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Good morning.Ìý

Ìý‘History is a marvelous, mobile thing’, my father used to say.Ìý ‘Never static, never still.Ìý One day you realize that you are history. It’s a momentous realization, as if a fish were to discover the water it swam in’.

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The Scottish Independence referendum is history in the making.Ìý Momentous, big history. But there’s also small history - making and re-making itself every day in the acts of individual people.Ìý I grew up in the countryside, and remember being told the story of the German bomber which crashed on a moor near our house in 1941.Ìý The pilot was captured by the local air raid warden, who gave him shelter and a cup of tea. Two of the crew died in the crash, and were buried in the local cemetery.Ìý

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After the war, the body of one was repatriated to West Germany, but the widow of the other airman lived in East Germany and had to wait until the Iron Curtain came down before she could come to Scotland to reclaim her husband’s body. When she saw his grave in a quiet corner of the country cemetery, cradled by the surrounding hills, she said she couldn’t bear to disturb it. ÌýIt’s still there today.Ìý Each Remembrance Sunday afterwards, a local woman made sure a wreath was placed on it. Ìý

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Our lives are immeasurably affected by small individual acts of kindness, as well as by momentous political choices. The novelist, George Eliot, knew this.Ìý At the end of Middlemarch she writes of her heroine, Dorothea, that ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…’

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Loving God, For the unnoticed people among us every day who make life better, thank you.Ìý Amen