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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with the Rev Sharon Grenham-Thompson.

I鈥檝e conducted many funerals across the span of my ministry, and I always see it as a serious duty, and a great privilege. Helping people to grieve is a tender and weighty responsibility. But, like most clergy colleagues, I seem only to have bid farewell to lovely, kind and generous people. What is it about us that hesitates to acknowledge in death that some folk simply鈥�got on our nerves? Wound us up? There is a peculiarly British attitude that whispers in our ear, 鈥淣ever speak ill of the dead.鈥�

It鈥檚 true, the right of reply is not easily exercised from beyond the grave, and I don鈥檛 advocate wholesale character assassination, which usually speaks volumes about the assassin rather than the character in question. But I wonder if our inability to be honest about less palatable aspects of someone鈥檚 life means we never truly realise the value of what we might euphemistically call 鈥榙ifficult people鈥�?

Whilst there鈥檚 never an excuse for bullying, rudeness or abuse, sometimes the proverbial grit in the oyster is just what we need to make us look at the things we take for granted. The biblical prophets of old were not exactly smooth talkers, with their admonitions about corruption and injustice. Jesus was killed for being a challenge to authority.

Sometimes that awkward so-and-so has a point. So may our prayer today be that we celebrate and value differences of opinion, allowing one another to be gloriously, grumpily human.

Amen