A QUESTION OF FAITH

With Rev Patrick Timperley, Minister of the Great Meeting Unitarian Chapel, Baines Lane THE LEICESTER City team and supporters are still rejoicing in their new-found status as Premier League champions. The Foxes have marched through the whole football season, hardly putting a foot wrong.

Many people have been caught up in the week-byweek emotional rollercoaster of hoping - but not quite believing - that City could keep winning!

This is a great time not just for the Blue Army loyal supporters, but also fairweather friends of the team who came back this year - and people in Thailand who have never been to Leicester, but are celebrating just the same.

I was born and brought up a few miles from Leicester, so even though I’m not much of a supporter, I was quite emotional when the title was secured.

This season has been a superb story - but another reason I found it moving is to do with my mum, who sadly isn’t alive to see all this. She would have been so excited! When she died five years ago, we found all the old football programmes – including one from the glory days of 1949 when Leicester City played Wolves in the FA Cup Final at Wembley.

I’ve thought of my mum often in these last few weeks. Some days I have felt quite sad that she is missing out on sharing the celebrations – she would have loved every minute of it.

Maybe you’ve felt something similar: at a wedding, family party, or Christmas dinner. Suddenly it’s clear: someone is missing; they’ve been taken from us; we feel the grief and the pain. It’s when big events happen that we are reminded of the people who aren’t there. We come face to face with the inexorable passage of time, the loves and losses of our lives.

Is my mum, with other family and friends who have died, now somewhere in another life, celebrating, in a world where times and places have come together, and suffering is no more? Life is mysterious, and even with scientific advances, we don’t know where we came from, or why, or what awaits us.

In the Bible it is written that now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face. Now we know in part; but then we shall know fully, even as we are fully known – and that faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.

There is one thing I am sure about. Wherever my mum might be, she would be looking forward very much to seeing Gary Lineker present Match of the Day in his underpants, which he has said he would do if Leicester City won the Premier League!