July 08, 2005
07|08 London - After the bombing
It's early Friday morning, and we are about to leave for a one-day trip to Oxford, Cotswald and beyond.
I want to let you know that we are okay, and London is trying to return to normal.
Real life is stranger than fiction. When we arrived in London we felt safe for the first time since we left Athens. The tension in Israel was real. It seemed like the possibility for terrorism could happen with the slightest of reasons.
When we went out for breakfast on Saturday morning, we sat down and relaxed in a little cafe. A woman in her 70's came to our table and asked if we could watch her bag while she went to the bathroom. We said of course. After she left our table, we looked at each other and said that we would never have done such a thing in Israel.
You can imagine our shock when we heard about the explosions on Thursday.
For the first time since we left home, we decided to sleep in. At the last possible moment we decided to take a walking tour through Kensington. If we left our hotel at noon, we could take the underground tube and be at Kensington in plenty of time. We have successfully used the bus system and the train, and we wanted to try the tubes. Needless to say, by the time we got to the hotel door, it was obvious that everything in the city was "locked down."
As we walked outside our hotel, it looked like the pictures we saw of New York city last summer when they experienced the power failure and everyone had to walk. There were huge lines of people walking across the bridge at the bottom of our street on Northumberland.
A special prayer service was held at Westminster Abbey at 5:00 p.m. Les and I went to the service. It was hastily planned and poorly announced and around 100 people were present, but it was a beautiful service. We planned to walk to Holy Trinity, Brompton but noticed that every store was closed and very few people were on the street, so we walked back to our hotel and called it a day.
The two Bible passages that were used for the "Choral Evensong on a Weekday" at Westminster Abbey were Psalm 90, and Romans 8 beginning at verse 31. Look particularly at Ps. 90:3 in the King James ... both passages really spoke to us about the precariousness of our situation in life.
We are both doing fine and looking forward to the rest of our trip. God bless.
Posted by roger at July 8, 2005 02:20 AM