Many are returning to school, college and university today. For some there’ll be revision before examinations…
…Revision… re-vision… looking at something again… reviewing, re-examining, correcting…
…I was half-listening to the news… about a tax on sheep. I was thinking… ‘The farmers won’t be pleased’… ‘How will it be administered?’ They were talking about keeping dogs under control, showed pictures of bloody, dead sheep…
The report was about attacks on sheep! I revised my view… I had re-vision.
We were watching Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’… Pip and the scheming lawyer Jaggers were smoking opium… an accepted Victorian pleasure and pastime… A few days ago we were hearing about the healing power of Buxton spring water… Victorian apothecaries and medical practices… the medicinal benefits of opium.
Views have been revised… there’s been re-vision.
I’m reading Victoria Arlen’s autobiography ‘Locked In’. At ten years old she became ill and was unable to speak, eat, move… Written off by doctors as a ‘lost cause’, her survival was uncertain and recovery unlikely.
Aged fifteen, against all odds, Victoria started to recover… strapped to a sled she joined an ice-hockey team with others who’d been through ‘horrific ordeals’:
‘We are all sick of being called ‘inspirations’, and we just want to be hockey players… We are not patients, victims, hurt or damaged. Our battle scars are hidden by gear, and our hockey skills speak for themselves. No pity party and definitely no ‘taking it easy’.’
She’s calling for a revision of the way disability’s viewed… a re-vision.
Yesterday Stephen preached at church. Encouraging us to ‘be thankful’ he quoted Matthew Henry, who, when robbed, thanked God:
‘Let me be thankful, first, because he never robbed me before; second, because although he took my purse, he did not take my life; third, because although he took all I possessed, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.’
I’m revising what makes me thankful… praying for and aspiring to re-vision.
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