WORD OF THE WEEK
SOME time last year I was walking with a friend when he remarked we were lucky to be born when we were – just after the Second Word War.
He did not view the future with any great optimism. Not long after that the world was hit by Covid-19 and the worst crisis it has known in the lifetime of most people.
Many people have lost their loved ones, unemployment abounds, children’s education has been seriously disrupted, others find themselves acutely lonely, while those who live in cramped conditions or with a violent partner are ensnared.
How I longed for another major news story other than Covid-19, which had dominated the news.
That longing proved to be a mistake, for when it came, it was a horrible racist explosion in Minnesota.
It was then that I found myself virtually taken back to the 1960s and the time of Martin Luther King, who was an American Christian minister and activist, who gloriously advocated civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience.
Among many other things he led a massive protest in Birmingham,
Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world. At the age of 35 he became the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and then, tragically, he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
It was the death of George Floyd that led me on my journey back in time. Unlike Martin Luther King, who changed the world by his activism, powerful oratory and death, George Floyd changed it in the eight and a half minutes of his dying and that alone.
While the initial protests were severely marred by violence, far more peaceful protests have followed in the UK and many more countries.
All this made me think, how far have we progressed over the last 50 years? In the 60s Britain was recovering from the war; people were better off and they had tremendous expectations for the future. It was going to be a brand new world, but that dream was never fulfilled.
Still, that dream is far from being fulfilled, but even in the darkest times, there are signs of hope.
I was deeply touched by the actions of 22-year-old Marcus Rashford, the England and Manchester United footballer, who penned an open letter to MPS asking the Government to extend its scheme and allow
1.3 million children to claim free school meal vouchers in the summer holidays.
His campaign succeeded! Marcus himself was brought up in a singleparent family of five children in Wythenshawe.
He spoke from personal experience and offered light in the darkness.
That’s where my faith rests, for there is one verse in the Bible that has no superior, for me, and that is the fifth verse in John’s Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never mastered it”.
Despite the failure and vulnerabilities of life on Earth, nothing will ever extinguish that light.