Comment by Harborough churches: We do not have to keep struggling all on our own

Every week, the Harborough churches write for the Harborough Mail. This week, it is the turn of Rev Stephen Haward, Minister at Market Harborough Congregational Church
Rev Stephen Haward is Minister at Market Harborough Congregational ChurchRev Stephen Haward is Minister at Market Harborough Congregational Church
Rev Stephen Haward is Minister at Market Harborough Congregational Church

Viewpoint by Rev Stephen Haward, Minister at Market Harborough Congregational Church

Looming hugely through the mist of a February morning, they are difficult to miss. Electric power is coming to ‘our’ section of the Midland Main Line and already many of the elegant steel supports are in place.

It will be some time before the wires are installed of course but, only 45 years after it was first recommended by a Parliamentary Committee, we really are going electric.

Overhead power lines are not all good news, as recent storms have shown, and of course they only help us to decarbonise if the electricity used is itself generated cleanly and greenly. But they do bring to an end the inefficiency of locomotives having to carry the weight of their own fuel everywhere they go.

Jesus met a lot of people carrying heavy loads: because of illness, because of unhappiness, because of fear, because of other people’s reactions, because of worry about someone they loved. All had no doubt tried to find ways to cope out of their own strength, like the diesel engine carrying its own fuel.

But that is a very draining and exhausting thing, as many of you reading this can testify. A bereaved friend was telling me recently of the sheer effort it takes every day to ‘get up, get out and get on’ when your heart is sore and empty.

Somehow Jesus conveyed healing power to those who came to him for help. He was able to do this in remarkable ways: by a word, a touch, a prayer, ‘by the finger of God’ as he once called it. But he also had something to say to all the rest of us.

We do not have to keep struggling all on our own. Like an electric train we are designed to work through a power we do not carry ourselves. God made us that way so that we could know Him - and find joy and fulfilment in that knowing.

Jesus stopped what he was doing one day and issued an invitation. ‘Come to me’, he said, ‘all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest’. (Matthew 11:28).

It is a good offer, and if you take it up, it does help bring your difficulties down to a size you can manage. My wife spent her childhood holidays deep in rural Shropshire. The only thing she did not like were the vicious geese who nipped at her legs when she had to pass them. And then there came a year when she announced that the geese had shrunk and she was no longer afraid of them. It was she who had changed of course.

It may take nearly 50 years for an electric train to arrive, but the power of God is available straight away. We can be changed, and our difficulties made smaller because of Him, and we can begin today.

Rev Stephen Haward is Minister at Market Harborough Congregational Church

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