Village Shepherd

When Grace was 82, her husband died. He'd been ill for some time, but not so ill that he was unable to function. It came as a great shock to Grace. She was completely thrown, for she realised for the first time that she had no idea about so many things relating to the running of their home. She couldn't, for instance, turn the water off when the tap sprang a leak because she neither knew where the stopcock was nor how to turn it off.

Grace had never written a cheque nor played any part in the home finances. She didn't know about paying council tax or other monthly bills. She could wash and iron, cook and clean, but she couldn't saw wood, replace plugs, paint doors or do any of the house maintenance jobs.

Grace had learned to drive when she was forty, but had never been really confident, so Alfred had always been the driver. Now he was no longer there, Grace discovered that what little confidence she had once had on the roads had evaporated completely. At the age of 82 she knew she would never drive again.

All of this, plus the huge grief she felt over Alfred's death after 54 years of marriage, plunged Grace into loneliness and isolation. She railed against God for taking Alfred so suddenly and she railed against Alfred for leaving her alone. She didn't dare let her mind dwell on the future for she couldn't begin to face the thought of those empty years stretching ahead.

It was a long, hard, uphill struggle for Grace and it was nearly two years before she began to feel that life might perhaps be worth living for a little longer. But she made it. She learned to write cheques and discovered that she enjoyed the experience. She learned to manage the simple household maintenance jobs and dismissed her pride sufficiently to ask her neighbours for help when necessary. She accepted lifts when they were offered and made a point of never refusing an invitation. Gradually, her life began again.

When she was 92, Grace said thank you to God for taking her husband. By then she was struggling to remain in her own home and she knew that she could never have looked after Alfred as well as herself. And in her more realistic moments she became aware that the other side of loneliness was being able to do everything her own way. She no longer had to listen to hours of classical music -- Alfred's choice -- but could listen to local radio and songs from the shows. She could indulge her passion for soaps on the television without anyone showing signs of disgust at her poor taste. And she could eat when she wanted to eat. There was no longer any urgent requirement for a meal to be on the table at precisely one o'clock.

Humbly and quietly Grace realised that awful as it was at the time and although she would never really "get over" Alfred's death, she had learned to live with it and in many ways it had turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

God's blessings often seem to be in disguise and sometimes the disguise is so thick that they take a long time and a great deal of effort to penetrate.

According to the book of Genesis, Abram was already a very old man when God called him to leave his home where he had been almost all his life and to wander until he found a new place to settle.

Abram was born in Ur of the Chaldeans and had two brothers, Haran and Nahor. Haran died, leaving a son, Lot, Abram's nephew. We're told that Abram's father Terah was 70 years old when Abram was born (Genesis 11: 26) and that he died in a place in Syria which he named "Haran" after the dead son, at the age of 205 (Genesis 11:32). It was after this that Abram was called to move on, so that makes Abram 135 years old! Even allowing for a different way of counting, for literary exaggeration, and for different lengths of years, the message is that Abram was very old when he set off with his nephew Lot and all their kinsfolk, cattle and possessions.

God promised to bless Abram, to make of him a great nation and to make his name great, but it might seem that God's blessing was well disguised when Abram set off. We know from the previous chapter that his wife, Sarai, was barren (Genesis 11:30), so at this point the chances of God's blessing actually coming to fruition are remote.

The story of Abram begins just after things have started to go badly wrong between God and human beings. So far in the story of humanity's earliest beginnings, Adam and Eve have sinned and been thrown out of the Garden of Eden and the first murder has happened when one of their sons murdered his brother. Paradise has crashed about their ears.

Next comes the story of Noah and the great flood, where most human beings are destroyed leaving only a tiny remnant -- Noah and his family. At this point in the story God makes his first covenant with human beings (never again to destroy the world) and seals the covenant with the sign of a rainbow (Genesis 9:8-17).

But rleationships between God and humans fail to improve and the final story in the pre-history sequence is that of the Tower of Babel, when human beings aspire to becoming gods and God knocks them back (Genesis 11:1-9). Then comes the story of Abram as a link between the pre-history myths and legends and the beginnings of a nation, so Abram's response to God's promise of a blessing is crucially important in the history of the nation. If Abram had assessed his present situation and decided that there was no possibility of being blessed in the way that God had promised and so choosing to ignore God and remain where he was in Syria, there would never have been a Jewish nation in quite the same way. And without Judaism there would never have been Christianity or Islam.

We can never know what blessings God has in store for us. We can only hang onto God's promises made throughout the Old Testament and brought to fruition in Jesus Christ, that God is on our side, that he loves each of us individually and that he is rooting for us. Once we have really accepted those promises as true, then we need to follow Jesus, and to take the good times and the sad times in our lives and see them both for what they are -- God's blessings, but sometimes in disguise.