A Spell in Hospital

So, where were we? I was having these mild chest pains when I walked which seemed to me must be indigestion. Then on the evening of March 14 I had what I thought was a really bad bout. I was able to preach on the Sunday (see this blog) but was then convinced a visit to the GP was wise. So I got here last Wednesday to the clinic for an ecg. Anyway they were not pleased - they think I have had a heart attack. So it was from there to A&E and on the ward where I have been ever since. They gave me an angiogram and it confirmed the worst. So I am sat here with three other blokes (all very different and very interesting Londoners) waiting for one or two procedures and then a trip to the heart hospital for a bypass. It was a bit of a shock at first but the mind adjusts. So I am trying to look to the Lord and not be too apprehensive. Thank you to everyone who has been in touch. Much appreciated. Sorry it's bad news but it helps us all to think about eternity I hope.

Ecclesiastes 3:11

 

A large grey coach came along the road the other day and some of the youngsters on board were waving to passers by. I waved back. I was wondering who these lads were and thought at first that I must know one of them. As I peered to try and see who it was I thougt for a moment that I recognised one of them as my twelve or thirteen year old son. Just as quickly I realised, of course, that it wasn't him just some boys from Leicester or wherever it was up in London for the day and waving to strangers for a bit of fun. Besides my twelve or thirteen year old son will be twenty-one next month and lives in Aberystwyth. What's that verse again?  He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. We're only talking about a gap of eight or nine years in this case but it shows the sort of thing the verse is alluding to - eternity in the hearts of men.

2010 and eternity

A little slow off the mark I guess - I wasn't sure just where to begin until I found this quotation near the very end of F W Boreham's Bunch of everlastings. He says

I recently took a long, long railway journey through a thousand miles of civilisation, a thousand miles of desert, and a thousand miles of bush. The train bore me to a part of this vast continent in which I found myself surrounded by trees that were entirely new to me, and by flowers such as I had never seen before. I freely expressed my admiration, and, when the time came to commence my homeward journey, I found among the mementoes with which I was presented a beautiful bunch of everlastings. A Bunch of Everlastings! It seems to me I have this morning been gathering just such a bouquet. Here is Stephen Grellet listening to the great word that rings through the silence of the forest Etemity! Eternity! Eternity! Here is Uncle Tom uttering the same word with strange and wonderful effects: Eternity! Here is Dr Chalmers confessing that the mistakes of his life lay in his forgetting the greatness of Eternity! The list could be indefinitely continued; the valleys are full of everlastings. ‘That night,’ says Ebenezer Erskine, in recording in the pages of his diary the greatest spiritual crisis that he ever knew ‘that night I got my head out of Time into Eternity!’ ‘The vastness of the word Eternity was impressed upon me,’ says Andrew Bonar in his diary; and, a few months later, he says again, ‘I strive to keep the feeling of Eternity always before me!’ ‘Gentlemen,’ exclaims old Rabbi Duncan to his students as he dismisses them at the end of the year’s work, ‘many will be wishing you a Happy New Year. Your old tutor wishes you a happy Eternity!’.