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Good morning. It took me a little while to realise what was happening. I was looking at a picture I’ve seen many times before in the National Museum here in Cardiff: Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, the Pembrokeshire boy who became governor of Trinidad, the most senior of Wellington’s officers to be killed at Waterloo. The war hero portrait had hung there for more than a century, until it was removed last autumn as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement - Picton was deeply involved in the slave trade, and a cruel torturer. This week the picture was back, but demoted to a side room and displayed in a travel case. ‘I think it’s showing that nothing is fixed,’ said one museum official, who spoke approvingly of the plywood strip across the middle, hiding, she said, his ‘tassels and testosterone.’ An accompanying exhibition includes perspectives on Picton from artists with roots in Trinidad, and others still living with the legacy of slavery. The reinterpretation is a challenge to keep on thinking, and to change attitudes. Nothing is fixed. That’s a reality which confronts us on a whole range of fronts. The weekly shopping bill seems to rise relentlessly, petrol has reached higher prices than any of us can remember, and charges bearing down on the winter taunt some families with the agony of choosing between putting food on the table or staying warm. And even if we happen to be comfortable enough for the increases to make no significant impact on us, we can’t duck responsibility for finding some way of sharing the struggles of those they really damage. Maybe our thinking has to change. As it might on the climate crisis. We’ve had some uncomfortably hot hours this summer – but that’s as nothing compared with the devastation of crops and the threat of hunger caused in some of the world’s poorest countries by too much rain or too little rain, or by the use of grain supplies as a weapon of war. Nothing is fixed. Which most certainly applies also to our own grasp on life. ‘Teach us how short our life is, that we may become wise’ prays the writer of the Hebrew Psalm. Even the strongest and fittest is vulnerable to accident or sudden, unforeseen illness. Jesus reminds his disciples that none of them could live longer by worrying about it: he offers no guarantees of longevity, or any existence immune from sorrow or suffering or doubt. Nothing is fixed, he suggests, except the need to continue to seek what God wants, and to try to do it; to be open to change, and to trust one who is unchanging in his love.
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