Wildness and Wet, and Storm Freya

Sunday was a wonderful, wild, wet day as Storm Freya battered our coast. I drove back from the meeting at the Kingdom Hall past a Channel piling up wave upon wave upon wave.

The energy and the beauty of the creation  - and yet we only see a tiny part of it.  But what does it tell us about the power, the energy, and the artistry of its Grand Creator, Jehovah of armies, the God of Abraham..

It also put me in mind of a longtime favourite poem: 

Inversnaid  by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness, the wildness and the wet - all part of the splendour and the glory of the creation.

Fast flowing peaty streams with their pitchblack pools were a part of my childhood on the Yorkshire moors and the Derbyshire Dales.  We used to picnic on the heather moorlands on a Sunday.  A wonderful playground.   In our earlier poorer days we went by bus, and later by car - at first a battered old Riley, with one door tied on with string.

Jackie joined us for fish and chips on Sunday night.  And the Chippie had run out of curry sauce!!   It had run out of curry sauce.  I am still in shock.  Its a Northern thing, and I suppose its also a First world problem, if only because no restaurant/chip shop/hotel on the sub-continent would EVER run out of curry sauce.  In fairness, they probably wouldn't serve it in the first place.

Apparently we are going to run out of everything the minute the Brexit happens - if it ever does.  In fact there is now so much scare-mongering going on among the chattering classes that I am having to be stern with myself and not get pushed into the Brexit camp.  They are getting so hysterical about it that I am starting to wonder.

However, I did not vote. And won't be voting if there is a second referendum.  And I must keep sternly reminding myself that whether we Brexit or Bremain makes not one jot of difference to Jehovah's wonderful purposes for the earth, and focus on that and stay neutral.

It is at least a good lesson in the unwisdom of trying to rule by referendum.  And perhaps yet another reminder that, as the Inspired Scriptures warn, "it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step."

We need the loving rule of the Kingdom of God, which will restore that link so fatally broken in Eden.