Most of us have just lived through the most peculiar April we have ever known. It was a month of lockdown, daily casualty figures, worry about the future, and, in the United Kingdom, unusually good weather.

I don’t mean to sound flippant, because in the big scheme of things right now, the weather is not the most important thing, but there was something disarming about those first few weeks of lockdown in which it was sunny every day. It added to that Groundhog Day sense of each day being the same as the one before. April in the United Kingdom usually has a fair amount of grey in it along with its sister months, January, February and March, and occasionally May and June. For that matter, July and August offer no guarantees, as my childhood memories of caravan holidays testify, so really we are only left with the period from September to December, months it is best not to venture into without an umbrella and a waterproof coat. We Brits don’t expect the sunshine to come out that much, and when it does it is a surprise, demanding us to go outside and experience the rays right now. Tomorrow it might be gone, like the friend who said they would stay in touch but somehow life happened and you didn’t hear from them for years and when they called you out of the blue it was embarrassing because you didn’t recognise their voice and you couldn’t remember the name of their spouse or even whether they were still together. That’s the usual British relationship with the sunshine. It appears and we are startled, blinking in the brightness and looking upward as if to say, ‘Do I know you?’

Eventually, the weather changed and normal April weather resumed, for which I was briefly grateful. One day I was out doing my daily exercise and it poured down. I breathed in the smells of wet springtime foliage, inspired by the kind of moment that John Updike expressed better than I can when he wrote, ‘Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.’

Life is sunshine and rain, bright and grey and to be rounded human beings we need to be able to seek out beauty in all these things. Many years ago in one of my very early sermons I wrote that ‘true joy is peppered with melancholy to give it a depth of meaning.’ It was a sentiment I later tried to express in my video accompaniment to a Richard Dworsky tune, which appears below, The Gray Sky Waltz.

Back in 2007, my wife and I were on honeymoon in San Francisco in April and our guidebook warned us to expect foggy days, but we had sunshine and blue skys all the way. On Sunday morning, I found myself at Glide Methodist Church, where I enjoyed an inspirational worship experience unlike any I had before or since. A large proportion of the congregation was African American or Hispanic and they sang freedom songs that were popular in the civil rights movement back in the 60s. However, what really defined this church was that this was an LGBT-affirming church. I knew I was somewhere different when the guy who read the announcements joyfully proclaimed, ‘I just want to thank God for making me the queen I am.” In the course of the service I heard people tell stories about how even in the 21^st century they were bullied and discriminated against because of their sexuality but at Glide they had found belonging and self-worth. At the end of the service, everyone held hands and sang We Shall Overcome, and it occurred to me that the movement of the 1960s was still happening and here was I in amongst it. I thought of those good people at Glide again in June 2016, when there was a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 people dead and 53 wounded. There are moments in life when life is so grey that we cannot see the beauty or the point, when people endure suffering or injustice that is beyond our comprehension. I don’t try to find meaning in such things or spout nonsense about it being God’s will, but I do try to look for what is good in other human beings and cultivate the hope that we shall overcome some day.