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Good Morning.
The novelist Franz Kafka said this:  ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’    You could take his words to mean that, for him, writing stories worked on his soul in a profound way.  But I hear it more directly: that being immersed in the imagined truthfulness of story, can break up the hard, unexamined places inside us, the reader. 

This past year has encrusted everything with layers of worry and grief and upheaval.  People have found their own ways of adjusting and coping.  But doing that without the physical comfort of loved ones and friends is very hard.  But still we absorb it all, squirreling away our sorrows and fears inside.  Layers upon layers of them. 

For me, there is solace in story.  I think I first read Dickens’ Bleak House when I was 18.  I’ve read it a few times since, but now, decades older - and feeling one day a hard bereftness which I couldn’t voice - I opened it again.   Maybe – probably – it could have been any great novel.   But as I read, the lives on the page reached out and crowded around me.  The story was full of the sorrow and the anger of life.  It was about wealth and poverty, and greed and goodness.ÌýÌý It showed lives of unbelievable harshness and loss, alongside hope and unquenchable humour.   There was the truthfulness of life.  And reading it that day did what Kafka said it would:  it unfroze me.    

Loving God, may each of us find solace when the day is hard.  You are in the smile of a stranger and the nearness of those we love.  You are in all words of comfort and cheer, wherever we hear them.  Thank you.ÌýÌý Amen