A PARTY POSTPONED

There’s a work survey out today about whether or not they should ‘postpone’ the Christmas party next week.

Happy December, everyone. I voted yes. I said they should ‘postpone’ it, although let’s face it - that means cancelling it really, doesn’t it. What an unhappy situation.

Working from home has left me starved for company - the bonhomie and unseen pheromones of human-to-human interaction with people on the same mission as you, the clickety-clack of an office full of people typing and chuckling and chatting, and then walking around aimlessly with coffee cups - I miss all of that far more than I thought I would. I really needed the party.

Yet on the other side, we’re here faced-down by the deadly Omicron: the latest Covid variant to hit the streets. No-one knows yet whether this beastly mutation is clever enough to get around the vaccines, or even how transmissible it is - though the signs are there. In a cruel symmetry to the beginning of this pandemic, the numbers of detected cases are now creeping up from single to quadruple digits in the UK, and it probably won’t be long before Omicron is the dominant variant here.

I don’t want to get it. I don’t want to risk it. I don’t want it near my tent, so in the spirit of wisdom, I clicked ‘Yes’ to the postponement of something I really needed and was looking forward to. I have no idea what everyone else will do - I guess even if they vote no, I’ve nailed my colours to the mast, right?

Life’s a tricky balance. Risk versus reward, faith versus wisdom. Another prominent evangelical anti-vaxxer died yesterday - a pastor/televangelist who simply refused to be vaccinated, and preached heavily against it. 64 years old. I think that’s very sad whichever way you look at it.

My own belief is that as followers of Jesus, our lives are best lived with a key balance between faith and wisdom. Yes, God can heal you. Yes, you should take your medicines. Yes, he can protect you from the evil one; yes you should stay out of reach of temptation. It’s when we swing wildly towards one or the other extreme that I think trouble sets in.

Too much worldly wisdom and we never trust God for anything - life becomes all about our own decisions and lives, and we become the masters of our own destinies without believing or even listening to heaven. Swing the other way and we rely on out-of-this-world faith and before we know it, we’re suddenly ignoring seatbelts and headlamps and roadsigns and vaccines.

Somehow we have to find ways of being both in the world and not of it.

Well. This concludes today’s sermon. It’s okay - you can disagree with me; your balance is almost certainly different to mine. I just hope that your equilibrium of medicine and miracle keeps you free from this pernicious virus.

So anyway, I’m probably not going to the Christmas Do in that there London. Tum tum tum. At least I can confidently spend my last single Christmas with my parents without having to self-isolate. There are other things in the diary of course, and who knows whether they too will have to be postponed, cancelled, called-off, delayed? I just pray I’ll have enough wisdom and enough faith to do the right thing.