The pain of the prophet

I have a dreadful confession to make.

In November I realised that I would have a journey by myself across France which would take hours and hours and hours. I knew that I would need something to help pass the time, so I downloaded the podcasts of ‘The Archers’ from BBC Radio 4 and didn’t listen to any of them. I thought it was as good an audio story as any to listen to as I crawled across the European mainland.

I always knew that it would be irritating to have the journey interrupted every 14 minutes by a double rendition of “Du du der, du du du dah…” and I was right. However it was something else entirely that took me completely by storm.

You see, I caught the news on Radio 4 over the New Year. ‘The Archers’ was 600 years old, or something, and there was a big episode to celebrate. I was listening to the ‘Today’ programme when the editor of the ‘The Archers’ gave away that Nigel had died when he fell from the roof of his stately home.

This meant that, as I listened to six weeks’ worth of programmes I knew that Freddie and Lily were about to lose a father and Elizabeth about to be widowed. It was excruciating. Each interaction became an ordeal; how would they have coped if they had known?

I entitled this post ‘the Pain of the Prophet’, but of course that’s not right. Prophecy rarely predicts the future. It delivers the heart of God, His insight, warning, invitation or rebuke. The future is not for us to know…

I am not sure if we could cope if we did.