6th August 2025

90 NOT OUT

Recently we have celebrated several family 90th birthdays: twenty years beyond the Psalmist’s norm of ‘three score years and ten’. There may be, he affirms, years of prosperity and flourishing, or times of misfortune, toil and sorrow, but all our days are in the hands of the one God who is our refuge and strength [Psalm 90].

A 90-year old would have grown up during the Second World War, neighbours killed in the bombing, churches reduced to rubble, and then living through difficult years which witnessed the conflict in Korea, the Suez crisis, and ongoing conflict in Vietnam. By contrast, the late 1980s into the 1990s saw many promising changes – the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the ending of the Warsaw Pact which had tied the countries of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union – all making for hopes of lasting years of international peace and co-operation.

But long life takes the story into new years of war and destruction. There is, today, too long a list of countries where violence challenges peace. Just think of Myanmar, Ukraine, the West Bank, Gaza, and Sudan, to name a few urgent situations from a much longer list of concern.

For us, this creates a tragic sense of powerlessness, that whilst gifts can help with relief, there seems no way in which the wielders of power can be stopped on their heinous exercises destroying the lives of innocent civilians with injuries so severe that one is tempted to see those who are killed as more fortunate than those left to a life of paralysing disability. Beyond all that, some aspects of developing artificial intelligence and the impact of global warming spell out new dimensions of experience, both frightening and incomprehensible. And so, the peace of former years gives way once more to times of turbulence which an aging intelligence finds it difficult to handle, though still holding fast to the one God who still is our refuge and strength.

John Briggs