6th June 2018

I was watching Carol King in concert yesterday – her 2016 ‘Live at Hyde Park’ concert. She was 74 at the time of the performance, and didn’t miss a beat, and held spellbound the zillion people who were in the audience. But during the concert, a few extraordinary things happened. She sang with her ‘20 year old former self’ (via old footage), and then sang with a young lady who was her alter-ego in ‘Carol King – The Musical’. All of which was quite weird and wonderful.

There’s a bit of the same “me, myself and I” in the Christian life. Christians are new people, or put more accurately: people who have been made new, with new attitudes, ambitions and a new way of living. But they can still see their ‘former self’, and some days all too clearly. They can still recall how they used to think and speak and act, which is sometimes surreal, and always a little humbling.

But then too, they can look ahead by faith to a time when they shall change again – to the end of time, when all things shall be made new. And yet that future will not be totally disconnected from this present. Our personality, our uniqueness, our basic humanity will remain the same; but ‘we shall be changed’, with every flaw and defect removed, and our present mortality clothed with immortality, and ‘me, myself and I’ swallowed up in perfect unity.

DM 5^th June 2018