Today, I heard Eamon Holmes on GB News say that snow in March was unusual and another presenter chipped in to add, ”Yes, it’s unprecedented”.
I can understand that if you are a Radio Presenter paid to interview people and talk for three hours each day, then you are going to fill up the time with all kinds of chatter. Some of it will be brilliant and some crass. Most will be mundane and listeners will have to take the rough with the smooth, whilst accepting, that some of the output will be factually incorrect even if entertaining.
As to judgements about weather, because most media folk are younger than the majority of my readers, they cannot draw on the experience of the great range of weather living Britons have shared over, say the last hundred years.
I have previously written of the double decker bus trapped under snow for three months in 1947, but not about the weekend in April 1957 when a bunch of young people from four Methodist Churches went to a weekend retreat at Eastwood Grange in Ashover Derbyshire.
We got there on the Friday evening, only by loading up the single decker bus with shovels and all the lads having to get out a few times to push and shovel snow. A repeat operation got us home on the Sunday evening. Drifts were up to seven feet but we made it. Snow in March may be unprecedented for the young presenter on GB News, but not for me.
In fact, at Buxton some years later a cricket match in early June had to be abandoned due to snow. These facts tell us one must be careful when assuming correlating links to the Climate, by what one sees through one’s window day by day.
Who knows, we may one day be growing olives in Bromsberrow and tomatoes in the fields at Upleadon? The fact that there are coal and oil deposits in Antarctica and vast oil deposits under barren Middle Eastern deserts is proof that over time, there have already been seismic changes in the earth’s climate and the life, which thrives still, within it.
When I was a young seminarian I came across a phrase my mind was quick to absorb. “Walk in the light of your hopes. Not, in the shadow of your fears.”
The phrase has itself, echoes of the Hymn, walk in the Light, so shalt thou know ….. and Psalm 23 which walks us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death …
Walking in the light of hope and not in the shadow of fears, reminds me that every person reading these words is free to choose the background ‘belief’ from which they view the world around them.
The Western World, which I still call ‘Christendom,’ is currently beset by great pressures from without, but equally, from fragmenting pressures within. Conflicting opinions abound, and even. institutions have become obsessed with their ‘Own Versions of Truth’ to the extent that they have lost sight of their original purposes and verities. So great are these pressures, many fear that the whole of Christendom is soon to burst.
As I look at the world today, I’ve decided to stick with those who are grounded in a Truth greater than their own as found in the Bible. Such people see this time as one when humanity can find a stability and future through the humility embodied in this prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.
View from the Pew 