I recently re-read a wonderful, deeply moving book, set in France during World War 2.  It tells the story of a girl who lives with her widowed father.  At the age of six, she goes blind, an apparent tragedy which could fill them both with despair.  But the despair doesn’t last, because “Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient”.

Her world suddenly becomes a maze, but her father painstakingly builds a scale model of their neighbourhood and teaches her to find her way around it.  At first she is frustrated (“I can’t do it Papa!”), but by continually running her fingers over the model to familiarise herself with it, and then going out with her father into the streets, she learns to find her way home from the museum where he works.  Then she learns how to get to the baker’s, by counting her steps and the storm drains, and by learning which way to turn at each intersection.  In time, she learns to find her way around their neighbourhood as well as her sighted friends.

Later, when they have to flee Paris and end up living with distant family, in St Malo, the process is repeated all over again.  A different neighbourhood, another maze, a new scale model.

We may feel that we had worked out to how to find our way around the world we used to live in – you know, the one we inhabited until four months ago.  This new place needs to be navigated slightly differently.  Some of the old landmarks are still there, but others have changed; when we reach an intersection, we may have to take a different route to our destination.

The way we live and work – as individuals, as a church and as a wider community - will never be quite the same again.  But different does not have to mean less good.  Who knows, we may be able to recapture the more leisurely pace we had to adopt at the beginning of the pandemic … finding different ways of doing things and taking time to discover new places.

Above all, like Marie-Laure, we may find that this new place is not as scary as we thought.  And we may discover a new direction and purpose in our walk with God, who is as patient a Father as hers was. 

The prophet Jeremiah says this:

This is what the Lord says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;

ask for the ancient paths,

ask where the good way is , and walk in it,

and you will find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16)

Margot Spencer , July 2020