The Pointer Online only May 2020
Rector The Rt Rev Darren McCartney 028 4175 3497 suffragan1@gmail.com
The Magazine of the Church of Ireland Parishes of Clonallon & Warrenpoint with Kilbroney in the Diocese of Down and Dromore Contact the editor, Elizabeth, if you would like a pdf sent to your email. hannamanor15@btinternet.com
I also remember chatting with a friend, who paramotors (think of the above cartoon) and I asked him the ‘what if’ questions. He informed me that he wouldn’t do a parachute jump and went on to explain how different paramotoring was to parachuting.
Perspective! I wonder if you have ever seen someone paramotoring and if you have, has your thinking been anything like the above picture? Perhaps on first glance it hasn’t looked the safest thing to be involved in! Questions run through the mind, what if? I remember a number of years ago being asked to do a parachute jump for charity. On a beautiful sunny morning I found myself with two other colleagues standing in a hanger up the North Coast. Part of the training involved hanging from the ceiling in a parachute rig. Above our heads were TV screens facing down. The instructor would play video clips showing different scenarios which could happen to your parachute on deployment. This involved the lines connecting you to the parachute being tangled and the effects on the shoot. The idea being that if you saw this happening you were to frantically kick your legs so as to get them untangled, I wasn’t completely convinced. The afternoon came for us to head up in a small plane. We were all sitting on the floor. I was closest to the door, I say door, it was a metal shutter similar to what you would see on the front of a shop window. The instructor reaches over and pulls the bottom of the door up. He says, “the wind is strong”. He throws a wind gauge out the door to test whether it is safe to jump, if it is ever safe to jump!! The instructor shouts “Sorry lads we can’t jump today!” I don’t think I have ever felt such joy or relief!! I had been sitting on the floor of this plane, with the different video clips that we had seen earlier being played out in my mind and it wasn’t pleasant.
Perspective. Things aren’t always what they first seem. How I see something, can differ from the way you see the same thing. If this is true concerning our day-to-day activities, how much more when it comes to our walk with God? Quite often, perhaps a lot of the time, we don’t see things the way God sees them. We are often limited to the here and now because we feel the here and now. I came across the following prayer whilst preparing this week, “O God, most
holy, as we bow in Thy presence, we acknowledge our sinfulness, our worldliness, our carelessness, our selfishness, and our thoughtlessness, our ingratitude for kindness human and divine, our anxiety to lay up for ourselves treasure upon earth, our indifference to laying up for ourselves treasure in heaven. In this hour, we confess that we all share in the sin that brought death into the world. Remind us that we must all appear before Thy judgement seat.” A very strong prayer, don’t you think? We tend to focus on the here and now and what is happening around us, and how it affects us and those we love. But if I could only grasp how fleeting this life is, perhaps, I might see things differently or think of them differently. God has promised that His Grace is sufficient for us no matter what might come our way, that there is nothing that can separate us from His love for us in Christ. I love the book of James in the New Testament. James indicates two possible outcomes when we face trials. One is that we will draw closer to God, we will seek God’s presence in the trials and the other is that we can follow the desires that are in us and harden our hearts against God. Lord God may we know Your presence, your power at work in our lives; sustain us now and in the hour of our need, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Blessings +Darren