Fractured

November 2023

Dear Friends

Fractured.  Would that be your description of relationships in our world?  As I write, hundreds of Israelis have just been brutally murdered by those who crossed the nearby border driven by intense hatred.  The expected response from Israel will lead to many deaths on both sides and huge suffering and destruction in the Gaza strip.  

On 12^th November many will gather at our village war memorials just before 11am to remember with gratitude and sadness the sacrifice of those who defended our nation and allies when conflict engulfed the world.  We would like to think that such cataclysmic days are long past but I doubt it.

Our relationship with creation is broken too.  I’m not talking about our current climate panic but our long-term world-wide struggle to produce the food and other resources that we need without despising or desecrating all that God has made.  I’m writing from a cottage on the Outer Hebrides and it is sobering to see what it took for crofters to live here in this cold, boggy, weather-beaten land.

Then there is our relationship with ourselves.  How many of us are happy with who we are and feel at peace with ourselves?  Sometimes our anger and frustration with others springs out of our disappointment with ourselves.  Why do I find it so hard to change?  We are, so often, our own greatest enemy.

But the root of all this brokenness, according to the diagnosis of the Bible, is a much, much deeper fracture - our broken relationship with our creator.  We complain that he is distant and unwilling to help us or we complain about the unjust way he runs his world, but mostly we suppress all knowledge of him not wanting to serve and worship him as we instinctively know we should.  He seems nothing like a ‘heavenly Father’ to us.  We cannot fix this fracture from our side.  But what if God made the move from his side, what if he has stepped across the barbed-wire border to offer peace with his wayward creatures?  What if reconciliation with him is the essential first step to a long slow mending of all the fractured relationships with each other, with creation and with ourselves?  What if the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has plans for deep peace on earth?

Sincerely

Graham Burrows