Here's the latest piece by our club chaplain and long serving fan John Barker.

If you missed it, here's his first article from a fortnight ago.

https://darlingtonfc.co.uk/news/the-ramblings-of-rev-john

First of all, thank you to the many people who have been in contact since my first article was published. It is great to be in touch with old friends and hear from others who I have never met. It was also reassuring to hear from people who had played at Longpasture against Bishopton and didn’t mind having to play “dodge the cow pat” as well as football!

These continue to be strange times. Still no football, conflicting messages about staying home but at the same time getting back to work and re-opening our schools and then to top it all Thommo is leaving Darlo! I did not list these in order of priority, I leave that to each of us to do. However, at the same time Darlo fans continue to amaze me in a very positive way. The response to BTB is outstanding, well done everybody! We are playing our part in making sure that whenever we will be able to play, we will still have our team to support.

I occasionally think back to the day when Darlo almost “died”. At that time, I was based in Skopje, the capital city of the country now known as Northern Macedonia but which at the time had the horrible acronym FYROM. This was universally hated by the locals, and I saw many cars with stickers stating “Don’t you FYROM me!”. Anyway, to get back to the time when Raj tried to FYROM Darlo, on the day when Harvey met the staff at the Arena to announce his decision, like many others I was desperate to keep up with the news. From Skopje that was not straightforward. I managed to pick up Radio Cleveland live online for a while and then I had to go out for a meeting just after one of the players had come out and said we were finished.

After a while I managed to get Twitter working on my phone and so I followed the real-life drama via Twitter feeds from a variety of people-thank you to all of you. I recall Peter Barron, ever the consummate journalist, doing a great job with his posts. They were a lifeline for us exiles. Throughout the whole day I somehow never believed that we were finished, even if I can’t explain why. Maybe it was wishful thinking, maybe it was blind faith.

Throughout my life there have been a number of times when everything seemed to be going wrong and there was no obvious sight of better days ahead. Maybe some of you are feeling like that at present? In the early days the lockdown was a bit of a novelty, everything was different, and the Dunkirk spirit was evident all around us. Now that summer is approaching and there’s still no footie, never mind the possibility to plan summer holidays, it’s not quite so exciting. Especially as too many people are still dying every day.

It is at times like this that faith is really important. Why are we all supporting BTB in the middle of a lockdown? It’s because we have faith that better days will return and we will be able to watch Darlo again. I pray that we may hold onto a similar faith in our personal lives, and that soon we will be able to meet our friends and families and return to our usual existence. After a bad result I have often seem a comment on Uncovered along the lines of “keep the faith”. Let’s do that right now, and not just for Darlo! If life is tough at the moment and you would like to chat, please don’t hesitate to send a message to chaplain@darlingtonfc.org

John Barker

Darlington FC chaplain

chaplain@darlingtonfc.org