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I expect most of us will have watched the US presidential inauguration, the pomp, politics and protests, and the personal as one family said goodbye the other hello. This week we will see President Trump greet the first foreign leaders, including the prime minister. Closer to home we have the continuing debate about how Brexit will pan out and whether it will have positive or negative outcomes. So 2017 risks being every bit as unpredictable and divisive as 2016 was. But does it have to be so? We can all too easily fall in to a mindset which sees certain outcomes as inevitable or think that something is simply predestined by factors outside our control. That can apply to our personal lives as much as the global level. We often seek out parallels to what we are experiencing now in historical precedents. For example, some are finding parallels between the uncertainties of our age and the 1930s. In some cases they can be very apt and help to provide the shorthand and meaning to what we are experiencing, but at other times they can fuel a feeling of powerlessness and pessimism. Our mindsets can not only lock us in to a sort of predestination, but can also lock others in. On this programme Friday past we heard an example of a transformation that broke free of such a mindset. As I drove to work I listened to Nick interview Ian Paisley junior and Danny Morrison of Sinn Fein about Martin McGuinness’s retirement from politics. From the line-up I had expected a lively debate. However, former bitter enemies involved in a conflict where murder and violence had become the norm, had come to appreciate the steps each took to bring about peace. Such was the appreciation that by the end of the interview, and I don’t mean to embarrass my hosts, Nick seemed to confuse Ian junior with Danny Morrison. When you listen you can see why. The Paisley-McGuiness relationship required many steps, societal and personal, but two fundamental basic human conditions from both sides; the ability to change even from the toughest path; and an openness and growing trust to allow someone to change. Ian Paisley junior summed it up nicely when he said, ‘it is not where a journey starts or even what has happened, but where it ends, that’s what important’. He thus summed up the essence of the Christian message of salvation. Nothing is inevitable apart from death. In order to be fully human we are asked to be open irrespective of the past cost. If we imprison people into what they might be or have become, then we also imprison ourselves and deny the possibility of grace in their life and ours.