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Good morning. My daily excitement with sports featuring hammers, houses, half pipes, exits out of turn 10 and big air ended yesterday with the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Instead, it seems it will be replaced with mundane concerns of frozen plumbing, traffic delays and this week’s snowmaggedon - in a nation, as our medallist Billy Morgan said has no snow! More seriously, it will be a shame if the excitement of the brief warming of relationship between North and South Korea, cools in a similar way. The hopeful symbolism of North and South Korea walking into the stadium under one flag at the opening ceremony seemed to lose momentum, in a way reflected by the string of defeats of the united Korean ice hockey team. Political commentators have argued that it was all a brief PR stunt, or a diplomatic play of trying to force apart Pyongyang and Washington. Yet If the Winter Olympics has opened a new line of communication across a dangerous divide then I will be grateful. I’d far prefer the world community to affirm this than impose even more sanctions on North Korea. So I remain hopeful – but not in a naïve optimistic way. I do see Kim Jong Un as a belligerent and unpredictable dictator, bolstered by the danger of ballistic missiles. And I do take seriously the appalling human rights violations including the persecution of my fellow Christians, highlighted by international monitoring organisations such as Open Doors. I have seen first hand the starkness of the demilitarised zone and listened to the fears of South Koreans. However, I have also prayed with those same South Korean Christians for peace and reunification on a mountain looking out to that zone and over to North Korea. We prayed with hope, based on a belief in a common humanity under God, and the grace and forgiveness of God shown in Jesus that enables people and situations to change. Jesus in fact in his own ministry, alongside speaking truth to those in power, demonstrated a peaceful welcome of the outsider and even the enemy, and founded a new community that would transcended national and ethnic boundaries. George Orwell once commented, ‘Sport is war minus the shooting’. Yet in 1894 the International Olympic Committee was founded on the belief that sport can contribute to peace. Pierre de Coubertin saw the Olympics emerging as ‘the holder and distributor of social peace.’ He and many other athletes since saw that there was something that went beyond the achieving a certain number of medals for your country into experiences of friendship and community.