There is something special about a day you can open up doors and windows and allow the outside in; usually in the form of a cooling draught or the buzzing sound of half a dozen flying insects with news from elsewhere. That’s before someone reaches for a can of fly repellent to extinguish them!
Too seldom we think of other creatures living godly lives, especially those we don’t want in our house or in our backyard! And Jesus’ parable about the tenants who take over the property entrusted to them still applies; those who refuse to recognise the owner, denying him his share of the produce, who beat up those he sends to protect it and then murder his own son.
More and more it seems clear that we are those tenants who, having bought out the owner and claimed the place for ourselves, show little respect for all the other children of life with a divine right to be here – in some cases whole families we won’t ever see again.
Our neighbours are leaving today, going back to Lithuania to raise their two boys. We will miss them as they leave us with that niggling sense of ‘could we have got to know them better?’ and a silence once filled by the sound of a different accent, child’s play, laughter, the buzzing of garden tools.
The insects that fly in and out of the house are briefly calling by. Forgive them. They are not good on boundaries!