A fleeting visit to Portadown is a chance to visit all the complicated feelings about the place in which we lived for 19 years, where so many of our friends are, where the children grew up, where ministry was more intense than it is ever likely to be again ..
Life does move on – but I missed it on Christmas Eve – missed the midnight service when young people whom I have known since they were children come home and come to church with their families. [More than Christmas Eve sentiment there – visit Belfast Airport at any time in the week before Christmas and you, like me, will be moved to tears by the sight of the best of Northern Ireland’s young people coming home from all the other communities to which have chosen to bring their talents and energies.] Names and faces of people are still pretty fresh in the mind – I was afraid that they would have shifted from the front of my mind into the archive section. Terence, my successor, will be instituted at the end of February – a year after we left. It’s a bit like how it must be when a former spouse remarries. It produces complicated feelings of regret, shifting loyalties and [quite properly] of doors closing firmly.