I was in the car yesterday when I suddenly realised it was Tuesday morning and I’d forgotten this Pause for Thought. Forgotten to write it. Forgotten to come to the studio. Forgotten the whole thing.
It was a horror show. I pulled over. I started to go over the previous 24 hours to try to understand how it had happened, how I’d got up, eaten breakfast, and missed the calls from from your production team asking me where on earth I was. I got the phone out to dial Jonathan, my producer.
And then the penny dropped. There were no calls. I checked my diary and finally knew for sure that it was Monday. My absence had gone unremarked because, gloriously, I wasn’t supposed to be here at all. It was like a new start, a sweaty, breathless rush of joyous relief.
I reckon those moments of disorientation, of suddenly feeling out of control, of experiencing the unexpected come to us all sometimes.
I once took a group of boys from East London walking in the Peak District and I’ll never forget their howls of dismay (and the accompanying expletives) when they realised that the crag they were running across after the long trudge up Kinder Scout had no safety barriers installed. But after the sweary terror, they were exultant. Here, for the first time, was a place with no limits, no constraints, no restrictions.
In the days after the first Easter, Jesus’ friends had those experiences time and again: they found his tomb empty; he showed up in a locked room where they were gathered; he met them when they were fishing and told them, literally, how to do their job – ‘no, mate, put the nets on the other side’. And then he cooked them breakfast.
For Jesus friends, the end of his life, the awfulness of his crucifixion was weirdly like a safety barrier. The crazy ride they’d taken with him was finally over and they could return to their everyday lives. Discovering he was alive must have felt like being at the top of that crag did for those boys: wide-eyed astonishment, fear, and then the careening joy of discovering that what they had thought was the end was just the start of something new and infinitely exciting.
Sometimes, the unexpected does that: It rescues us, gives us the chance of something new, gives us the chance to start again.
Sometimes the unexpected gives us much more than we expect.
On another occasion, my friend Paul and I took the same boys on a day out to Calais. On the way back they fell foul of another group and we found one of ours being held over the side of the ferry by his ankles.