What Do You Believe?

Last night we went to Norwich to watch ‘2:22 A Ghost Story’. The West End production had excellent reviews…

…Jenny believes her new home is haunted. She hears something every night at 2.22. Her husband Sam believes that there must be a rational explanation. Old friend Lauren and her partner Ben come for dinner. There’s conversation, discussion and arguments about beliefs…  calm rational science, healthy scepticism, emotional experiences… belief in the unseen, confidence in the unprovable, fear of the unknown… after-death experiences, spirits, ghosts, zombies…

 They agree to stay up until 2.22 to discover the truth…

Yesterday’s BBC News reported: Three young rowers from Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. Harry Allen (20), Anna Dunk (19), and Rowan Dally (21) set a world record as the youngest team to row across the Atlantic.

After two years of hard training they left San Sebastian de La Gomera, Spain in December. After 42 days, eight hours, 10 minutes they’d travelled 3,000 miles and arrived in Nelson’s Dockyard in Antigua.

Harry said: ‘We’re just ordinary people with a dream and if you’ve got that, we figure that we can do anything, including rowing the Atlantic Ocean.’ They dreamt, believed and achieved…

On ‘Make Them Count’, for church parent and toddler groups, Alan Dobbs writes: ‘Little Sheep is, I am reliably informed by the Vicar, “absolutely vital to the future of the church”.  This is usually explained to me while I am stepping over a pushchair, removing a sock from a radiator, or wondering how mashed banana has reached a vertical surface….’

I was challenged by: ‘Jesus said we must receive the Kingdom of heaven like a child.  I assume this means without dignity, without planning, and with a face covered in jam.  Children do not come to church pretending.  They arrive exactly as they are: loud, honest, emotional, and deeply unimpressed by grown-up ideas of order…’

Musing… What do I really believe about… life, death and the afterlife… aiming for and achieving my hardest challenge… receiving the Kingdom of heaven like a child?