From One End to the Other

Church Club met at the Infants School for the last time this year on Wednesday. Several of the children weren't there, and the remainder were more than a little hyper, although I had hoped that Sports Day might have dampened them down a bit. Trying to talk to small children about the Book of Revelation (John having a strange dream about wars and earthquakes and a man on a white horse who turns out to be Jesus, and finally a beautiful city coming down from heaven) would be hard enough at the best of times, but you can't keep telling the story of the Good Samaritan over and over again, can you? I asked them to think about something that was really beautiful, and got some peculiar answers. It was probably that thought that prompted Lauren to tell me 'You're like a sunrise!' as she gave me a goodbye hug (not that it's as though I won't see her or the others again). I'm not sure I quite understand the simile. 

At the other end of the scale I spoke in the evening to the concerned cousin of an older member of the congregation whose normal hesitant diffidence seems to be turning into a kind of breakdown, and then to the daughter of another longstanding member of the congregation who is dying. She shouldn't be dying: what the huge operation she underwent a few weeks ago was for is a question that will be asked at a future point. She's at a care home about fifteen miles away close to the daughter's home, so I retrieved the necessary equipment from the church and took her the last sacraments. It all went as it is supposed to, the recipient more-or-less conscious and aware and their family around them; how rarely this happens, and how affecting it is when it does.