20 John
An elderly writer recounts world changing days.
It was all a long time ago now and I have written it all down. You should give an old man some peace instead of bothering him with questions.
Who do I remember?
They come back to me as if it were yesterday – Jimmy, my brother; Simon and Andy, we were boys together, you know? Then there were the others, Tom and Mattie and Phil and the rest of them. Good men, good men and all of them dead, long dead.
I’m the last, the last of those who were there, the last person to see things at first hand. Why I survived when all my friends were killed, I don’t know. We were told that’s how things would be, and so they turned out.
It’s sixty years ago now, but what’s sixty years? You look back and it is gone, just like that. I’m nearly ninety now, you know. I never imagined reaching such an age; I never imagined that most things that happened in my life could ever have happened. I sometimes have to pinch myself to be sure that it is all real, that it’s not all just a dream.
Can you imagine us counting for anything? We would have laughed, if you had told us. We would have laughed and laughed.
We were hardly the most promising of material. Look at us, well, look at me, anyway; I’m hardly the sort who is going to change the world.
But sixty years ago, who would have thought things would happen the way they did?
Three years, we had been on the road. It was a strange life, leaving everything behind and just living from one day to the next. We had been used to routine; that was all left behind.
Can you imagine it?
No, I suppose not, it would be hard for anyone who was not there to imagine. The times were different, our thoughts were different. We didn’t know then what you know now.
What you know now! We couldn’t even have imagined what you know now.
In three days the world changed – such days, such days.
Who could have foreseen what would happen? Perhaps we should, he had told us often enough, but we didn’t, we misunderstood completely.
There was so much euphoria after our arrival in the city that we failed to see what lay ahead. That Friday seemed the end of the world, there was nothing left.
But you know the story. You know what happened. You know about Sunday morning.
Have you read my book?
It doesn’t cover everything, I would accept that. I acknowledge that “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book”.
I didn’t plan to try to write everything, what I wanted to do was to tell people what it was about, I say in the book, “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”.
You should read it for yourself sometime.
And now I am tired and I must rest, I am an old man.
Do read the story for yourself.
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