Good Day

Friday was good. Good Friday. Very good. Strange name for a day which commemorates a good man dying a criminal’s death stretched across a cross – a cruel execution. Of course, if Jesus wasn’t good then he was bad or mad.

Friday was very good for me because it came after Thursday. On Thursday I wasn’t sure if I’d see Friday dawn. Thursday was nearly my last day on earth. The man and I were involved in a horrible road traffic accident. Apart from seat belt aches and pains, we were miraculously uninjured, as was the other driver who crawled from the mangled wreckage after crossing the road upon impact, felling a wall and ending up facing the direction from which he’d come.

As I knelt on the grass verge in humble gratitude for the deep, if painful, breaths I was breathing, I allowed myself to momentarily imagine my children receiving phone calls to say that their parents had both been tragically killed. Not wise, imagining the worst, especially when the good has just happened. We were saved to live and laugh another day. A good day. Good Friday.

So now we can enjoy the new arrival in our family with even greater joy and celebration. I became a grandmother three weeks ago. Finlay George swam his way out of the birthing pool just before breakfast on 15 March to the delight of proud parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all. People keep asking me how I feel about being a granny. What exercises me much more is that my baby girl is a mother. She whom I nestled and nursed is now nursing herself and making decisions about the care and welfare of another totally dependent human being. It’s as if there is a queue moving forward and someone has joined the line at the back and we’re now closer to the front. The front of what, I’m not sure.

Whoever is watching over us hasn’t finished with us yet. There are things to do that we have not yet done; there are people to be that we have not yet become.

Thank you for Finlay George and thank you for a good day to be parents and grandparents. Thank you that Finn will know me and that I will know him and watch him grow into the fair-haired warrior that his name promises.

'From life's first cry to final breath

Jesus commands my destiny.'

A Happy Easter!