We’ve entered a new day, perhaps a new month and even a new year. Perhaps it’s that time of the year between the two solstices or in that geography of earth when the days are darker and shorter and the nights seemingly unending. For sometimes when the night is over, the day remains dark and cold. Dark and cold, that is – not in the literal time and climate of the day but in the sense of darkness, doom and even despair that faces so many.

Not every day is a good day. There are things we dread, to which we can never look forward, positively. There are people we dare not meet, tasks we’d rather not enter upon, travels we do not want to take.

How can we move on – get up and face this day? There are many clichés that some have used to cope. “If you pray for rain, don’t be surprised when you also get mud.” “If life hands you lemons, then make it into lemonade.” And of course we are cautioned never to pray – Lord, give me more patience – or ‘slow me down’ Lord, for fear that God in answering will bring more difficulties, things hard to bear, into our lives.

Indeed, we were never promised skies always blue, or a rose-garden (at least ideally: one without thorns.)

One answer to life’s challenges is that there is a God who loves us, who attends to us and to our way.  As the ancient Celtic Church had it: ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is present.’ A God who cares and who fashions us and each day aright, creating both circumstances of blessing and challenge in what God ordains.

Dark threads and bright ones are tangled together in the tapestry of life. We usually see only the tangles, and knots, the ends cut with scissors or knives. The beauty and magic of what is to us unseen as yet usually only comes later, if even in a world and life beyond our own.

A surgeon knows best, the attending family ponders, even as the initial scalpel incision is made. A parent knows best, growing and maturing children discover, usually much later and then hopefully to give thanks.

I wish for you only bright, sunny, carefree days, free of pain – of great advance and much progress in maturing, discovering, exploring and finding. But not all days will be like that; sometimes for a season at least, most days are not like that.

There is a verse in the Bible book, Hebrews, that speaks of our Lord and of His Sacrifice for Sins and for the world’s redemption on the Cross of Calvary. “Who” – it says, “for the Joy set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame . . .”

It seems that the warm, sunny days we seek often-times will only come after, or even through the grey clouded, rain/snow mix of reality. They will come though- the bright days, I assure you.

A final thought. It seems that the gift of hunger is what really makes us appreciate the gift of supply, and to know the former is to savour the welcome of abundance.