Pastoral Letter
Dear Friends,
I am writing this letter on Easter Saturday and, as with many of us, looking forward hopefully to warmer weather.
The key word here is "hopefully". There is an English proverb that says: "If it were not for hope the heart would break", and that is so true. We all need hope to enable us to face the challenges and difficulties that life inevitably brings.
The Christian faith is founded on hope. As someone once wrote: "Life with Christ is an endless hope, without him a hopeless end".
On a cruise from Mexico to Hawaii in 1979, Los Angeles lawyer John Peckham and his wife, Dottie, put a note in a bottle and tossed it into the Pacific. Three years and nine thousand miles later, Vietnamese refugee Nguyen Van Hoa leaned down from a tiny, crowded boat and plucked the bottle from the South China Sea and was amazed to find a name and address, a dollar for postage and the promise of a reward. "It gave me hope," said Hoa, who had escaped from a prison camp in Vietnam.
Safe in a UN refugee camp in Thailand, Hoa wrote to the surprised Peckhams. For two years they corresponded; during which Hoa married and had a son. A short while after the birth the Peckhams agreed to sponsor the emigration of Hoa, by then thirty-one, and his family. A few months later, they arrived in Los Angeles for an emotional meeting with the Peckhams and to start a new life. The hope that the note in the bottle gave Hoa was then fully realised.
For Christians the resurrection of Jesus Christ is our hope for today. It is our assurance that we have a living Saviour to help us live as we should now, and that when, in the end, we set forth on that last great journey, we shall not travel an uncharted course, but rather we shall go on a planned voyage from life to death to eternal living. We believe that Jesus Christ will be our constant companion on that journey - guiding us, teaching us, strengthening us, and supporting us; and, when we arrive at our final destination in heaven, we shall have the joy of meeting him face to face.
Alexander Pope sums up the Christian hope beautifully:
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher death, and God adore.
What future bliss he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now,
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed.
May God bless you all,