Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Official Report 882KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Alan Sorensen, the minister of Wellpark Mid Kirk in Greenock.

I was rummaging through old diaries recently, and out popped a piece of paper with a list of all the disasters that had befallen me over two weeks. It became the introduction to a talk on the subject of “How God Blesses Us”.

It started with my church’s annual meeting, which had been so full of heckling that it was almost abandoned; the next day, my wee three-year-old daughter went into hospital for major surgery; her X-rays were lost and it was postponed; my mother was mugged; my sister-in-law borrowed our car to take said daughter over to hospital for the operation and it broke down; her sister drove to the rescue and was in a car crash; and my daughter came out of hospital in plaster and in a wheelchair and came down with German measles, as did her baby sister, so none of us slept for an entire week.

Stay with me, here—believe it or not, there is more to come. My car was broken into; the washing machine got the last rites and, with no money to buy a new one and with a baby in the house, that created a major biohazard. To cap it all—drum roll—the family budgie died.

As I said when I gave the talk about God’s blessing, all of that happened to me, supposedly one of the good guys. I have got faith, yet I struggled to make sense of it all.

Some of those events were serious, some not so, but we all have times like that when everything that can go wrong just does go wrong. Faith provides no immunity from suffering. I think that we get that message at Easter, when we see that Jesus ends up on the cross. St Paul, in the Bible, rattled off his list of hardships and yet he said that that was what made his faith stronger. There is a real mystery there; bad stuff can actually help to make us better.

Eventually, I could list good things that came out of that time. It reminded me of the wee inflatable punch-bag toy with a weight in the bottom that we used to whack over and it just bounced back up. I suspect that that resonates with all politicians, especially those who are in this chamber.

Having a faith does not mean that we do not take the knocks, but it does invite me to believe that, with God, I may be knocked down but I am never knocked out.

Thank you.