By the time you are reading this, the England soccer team will either have won the European Championship Cup for the first time ever – or they will have lost. Accordingly I will either be very happy, or to put it mildly, not very happy at all. It has been a wonderful tournament to follow, and of course I have been rooting for my home team all the way.
Part of the excitement has been that if England have in fact won, then it would be the first international tournament win since 1966. Fifty-five years worth of waiting. Whether he was aware of it or not, in one of the many press conferences during this past week the England manager Gareth Southgate made rather a profound statement about those years of waiting; “We always have to believe in what is possible in life and not be hindered by history or expectations.” The key, he went on to say is character – character forged by absorbing all that's thrown at uds, but not being defeated by it.
In other words, there are no guarantees about the future, however we don't have to be defined by them the wounds of past experiences and failures.
It has been a long fifty-five years for England soccer fans, but hope has indeed endured during that waiting.
Emily Dickenson wrote that “hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all”
May we all have that kind of hope at the center of our lives, forging us onward for us to attain new insights into who we are created to be no matter how difficult the journey may be. Echoing the words of Saint Paul; “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which God has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people”. And I pray that England have are the European champions by the time you are reading this!
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