The LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore. (Psalm 121:8)
Sometimes I wonder if life is a series of arrivals and departures or as Shakespeare put it ‘exits and entrances’. Our workplaces see new people appointed and old-hands retire. Our families greet new arrivals. We move house to live in new towns or cities. We walk into a pub or sports club and hope to make new friends.
Mark Wallinger created a video installation called ‘Threshold to the Kingdom’ (2000). He positioned a camera at the international arrival’s gate of London City Airport. He then slowed down the film and gave it the soundtrack of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere - a seventeenth-century setting of the Bible’s fifty-first psalm which has been sung in the Sistine Chapel for centuries. The film is mesmerising. Some people are greeted with waves and hugs, others check messages on their phones. Most acknowledge, however subtly, that they’ve crossed a threshold, that they are now on different soil. You can witness a slow-motion home-coming smile spreading across their faces, the relief at getting through customs and passport control or nervousness about onward travel.
What a comfort to trust that the Lord looks over our comings and goings. We can cross thresholds with a confidence that God goes before, with and indeed behind us if we are worried about those we leave behind. I don’t believe that the kingdom is just a final destination - whenever we step into the will and ways of God there is the kingdom. Do I actively seek out those thresholds? And if all the arrivals and departures we go through in our lifetime are a practice for ‘the threshold of the kingdom’, on that day will it feel like homecoming? The cleansing of making it through passport-control? The adventure of a new beginning? Again, I trust that the love of the Lord will enfold me.
Suzanne Nockels
Comentários