Comment by Harborough churches: Hindsight is a wonderful thing - but there is always another chance

Every week, the Harborough churches write for the Harborough Mail. This week, it is the turn of the Revd Pep Hill, Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican Resource Church Team
Revd Pep Hill, Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican TeamRevd Pep Hill, Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican Team
Revd Pep Hill, Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican Team

Viewpoint by the Revd Pep Hill, Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican Resource Church Team

During Covid, we in the Harborough Anglican team have been emailing out information about what’s going on in our various churches to everyone who wants it, and hand-delivering it to those who don’t use e-mail. This week, I looked back at the last paper copy of our notice sheet before we went into the first lockdown.

There was a big box on the first page headed “Coronavirus” and the first sentence read “The threat posed by this virus has been assessed by the Chief Medical Officer as ‘moderate’ with the risk to individuals remaining low”. Oh, if only we’d known then what we know now!

Hindsight is a beautiful thing isn’t it? “If only I’d known” is a common refrain, and all of us make bad decisions, sometimes with the best of intentions, because we don’t know how things are going to pan out. Which is why it gives me great comfort to know that our loving God does know how things are going to pan out.

That might not explain why God lets things pan out the way they do. My own hunch is that God holds people’s freedom of choice, and freedom to pursue our own destiny, so highly that God very rarely interferes in our choices, even if they’re extremely bad ones!

However, it does mean that we can seek to understand God’s perspective on how we ought to respond in any given situation, and that will be the best thing to do, because God knows what’s in store for us.

Of course, this guidance is not always easy to either discover or accept. I definitely didn’t want to be a vicar when I sensed that God was telling me that was what I should do. It was only after a bit of a battle that I went along with it, all the time expecting God to turn round and say, no, it’s OK, you don’t need to do that after all, you can go back to your nice, uneventful but comfortable, life. And it was only after I actually started training that I realised that God had been right all along, and that this was exactly what would fulfil me.

What about you? What would you have done differently “if only you’d known”? I suspect for many of us, there are things we would never have done. I still remember with shame mimicking my overweight school friend running, only to turn around and see her behind me, looking so hurt. But with God there is not only forgiveness, there’s always a second chance, and a third, and a fourth …

Revd Pep Hill is Associate Priest in the Harborough Anglican Resource Church Team

Related topics: