Sent On Their Way

There was a concert in the church last week; although it was my day off I thought I would just drop by on my way home and check that everything was all right. When I arrived it had just begun to rain; the church porch was crammed with the usual young people who hang around the building and I noticed at once that a pane of glass in the inner door was cracked. ‘I suppose nobody knows how that happened?’ I asked – this kind of low-level practical nonsense never ceases to annoy – and as it wouldn’t be long before the concert began thought it was time to move the youngsters on before patrons began arriving and had to run the gauntlet of pot-smoking teenagers in order to get in. After a bit of persuasion, less from me than from the college music department staff who were the organisers, they did indeed move off, grumbling that they’d only just arrived. That proved to be true, as our CCTV footage showed them moving from the back of the church when it began to rain, and, as I was realising, in fact the crack in the glass had almost certainly been made by the door swinging shut in the strong winds earlier in the day. The only other place in the centre of the village with any shelter is the railway station, so I presume that’s where the youngsters went, and where one was stabbed barely a quarter of an hour later, ending up in hospital. He’s on the mend, apparently, but might well not have been. ‘Five quid says county lines’, Ellie who runs the Brownies commented.

I know I wasn’t responsible for this awful event, but I was involved. It’s an unpleasant realisation to know that, as soon as I’m confronted with a problem – a crack in a glass door – my first thought is the inconvenience it’s going to cause me, and in the end even that was dealt with by someone else as Grant the churchwarden took the entire door away and got it fixed. Did my mood affect how I acted? Had I offered the whole thing in a tiny prayer before beginning, as I continually tell myself I should but vanishingly rarely do, might the Lord have been able to do something different with the situation? How our own sins and temptations interact with other people’s, and build up into something potentially tragic.