Boxing Day

Traditionally, a day of getting over the excesses of the day before - of cooking leftovers, hitting the sales and catching up on the football. Re-runs of old movies and TV Christmas specials. I sat down this morning with an episode of a US sitcom, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, to my mind, one of the best of the current genre.

It’s a kind of Alpha Marriage Course in reverse, or how not to communicate, to resolve conflict, to deal with in-laws, to protect your “marriage time” etc etc. The eponymous Raymond is a New Yorker of Italian descent, and a lot of the plot lines have to do with his wife Debra coming into this clan, and dealing with the overbearing mother-in-law and her pampered husband and all the rest.

Today’s episode “The Wallpaper” was a classic, when the in-laws, Frank and Marie accidentally reverse their car through Raymond and Debra’s living room wall. The row that ensues about who will pay, then the repair of the wall ... and then the wallpaper! It doesn’t happen to quite match the existing stripy pattern, a fault which sends Raymond off into a whole litany of his parents’ other faults that he never seems able to express properly. And there follows an excellent few moments, as Debra tries to resolve the tension, by helping Raymond open up with his parents about all the other issues he has with them
Debra : Come on, Raymond, why are you getting all worked about about the wallpaper. It’s not such a big deal.
Raymond : Yes, it is. It’s a big deal for me. It’s the last straw.
Debra : That’s good. So let’s talk about some of the other straws then...

A good lesson in active listening, and developing openness and sensitivity in our relationships.

Birgitta Almeby

I hardly knew her. A Swedish missionary who has been serving in Lahore for 39 years with the Full Gospel Assembly, an indigenous Pakistani Christian church group. We might have met on a few occasions during our time in Pakistan, at a Board meeting or at a school or church function.

I was shocked to read that this week she was attacked and shot, though not fatally, at her front door by two men on a motorcycle. She is 71. Dawn, the Pakistan newspaper had this to say :

“According to the Swedish lady’s maid and some of her neighbours, Ms Almeby had just reached her residence when two motorcyclists appeared on the scene and fired a shot at her. The assailants fled from the crime scene without taking any valuables which showed that it was not a street crime, as was being portrayed by some policemen. Ms Almeby had been living in Pakistan for the last 38 years and was looking after social programmes of the NGO she worked for and had nothing to do with politics.”

In a week or so the news story will no doubt, be buried among a host of other crimes, injustices and acts of cowardly terrorism.

This, along with the shooting of 15 year old Malala Yousafzai, in Mingora, in the Swat Valley October 9th strikes me as the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the cowardly acts of bravado of today’s terrorists. No need to target heavily guarded army generals or political leaders, if you can get away with gunning an old retired spinster or a young schoolgirl and still create a climate of fear in the common people. Makes me angry.

But in the end, history proves that this kind of violence has a way of backfiring on the perpetrators and ends up doing more in service of the causes that the gun is trying to silence than against them. As we sing once again at year’s end “Peace on Earth, good will to men” may it indeed, be so.