Hope

It was good to get back to work yesterday, to simply do a full day of gardening, working with my friend S we managed to get a lot done, but I still have a lot of catching up to do after losing five full working days while I sorted out vans.   At least I am now once again "On the job"

I have now sold Gloria, sadly for scrap, I wonder if and strongly suspect that her predecessor Gloria Monday is still running, it is strange how Ford managed to take a wonderful, iconic design and simply ruin it.
 
All the earlier Transit platforms were brilliant vans, but also brilliant vehicles, not ground breaking in engineering terms, they just did the job very, very well.   This latest incarnation (the front wheel drive Mk6) is juts not a good vehicle.   The box on the back still works well enough, but the electrics, the seats, the gears, the steering, the locks are all worse than on previous models, how can they do that? Over the last year or so I have heard so many people say "I will never buy another Ford"

We have an expectation that things will always get better, that progress is a one way process and that our lives will always improve.    We now have a generation who are facing up to the reality that economically their lives will be worse than their parents, that's tough! I always expected to be living a comfortable suburban middle class family life, I am having to face up to something different, now that  have accepted myself as a trans woman my expectation s that things will get better, hormones, maybe (not more likely not) surgery allowing me to live more authentically.   We all need to believe that there is something better to look forward to, in the short term a holiday, in the longer term maybe retirement.

That is one of the things that makes Christians content, we know that we have something to look forward to, that whatever befalls us here we are drawing ever closer to God, until eventually we will be living permanently in his presence.  We have hope for the future, our future, it's not hope for an eternal life, we have already started that as soon as we are baptised in the spirit, it's hope in God.   I have taken to wearing a copper ring inscribed with the single word HOPE, I don't know what that meant to the maker, but I know what it means to me.