GOOD NEWS
Someone once said there is one thing harder to accept than
bad news and that is good news! Perhaps we are not used to good news. We don’t
get enough of it. What is the ‘good news of great joy’ the angel announced on
Christmas night? Each one of us will have their own version and down the ages
we have sought to puts words to it. Poet John Milton, four hundred years ago,
wrote;
The stars, with deep
amaze,
Stand fix’d in steadfast gaze,
Bending
one way their precious influence…
Even the stars are astonished by the event at Bethlehem.
The good news is, first of all, about hope. When lost is a forest, we long to
see some familiar landmark to give us our bearings. We may have a long and
tough way to go but at least we know where we are going.
So hope, especially vague hope, is not enough. We must
know what we are hoping for - in detail. It is Christmas and we are in
Zimbabwe. What exactly are we hoping for? That ‘they’ would sort out the power
shortages? Introduce a stable currency? Rescue the health services? Pay the
teachers? Mend the potholes? All these – and many more. Above all, allow
freedom to breath.
But even these ‘hopes’ can remain vague and ‘out there’ –
someone else’s responsibility. Something more radical is needed to put flesh on
hope. That ‘something’ has to do with our mentality – our way of thinking. Just
to take the last, and least important, of the examples given: there are
countries where a pothole would have a life expectancy of twenty-four hours at
the most. We have potholes, where you could bury a cat, that have lasted
months. Why? Because the consensus of people is that nothing can be done.
Hope will find no fertile soil until we begin to change
our way of thinking, our way of looking at things. We are good at waiting; we
are patient and that is a virtue. But to wait too long is to give in to
hopelessness, to shrug and say there is no hope, there is nothing I can do. There
may, indeed, be nothing I can do for now but I can still look at my mentality.
Am I passive and just ‘going with the flow’ or am I trying to influence the
flow? Develop a way of thinking that could be contagious and lead to a new
consensus among people.
There is nothing revolutionary about this; it is simply
healing our hope. From being a limp formless feeling, it becomes a searching
expectant attitude ready to grasp every moment that offers a new outlook, a new
vision, a new way – a hope that has flesh. That really would be good news.
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