The Sadness that Belongs to the World

This quote is from the first part of Janet Frame's autobiography "To the Is-land".

"I remember a gray day when I stood by the gate and listened to the wind in the telegraph wires. I had my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness, or it seemed to come from outside, from the sound of the wind moaning in the wires.  I looked up and down the white dusty road and saw no one.  The wind was blowing from place to place past us, and I was there, in between, listening. I felt a burden of sadness and loneliness as if something had happened or begun and I knew about it.  I don't think I had yet thought of myself as a person looking out at the world; until then I felt I was the world.  In listening to the wind and its sad song, I knew I was listening to a sadness that had no relation to me, which belonged to the world."

I understand that feeling.  But what is the sadness that belongs to the world?  She asks again a few chapters on, when she says:  "The aunts were there...and the uncles with their shy Frame look and the particular set of the lips that said, 'Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?'"

Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?

Janet Frame doesn't answer the question.  Yet the answer is there - and always has been - in the first chapters of Genesis. But "the world" will do all it can to make sure we don't hear it.  Just as it does not want us to know where we are in the stream of time.

We are born desperately lonely, cut off from our Creator, our Source of life. We are dying from the moment we are born.  It was not supposed to be like this.

And a rescue is on the way. That is the good news of the gospels - the urgent good news. Which brings me back to 1914 - a marked year in Bible prophecy.


We went to our first virtual book launch yesterday!    "Edge of Arcadia" by Ken Reah.

http://www.fantasticbookspublishing.com/2014/01/09/incoming-edge-of-arcadia-and-amuseing-tales-will-be-available-as-a-beautiful-print-book-very-soon/

We are being hit by another violent storm - the wind howled round the flat all evening and was still doing so in the early morning.   Jacks came for supper last night. Cooks shepherds pie - very good and enough left for Captain B today.  I did carrots and broccoli with cheese sauce to accompany, and we had cheese, biscuits, grapes and ice-cream afterwards.   The Captain left early in a brief sunshine window which closed and the gale came back.  We keep having sunshine windows in the storm.   Strange strange weather.
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