Everywhere I look – including inside myself – I see cracks. Whether it is the record of the church at safeguarding, or the culture revealed at the heart of our government, or the horrors of famine looming in Afghanistan, or the exhaustion of teachers, medics and carers two years into a pandemic, or the floods and wildfires sweeping the planet, we are cracking.

St Paul speaks of treasure in fragile earthenware jars. Leonard Cohen sings of the ‘crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in’. David Attenborough shows us seeds that split open only after forest fires. I wonder how in myself, in our church, in our world, we may be cracked <em>open</em>? It is very uncomfortable – there is a lot of mess – and yet in it and through it God renews and regenerates.

The woman who broke the alabaster jar to anoint Jesus was less anxious about the cost or the loss than the opportunity. Where can I turn my attention this day so that I focus not so much on the cracks but on what becomes possible through the opening? In creation, in history, in Scripture we see that this is how God works… so let’s be expectant.