Faith offers a sense of hope through the foggy road ahead

The world appears a very different, scary place, demanding fierce concentration and patience.

You long for the fog to lift and the roads to become familiar once again.

As we slowly emerge from lockdown, a fog obscures the way ahead.

We long for a resumption of normality, or at least something close to it.

However, threats lurk on every side and the slow rate of progress is frustrating.

Feelings like this crop up from time to time for all of us on a smaller scale, as a result of sickness or redundancy, for instance.

The threat of Covid-19, however, has an impact not only on us and our families, but on the whole world.

Most of us will doggedly carry on, but for some it will lead to despair, and for others, a careless abandon, accompanied by the mantra ‘what will be, will be’.

The message of Jesus has something important to say.

When his friends faced the imminent and devastating threat of his death, he told them: “Do not be worried and upset, believe in God and believe also in me.”

Easier said than done

He also promised that his gift of the Spirit of God would help them, and when the Day of Pentecost came, this became a reality.

Their fears were remarkably overcome, replaced by a deep sense of hope and confidence.

St Paul, writing some years later, wrote to the hard-pressed Christians in Rome that their hope was founded on a confidence of being loved by God, a confidence which the Spirit of God, working in their hearts, brought to them.

In times of anxiety and threat, this sense that we are loved by God may not change our circumstances, but it can give us the inner resources we need to cope in a hopeful and positive way.

Written by The Reverend Dr Peter Shepherd, of Cemetery Road Baptist Church, Napier Street, Sharrow.