THERE are times when Christian festivals remind me of buses. You can stand around waiting for one to arrive for a while and then, hey presto, several turn up at the same time. Good Friday, Easter Day, Ascension Day and now Pentecost, it’s certainly been a busy few weeks!

Pentecost, of course is that time when Christians celebrate the coming of God’s Holy Spirit. This was a pretty remarkable event not least because it reassures us that Jesus always keeps His promises and that He was able to do it even after His death! It’s a helpful reminder then, that we should do all we can to keep our promises too even if it’s difficult to do so.

I will never forget an elderly gentleman I met when I was serving as a hospital chaplain some years ago. His wife was suffering from severe dementia and took every chance she could to say horrible things to him. But he continued to visit her on a daily basis, because he had promised to love her ‘until death do us part’. This impressed me so much that I asked him how he was able to keep going and he told me that it was because he went to his local church every day and asked God to give him the strength.

We need to think carefully before we make a promise. I became acutely aware of this when I was a member of a humanitarian mission taking aid into war-torn Croatia in the early 1990’s where I met a young lad named Daniel. He had seen his mother killed by mortar fire in his garden and tragically two years later he had lost his only brother in a car accident. In addition to this, his emaciated body was covered with blisters and open sores from head to toe. He didn’t possess proper hands either just two stumps that looked like clenched fists covered in bags of skin. Nothing could have prepared us for such a pitiable sight. In fact, his weeping wounds caused the grown men in the group to weep too.

We were asked if we could do anything to help Daniel, but we didn’t want to raise his hopes unduly. But we did promise to all we could and that would include praying for him. As a result of this, Daniel ended up travelling to Britain for treatment that would completely revolutionise his life because, as we prayed, lots of people offered to help when they heard of his plight - including Sir Alex Ferguson.

It taught me that we should be very careful when we make promises, but we can be confident that God will help us when we want to care for others. It also proved to me that He is capable of doing things that go way beyond our expectation which is why it’s always worth promising to pray for people.