This particular morning, on a Sunday as it happened, I followed my usual daily routine: prayer, Bible, breakfast, all before deciding how to spend another day alone. And as the late summer morning smelt fresh from the previous night's rain, and with the sky promising to brighten, I decided on an early walk.
What better way to start a new day, a new week? I thought, heading towards Main Street and the promenade beyond. Life's joys, even in this troubled world, tend to be simple when one lives in a small coastal town.
The streets were eerily quiet, and I realized that no traffic moved: no aged drivers heading early to the supermarket, having risen after a sensibly sober Saturday night; no boy racers tearing up the town's back roads in 1.2 litre dinky toys that boasted fancy tires and chrome exhausts costing more than the actual cars, neds and chavs burning off what alcohol and other drugs remained in their systems from the previous night's partying. No, there was nothing to watch out for when crossing the street this particular morning.
Looking up I noticed a gull and some other birds frozen mid-flight, not moving at all. Being a regular dreamer of vivid dreams, I wondered if I was still asleep; or if this was for real, that I was wide awake and really could feel the slow gentle breeze caress my face.
On Main Street those shops that were open were quiet, their few customers and staff standing perfectly still inside. I went into one and my skin tightened as I saw them posed like mannikins moving almost imperceptibly slow.
Back outside plenty of vehicles sat parked along the roadside, some with frozen people waiting inside, and a few trucks squatted silent in loading bays. Further down I passed a road tanker stood stuck in the middle of the turn for the ferry terminal.
Having now arrived at the promenade I could see out over the water and across to the ferry. The boat sat apparently marooned in time and space, halfway on its return trip from the island. And that's when I noticed the sea, really a salt-water estuary, itself moving as if waves of treacle rolling slowly in a scene played at super-low speed on a screen.
What was going on?
"Did I not promise I would come again, and receive you unto myself?" said a gentle voice, one strangely familiar.
"Master?" I said, ready to fall to my knees, overwhelming joy filling my heart.
"Come with me," he said. "Be not afraid, only believe."
"Where are we going, Master?"
"To where there is no more sin, no more sorrow."
Together we walked to the water and out past the motionless ferry, heading beyond the morning and blissfully away from this world.
John 14:1-4 (KJV)
14 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
4 And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.