Last week,
on what surely must have been one of the wettest days of the Spring, a group of
us from AFC visited Bletchley Park.
It’s been a few years since I was last there and in that time the place has benefitted enormously from an £8 million Lottery grant.
Churchill called Bletchley ‘The goose that laid the golden egg’. He was, of course, referring to its secret war time work in code-breaking, especially deciphering the messages sent out via the famous German Enigma machines.
By the end of WWII Bletchley had 9,000 people on site and their top secret work is estimated to have shortened the conflict by two to four years – saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.
Last Wednesday, whilst in one of Bletchley’s famous huts, I watched a DVD presentation of some young sailors who swam across to a sinking U Boat in the hope of capturing an Enigma machine. Of the three who attempted this mission – two went down with the submarine and only one returned.
As the film concluded I met a friend of mine who was also on the trip out in the corridor. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said: We must never underestimate the value of a single life.
It was a moving and precious moment between us. We spoke of profound truths with an economy of words. Our hearts met in affirming the value of human life – and then we moved on to greet the rest of the day.
I believe something of God was in that encounter. For the truth is we meet God in all sorts of places and people. God is never exclusively in our prayers and churches, but can somehow be experienced in the everyday and the non- ecclesiastical.
This week my thoughts have been drawn to this idea that we encounter God in a multi- sensory sort of way as I’ve been gearing up for the sermon this Trinity Sunday.
Strikes me that God is eager to bless our lives with the divine presence of love, light and peace and that we can and do meet God in creation, in Jesus and in the daily activity of The Spirit in just about any and every situation.
This Sunday I want to affirm my belief in
It’s been a few years since I was last there and in that time the place has benefitted enormously from an £8 million Lottery grant.
Churchill called Bletchley ‘The goose that laid the golden egg’. He was, of course, referring to its secret war time work in code-breaking, especially deciphering the messages sent out via the famous German Enigma machines.
By the end of WWII Bletchley had 9,000 people on site and their top secret work is estimated to have shortened the conflict by two to four years – saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.
Last Wednesday, whilst in one of Bletchley’s famous huts, I watched a DVD presentation of some young sailors who swam across to a sinking U Boat in the hope of capturing an Enigma machine. Of the three who attempted this mission – two went down with the submarine and only one returned.
As the film concluded I met a friend of mine who was also on the trip out in the corridor. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said: We must never underestimate the value of a single life.
It was a moving and precious moment between us. We spoke of profound truths with an economy of words. Our hearts met in affirming the value of human life – and then we moved on to greet the rest of the day.
I believe something of God was in that encounter. For the truth is we meet God in all sorts of places and people. God is never exclusively in our prayers and churches, but can somehow be experienced in the everyday and the non- ecclesiastical.
This week my thoughts have been drawn to this idea that we encounter God in a multi- sensory sort of way as I’ve been gearing up for the sermon this Trinity Sunday.
Strikes me that God is eager to bless our lives with the divine presence of love, light and peace and that we can and do meet God in creation, in Jesus and in the daily activity of The Spirit in just about any and every situation.
This Sunday I want to affirm my belief in
The God of
Creativity
The God of Humanity and
The God of Community
And give thanks that the experience of the Divine can come to us at the most unexpected of moments.
The God of Humanity and
The God of Community
And give thanks that the experience of the Divine can come to us at the most unexpected of moments.
Happy
Trinity!
Ian
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