Chaplain's Column | Good Friday Thoughts

In a new subregular series, Ian Nicholson pens a letter to supporters from the perspective of Club Chaplain.

‘It’s the hope that kills you!’

If only I had a Woking share for every time I have heard that said over the years in football! We have certainly had our fair range of triumphs and disasters season after season, and while some better people than I may well manage to ‘treat these imposters just the same’, I’m afraid I come up far short! Regardless of the past, we still head into the weekend hoping for positive results against Torquay and Dover – and with good reason!

In that sense, football really does mirror life with its wonderful highs, devastating lows, and a lot of mediocrity in between! The last few years have been so challenging for us all with the pandemic and perhaps the loss of loved ones, growing financial pressures and now war and a sea of refugees on our own continent. It can shake even the most hopeful of us and stir lots of questions. Having been asked to write a few words for today, the start of the most important weekend in the Christian calendar, I have therefore been thinking a lot about hope – perhaps in football, but particularly, in life.

To me the Easter story brings us the depths of despair and desolation but also points to the promise of new life, whatever the circumstances. For Christians the desolation is found in the crucifixion of Jesus, whose mission had only ever been to love the poor, heal the unclean, point to God’s love and, in so doing, upset the religious authorities. Good Friday is a dark day and we read that as he died the sky itself went black – no light, no love, no sound and no hope.

Then on the Sunday morning, as some women went to check the tomb, the stone over the entrance was gone and their message was simple ‘He is not here, He is risen!’. For billions of Christians, throughout the centuries , this simple phrase, and reality it points to, has been the foundation of hope – whether in city estates, jungle tribes, prisons, palaces, ghettoes or leafy Surrey suburbs.

So, whatever your faith, or lack of it, may you have a very happy and hopeful Easter – perhaps in football but, much more so, in life.

It may be Friday but Sunday is definitely coming!