Thought for the week: The desire to know Christ and make Him known
The Ligoniel/Ballysillan area of north Belfast, known as the turn of the road, is where I came to live when I was nine.
My parents left the Woodvale/Shankill area for a council house in the new Silverstream estate during the 1950s-60s. I soon discovered the area was full of characters.
There was Sammy Heaney, known as the ‘lord mayor of Ligoniel’. Sammy liked a liquid lunch and would often enter church services somewhat inebriated, offering a different tune to the singing.
No one ever asked Sammy to leave; people accepted him as he was. Then there was John, who had his trousers tied up with a rope and was always up for free buns and tea if the opportunity arose. The denomination was irrelevant.
For a time I went to the Ligoniel Belfast City Mission Sunday school. They had wonderful characters; there was Billy Cathcart, who led the singing at the mission hall, and to the end of his life was my encourager.
He was a bus inspector who ran a ‘tight ship’, instructing hangers-on standing on the platform that there were seats upstairs. He was an early pioneer of health and safety and would never let the bus overflow with passengers. I don’t know how he would have coped with today's Belfast’s Glider packed like herrings in a barrel.
The City Mission hall had its many homespun theologians like Sammy Patterson and Sammy Morrison. The Sunday School exam was something else. You learnt a passage of scripture, and on examination day, the two Sammys sat at the back of the room while your Sunday School teacher asked you the questions.
These two ‘professors’ then gave you a mark that decided whether you got a special prize, a leather-bound Bible, or one with a less stylish binding.
Those Belfast City Mission hall men remain my heroes of the faith. Their desire remains mine: “To know Christ and make Him known,” and what better!