Remorse

I feel remorse.  The more I stare at my keyboard the harder it gets to express myself but I’ll give it a go.

Mark was a man who I had come to know in the village.  I remember us both being quite surprised when we figured out that our age was almost the same, with roughly two weeks between us.

I had thought he was a lot older.  Perhaps the first bit of remorse is how I had made assumptions about his age.  After all, I tried to explain to myself in a feeble bit of justification, that he looked older.  He wore glasses all the time, he had a walking stick and I could go on.

He was a likeable, gentle soul, modest and unassuming.  He would always smile with a sense of gratitude.  He lived alone in the village and he had told me about some of his past.  I also knew he was quite lonely and needed friendship.  In my mind I had come to the conclusion that it was going to be one of those slow burning friendships, it would take time to really get going.

Sure, he had been to our house once or twice and we had got to know each other further through the Alpha course, which I believe had been helpful and positive for him.  His deepening faith had led him to recently being confirmed in the Anglican Church (the wording is similar to adult baptism).

Alas that opportunity has now gone, at least in an earthly sense.  A couple of weeks ago, quite unexpectedly, he was found to have passed away in his house.  At the time of writing, we don’t know any more about how or why etc.

This is a reminder for me.  A reminder not to put things off, not to procrastinate too much.  This is my regret here, my remorse.

None of us, myself included, know what the future will hold.  As much as we think of ourselves as being well organised, on top of things and so on, we don’t know everything.  In the Bible, it says this in the book of James (chapter 4) which is in the New Testament

 ¹⁴ yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

I don’t know if the verses from James are exactly right or not but I hope they may go some way to explain.  We don’t know what the future will hold.

The lesson for me is not to keep putting things off.