WHY?

Why do I do this to myself?  I woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning after a stress filled dream about being taken to the airport - vaguely the local one of our expat years - only to realise I had no passport, no airline ticket and no idea of what flight I was supposed to be getting. I kept trying to phone Captain B to ask him to bring the paperwork to the airport.  But something always happened to stop me.

Then I was back home - vaguely my childhood home - I was again trying to phone Col to ask if he had  my paperwork, but every time I tried to phone something stopped me. There was a guy, a Filippino guy who was testing our record player and he had to test it right by the phone, so I couldn't hear anything.  Then I went upstairs where it would be quieter, only to find there was no phone - nor should there have been if this was indeed the house of my childhood - one downstairs phone was a luxury then.

When my young parents came home from a rare outing - the office Christmas party - and found a pregnant neighbour lying battered and bleeding on their doorstep, my father had to run to the nearest phone box. while my mother rushed for blankets.  And run he did. And she was saved. Though not the baby.  

Then I was overcome by a blinding pain in my right leg. I am going to die up here I thought.  Is that why I had gone back to a version of my childhood home?  And I did die to the dream as the pain - very real - woke me.  It only lasted for a few seconds thank God, and, finding Captain B sleeping peacefully next to me I thought at last I can ask him about my passport, I don't need a phone now...  fortuntely it dawned on me before i actually woke the poor guy up. But, oh dear, why am I doing this to myself?  Doesn't life have enough anxieties as it is?

And enough horrors.   The battered lady in question did ring my mother, years later, to say that the batterer had died some time ago, and that she had married again (bravely), this time to a really nice guy.  And now there is the tragedy of young Sarah Everard, killed - allegedly by an off-duty policeman - as she walked home.   

It comes back to WHY?  Why did he have to attack and kill her?  And the anger left in the wake of this seems to have made things even worse. There was a vigil in London for Sarah, which was broken up by the police, under Covid regulations.  So it all ended with more violence.  More anger.

Divisions and hatreds seem to be on the increase everywhere. And why this hatred between men and women, who should have been partners perfectly complementing each other?

The Inspired Scriptures, which truly do set everything straight, tell us.  Because surely the asnwer is there in Genesis.  It tells how the perfect partnership between man and woman went tragically wrong.  And it also shows us how Adam blamed the woman for what had happened.  "The woman that you gave me..."

But in Genesis they are both blamed and both died, as God had warned they would if they disobeyed. They both returned to the dust of the ground from which they were created. Because of this we will never meet our first parents.  And we are still living in the tragedy their disobedience created.

This is why the Memorial is so important, such a special occasion.  Jesus' death, as a perfect man, paid back to God the perfect human life that Adam so tragically threw away in Eden.  And it opens up the way back to the life and perfection that was lost.

Under the rule of God's loving Kingdom, there will not only be no more bad dreams, but the current wicked system of things on the earth will be gone like a bad dream - never to return.