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Art Historian, Dr Jim HarrisÌý

I read the news today.Ìý Oh boy.ÌýÌý Some days what’s happening in the world seems barely believable.Ìý The dreadful fire now burning in West London is too awful to contemplate, and the thought that the world is capable of such random caprice too terrible to dwell upon.

It’s one thing when people behave in a way that is unpredictable and fickle. We don’t like it but we’re used to it. The Bible is full of them - faithless, capricious, inconstant people - it's part of our shared humanity, part of our inherent imperfection

When the story of human imperfection, though, is matched, overmatched, by the apparent cruelty of the world, things sometimes seem too much to bear.Ìý We might call it the fickleness of fate and it is an appalling thing to contemplate.

But the world’s capriciousness, like our own, I believe is mirrored by another, opposite narrative: the story of God's absolute faithfulness. Again and again we read of God's unchanging nature, his unswerving commitment to humanity. ÌýAs the writer of the book of Lamentations puts it: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

That’s a hard thing to grasp on a day like today, but I reckon that God's steadfastness, God's constancy does more than serve as a neat, literary contrast to our fickleness and the seeming fickleness of the world.

Much more importantly it gives us somewhere to go and someone to go to when the worst happens – and not just to be loved and comforted, but also to be angry and confused, somewhere to shout and someone to shout at.Ìý I believe God is steadfast enough to take all our rage and sadness, all the incomprehensible grief that overwhelms us, and to take it not impassively and not impersonally but with the deep empathy of someone who has himself suffered, who has himself experienced pain and loss.

So, perhaps, even now, even on a morning like this, there is something of hope, not that somehow the circumstances will somehow change and thatÌý ‘everything will be alright’ but that in the steadfast, faithful character of God we can find a steadfastness of our own, and more importantly, the capacity, when things are at their very worst, to be steadfast for one another.

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