and smash your head on the way up.
Some calamities are a bit bigger, though. Those NASA scientists must be pretty
cheesed off that their £135 million Mars Lander seems to have got the hump and
won’t speak to them. It seems
they’ve lost touch and have pretty much given up hope of getting anything out
of the exercise – at least that was the case up to the moment I banged my head.
Losing touch is something that happens. I can still remember the boys’ class
register when I was in class 2/1 at Mayflower Junior School in the 1950s:
Banks, Bates, Burgin, Day, Denney….
And out of the eighteen boys in the class, I haven’t been in touch with
any of them since our schooldays.
I did hear that one had become a multi-millionaire on the
Lottery, though, another is in prison and at least one is dead.
We can, of course, lose touch with close family
members, too. Sons and daughters,
brothers and sisters go their separate ways, moving to other parts of this
global village we inhabit. And
sometimes rifts can develop and we just don’t meet with relatives who live
within a mile or two.
The four weeks leading to Christmas is called the
advent season by the church. This
Christmas we’re celebrating the fact that two thousand years ago God got back
in touch with the human race. We
had drifted apart. So He got back
in touch by sending Jesus, His Son, to meet with you and me, the people He
loves.
Maybe this advent season is a time for us to
get back in touch, not just with lost friends and relatives – but with God
Himself.