St. Joseph’s Church, Merry Hill, Wolverhampton

Kids welcome too! All get together on Wednesday 10th March, 12.45pm to hear a talk about Promise Dreams. Soup, bread, sandwiches and squash will all be served.

For full details see the flyer.

A very tenuous and rubbish attempt at a pun in the blog title is about as close to a laugh as you will get from the film The Road i.e. no laughs whatsoever.

The Road Trailer

The film itself revolves around a father and sons journey for survival in a phenomenally bleak post-apocalyptic America. And boy is it phenomenally bleak. It is a land where next to nothing grows, forest fires and earthquakes are a constant presence. However the natural perils are the least of their worries as the country is littered with cannibalistic gangs, oh and the father is dying and the mother filled with horror and desperation has committed suicide. As family road trip films go, National Lampoons American Vacation it ain’t.

Throughout the film there is a tension between the fathers desire to show to his son that morality can exist in this the most darkest of places, “we have to find the good guys” and a fight for survival that leads increasingly to the question of who exactly are the “good” and “bad guys”? However the film does not end on a nihilistic cry of despair. The father is vindicated in that his son finds safety. The boy does eventually find the “good guys”. Hope wins even in this bleakest of films.

Hope wins also in the real world. It wins in societies where the horrors of that film may not really seem so far fetched as they do to us  Rwanda Reconciliation. Hope is of course at the heart of our faith in Christ. In this it also wins for us in our more mundane (thankfully) suburban Wolverhampton. Its hope that allows the motley crew that is any church and we at St Jo’s have our fair share of unlikely candidates (I write as one myself!) to find peace in Christ. And that hope is open to us all.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” 1 Peter 1:3

As you’ll know we’ve been doing a set of sessions of Everybody’s Welcome discussions and talks. Joy Dale and Andy Bennett – who have been leading the discussions – are grilled…

I’ve added info from Liz about The Noise this Sunday – enjoy!