Front page

Yikes! Benjy, Jane and I are all over the front cover of the Church Times today.

It's a good article, in my view, by Rebecca Paveley - click on Features, if you can't afford the £1.10. She's a journalist with an unusual degree of empathy, who seemed to probe into bits you'd rather hide as well as the more cheerful bits.

I might put the whole of the email interview on line sometime, but for the moment here's one bit about healing that didn't get in (and I DID have a lot to say!).
'How do you reconcile the terminal nature of MND and your belief God is able to heal, physically?'
The flippant (or profound) answer would be that all life is terminal in that sense, wouldn’t it? And in one sense having your days numbered for you is a privilege - so we may get ‘a heart of wisdom’ - isn’t it? And we don’t have hope for this life alone. But my theology of healing is that it’s a sign of the Kingdom, not a right of the Kingdom. You know how, when there’s a solar eclipse, you can’t actually look at it direct, but you can use a pinhole to project the image on to paper and see what’s going on. In a way, I think it’s a bit like that with physical healings in answer to prayer (which I know do happen): God gives us a tiny indication of his power, his personal compassion and his ultimate intention for redeemed creation. It’s a sign. I think that’s what Jesus was doing in his ministry, except he was saying, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ I’m really glad to worship a God who is able to do so much and who shows me what he’s like, but whom I can’t boss around. I’m glad he’s mysterious. But I look forward to the day when I shall know, understand, as I’m understood. I suspect my worship will be on a different plane then! I certainly hope it will.