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Good morning. There has been a great deal of frustration and anger around in recent months about how long the Brexit process has taken. There may well be more as a result of yesterday’s vote to delay the process still further. But big decisions do often need time. When I first felt a call to ordination it was overwhelming, and like Martin Luther, I felt I could do no other. But that was highly unusual. Most candidates wrestle with the issue for years. Similarly, some people struggle for ages whether they should marry someone they are fond of, or whether at the end of life they should leave their home where they have lived for forty years to go where they can receive more care. If our personal decisions can sometimes be so hard, so perplexing and take so long, we should not blame our politicians if they are finding the same for this momentous decision in our national life. There’s another factor too. The possibility of fierce disagreement goes to the very heart of political freedom. The range of views now being expressed by our MPs as to the best way forward for the country - passionately held and strongly expressed - is a sign of the health of our democracy. They are free to do that, as we are free to echo those debates in the pub and round the table. When we have a big personal decision to make we might have conflicting voices in our head, an argument going on in our own mind, but then we can shut down some of those voices, or at least try to. But shutting down publicly expressed voices quickly leads to despotism and dictatorship - a path which, sadly, too many countries have now followed. Democracy can be messy and confusing. But those MPs actually physically going through the lobbies so that their votes can be publicly recorded and noted is a sign of the vibrancy our system. In too many countries the only option is sign up and shut up or go to jail. In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov there is a famous scene in which the Grand Inquisitor confronts Christ. Instead of expressing sorrow for all the cruelties carried out by the inquisition he turns on Christ and accuses him - accuses him of treating people as free when they did not want and could not cope with freedom. The Church, says the inquisitor, has had to correct Christ’s work. It is a passage of bitter irony in which Dostoevsky wanted to bring out how remarkable is our freedom and how much Jesus respected it. MPs will in the end of have to find out where a majority lies in parliament in order to lead the country forward. But meanwhile we can take some comfort in their publicly expressed disagreements as a sign of the freedom that our political system safeguards - that freedom which is part of our birth - not right - but birth gift, as humans made in the divine image, which is at the root of our culture.