The Prodigal Son Returns

Whose life has gone just the way they planned?  I know mine certainly hasn’t.  But what can we learn from this?  Perhaps that nothing in life is certain.  No one’s life is perfect.

When we are upset, or going through a crisis, even a small crisis of one kind or another, it’s then that we often reflect on life.  We might think about the reasons for life, and maybe just what life is all about.  We might even think about the existence of God.  It is those moments, when we experience emotions that we can’t put a name to, emotions somewhere between happy and sad, neither one thing or the other, that we could begin to see that we are complex beings.  And we demand complex answers to things that we, hard as we try, never seem to find.

When we go through a life crisis of one type or other, we are facing a kind of test, although some people might not know it, or see it like that.  Some people are unlucky; they have had, or are having, hard lives.  Other people are more fortunate; they, like many of us, have had or are having decent lives.  And most of us have had one or two crises now and again; it’s the nature of life.  When you are caught up in the storm, right in the middle of all the chaos, it’s hard to see anything else or think about anything else.  This can affect us deeply.  And then, to add to it all, life goes on, and people around us seem sometimes indifferent to our plight, our troubles; and where is God?  Where is God indeed.

Looking for answers?  I’ve only got more questions.  It seems as a race, we are always questioning, always asking questions brazenly and willy-nilly, half expecting the answers to pop out of the air; they never do.  The fact that we ask questions proves that we all have a kind of nascent intelligence, regardless of upbringing, education (or lack of), and any other factor that makes us different from the next person.  We are different, but we are also similar, all part of the human family.  We are similar in that we have similar yearnings; yearnings to understand, yearnings for things to be explained to us, yearnings for something higher than ourselves and yearnings for something bigger than ourselves and possibly yearnings to belong.  We yearn, for many intangible things, but never seem to find.  It’s like we’re blind, set adrift on a lonely dirt path, that we’ve never been on before, and then we expect to find what we can’t see; no wonder so many people are confused!

There’s something that I have thought about for a long time; we’re never happy with what we are; if we have blue eyes, we want brown.  If we are tall, we want to be shorter.  If we’re big, we want to be smaller.  Whatever it is we are, we want to be something different.  I think we should really be grateful that God has made us unique; there’s no one quite like you, or me.  Human beings, the most intelligent, the most resourceful, and certainly the most destructive species on the planet, seem to be the least satisfied.  You could give someone a gold bar, and they’d complain because it was dusty.  There’s no pleasing some people.  And, yet, someone else can live a humble life, just making enough to get by, with maybe a little to spare, and they are grateful for it.  We’re a cantankerous lot us humans, restless and forever wanting to change things, not happy with what we have, and always ready to moan and complain if things just aren’t right.  Well, some of us anyway.  What’s the answer?  Maybe we’ll find some, if we search hard enough.

When I look at some wealthy people, I wonder whether they are truly happy.  It seems to me that the more money people get, the more they seem to want; they never seem satisfied.  After your first million or so, when you never have to worry about it again, then it seems that some people just want more and more.  Is there a spiritual emptiness to some people’s lives, that they try to fill with material things?  I do wonder.  And then I look at the wealth that organised Christianity has, like the Vatican and the Church of England.  If the Vatican has billions of pounds of wealth, and vast collections of in some cases priceless art works, and to my knowledge has vast land holdings, then what is the purpose of that wealth?  Does it serve God?  I have visited Rome and seen the relative poverty of some of the people living there; can’t the Vatican help to find people work in Italy and in countries around Italy, and help young people to get work, and help make people’s lives easier with all that wealth?  And likewise with the Church of England; doesn’t it have enough wealth to help, really help, people get work and be trained and help people get educated?  I may be being too harsh here, for these organisations may indeed be doing just that, but I think they need to be more transparent about what they are doing with all that wealth.  Money seems to get in the way of everything, especially friendship, love and concern for fellow humans.

Isn’t it funny how age creeps up on us; no sooner we are teenagers, then somehow we’re adults, and then somehow we’re middle aged.  And we don’t know how it happened.  When we’re young, we want to be older and what we think is more sophisticated.  When we’re old, we might pine for the days of our youth, and perhaps wish we could undo all the stupid things we did or said in our salad days.  When we might find a moment, a rare moment, where we are just satisfied, just glad to be alive regardless of all the problems, misgivings and worries we might have, it's then we might reflect on the peace that so deftly evades us most of the time.  Peace; isn’t that what it’s all about?  Even in the Old Testament, with its genocide, fratricidal wars, envy, rape, warfare, rage, jealousy, disobedience to God, general bloodletting and so on, reading between the lines I get the feeling that God wanted His people to have peace; peace to sit under their own vine and fig tree.  Anyone without peace in their lives may quickly realise that peace, far down on most people’s lists, is actually like an oasis in a desert.  It is God’s peace that I think most Christians are seeking.  And it might be peace that people are seeking when they drink too much, or abuse drugs, or seek vast wealth.  But real peace has nothing much to do with any of these things; where will we get us some peace?  Is there such thing as peace, perfect peace?  Instead of searching for real peace, we make troubles for ourselves, and heap misery upon misery.  And, then, we wonder why we are so miserable!

If we are seeking peace, genuine peace, in our lives, where do we begin?  And, as well as seeking peace, perhaps we are seeking other things too, like maybe a job or a better job, to get ourselves educated, to save to start a business, to become a better photographer or writer or painter or guitarist or musician, or whatever it is we want to do; it’s all within our grasp to be honest.  So, peace; where will we find peace, and its brother, contentment?  I have learned quite simply throughout my life that God is the only source of real peace and real contentment.  It isn’t about being the richest, or the best, or the toughest, or the most beautiful or handsome, it goes beyond these things; it isn’t also about accepting mediocrity in our lives, or somehow accepting poverty and limited horizons either; it’s harder to define than this.  Some people could be content living in a tin shack with rainwater to wash in and a banana tree to eat dinner from.  But that for me isn’t really godly contentment either.  It isn’t about a lack of material things any more than it is about having lots of material things and wealth and so on.  It goes beyond this too.  So, just what is contentment then?  I think contentment begins with being grateful to God for any good things we take in our lives for granted, and just simply being glad for those good things, whatever they might be.  And peace?  Well, for me, peace is at its simplest really a spiritual condition, not necessarily the absence of troubles which we all have now and again, but a condition where we learn to fully put our faith solely in God, whatever happens and whatever the circumstances we might find ourselves in.  It is possible to have peace in the centre of the storm.

I was reflecting on life again, and I was thinking how that in life, relatively few people become world famous or even moderately famous, relatively few people become super-wealthy or famous like Jimi Hendrix or Winston Churchill or Barack Obama; and I thought honestly ‘does it really matter?’  How many people have lived anonymous lives?  Most people that have ever lived in fact.  I sometimes go for short breaks to Llandudno, a small but pretty coastal town in North Wales, and there is a mountain there called the Great Orme.  On the Great Orme, there is a church called St Tudno’s.  Apparently it goes back centuries and centuries but I don’t know how old the present church there is.  There are two specific gravestones I noted when I was there.  Both are children, called Sarah and William, of Robert Williams, who was a mariner.  They died at the end of the 18^th century.  I always think just what sort of lives they led, what they ate, what they believed, what if any dreams they had, why they died at such a young age.  Were they loved and cherished?  Who can say?  They’ve lain there all those years, long forgotten by most people, with all the history that has passed since they died.  Their whole lives, short lives at that, marked by two carved slabs of slate.  Then I thought that this was the fate of most of humanity; certainly in the past, not even the dim and distant past, people’s lives were generally hard, people often didn’t have enough to eat, or proper clothes, or medicines, or access to help and advice.  How far we’ve come, and how fortunate for some of us to live lives far removed from those times.  So, in the great scheme of things, we should be grateful to God for whatever good things we have, and perhaps reflect on two children from long ago who perhaps didn’t.

If God is the Father, then I was one of His wayward sons; one of the many no doubt.  I had to learn what it was like without Him, to really understand what it was like with Him, and to understand what I was missing.  I was the prodigal son and, eventually, I returned to my Father, my heavenly Father.  But I had to learn the hard way just what being estranged from God means.  It seems as a species, we always make things hard for ourselves unnecessarily, and we make what is essentially simple, a relationship with God, into something complicated.  I think religion is one thing, and Christianity is something else.  I sometimes think that some people who fervently espouse Christianity, are actually being only too religious, and instead of waiting on God, and truly being inspired from God, run ahead of themselves making all sorts of statements and living in ways that are not from God at all.  I think we have all done this; but we must learn to live as God would have us live; it’s that simple, and that difficult.

Worry, Worry, Worry

Are you one of those people who find it easier to worry about everything, rather than not worry about everything?  I find myself in this position sometimes and don’t really know why; everything gets on top of me and all I want to do is pull the duvet over my head and never get out of bed again!  I think many people have the same feeling now and again.  Do we ever fully understand human feelings and emotions, do we ever sit down and really try to understand them?

In trying to come terms with our emotions, how we think and feel, and maybe especially as Christians, we might begin to think about God and how He made us in His image; what exactly does that mean?  I certainly don’t think God is a big bearded bloke in the sky, balancing on a cloud!  Seriously, God is of course the supreme spiritual being of the universe, far from our general understanding.  But, if He did make us in His image, then we share traits with Him even though we are very different.  We share a spiritual dimension which must not be overlooked.  Our emotions, whether good or bad, I believe are part of that synthesis we have with God.  When humans feel very bad they can do bad things; when humans feel good they can do good things.  So, we know that how we feel can often impact on other people; sometimes positively and, unfortunately, sometimes negatively.

So we worry, and if we are we honest, we don’t really know why; perhaps it’s just a part of being human; perhaps it’s a part of those emotions that we don’t really understand.  I think that if we are in tune with God, our emotions tune into Him as well.  In other words, we may just find that as we lead a God-driven existence, we begin to find peace and contentment in our lives too.  Of course no one’s life is ever perfect or always runs smoothly, but I think we can live in general in a level of peace with God that we certainly couldn’t without Him.

Patience

We want to receive, so we pray.  We pray, and we don’t receive so we get despondent; so we indulge, and create more problems.  We pray for a job, and we don’t get one.  We pray for a better life all told, but we still feel we are stuck in a rut.  We want something to change and to change for the better, and nothing seems to change.  We want something new but have to put up with the old.  We yearn for things we can’t put into words and struggle with what we can’t fully understand.  We are in a mess, and we want everything straightened out straight away.  We want everything, and think we have nothing.  What are we being taught?  Perhaps, after all, we are being taught patience.

Mid-Life Crisis

Do we wander in the desert for 40 years as Christians, until we reach middle age, then find God more relevant?  I feel that for much of my life I haven’t really been ‘in tune’ with God, maybe for one reason and another.  I lived in sin for chunks of my life, it’s as simple as that.  If you have a calling on your life, and you choose to ignore it or not take it seriously as the Israelites often didn’t, you will sooner or later find your life unravelling as I have many times before today.  And as we read in the Bible, God will also punish people for their abandonment of Him.  So, it is possible to spend many years in the wilderness, to all intents and purposes ‘doing our own thing’ and finding that we achieve little and are at the same time not satisfied.  I firmly believe that if we disregard God, we make the biggest mistake of our lives and, like the Israelites of old, we may very well wander in the desert for 40 years before we see sense.  This is how it’s been for me anyway.

It seems clear to me that all Christians will suffer in some way for their sin, and for not taking God seriously at His word.  He does have the power to move in our lives, and He does have the power to transform us from wretched sinners to useful servants; if only we let this sink in!  Some people who are not Christians may perceive Christianity as a sort of jolly club for the terminally nice living in nice neighbourhoods and singing nice hymns on Sundays in nice, quaint churches.  It is an image that for me isn’t really true; there is no stereotype Christian any more than there is a stereotype human being.  God calls all types of people to Him, and if He called me I think He can call anyone!  What I’m trying to tell you is that God is bigger, more profound, more amazing and more life changing than anything else you may have experienced or anything else you may imagine or perceive.  It isn’t necessarily about dusty churches and dog-eared hymnbooks, it is more a lived reality on a daily and on-going basis with a God who is not too proud to walk with us providing we are not too proud to walk with Him.

If we spend years living in the wilderness, away from God and His love and values and law and so on, after it we might begin to reflect a little.  When God punishes us for living in sin, we are meant to learn a lesson from this; sometimes we might have to learn a number of lessons.  I believe God wants us to serve Him with a whole heart, and wants us to trust Him and put our faith and hope in Him that He will see us right, and in a better condition than we could be without Him.

Positivity and Negativity

Negative people can nurture doubts, while positive people can try to nurture possibilities.  You may have a very good reason to be negative or filled with negativity but in the long run it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to make you unhappy or discontented.  I believe that God is all positive, there is no negative with Him at all, and I also believe He wants us to be realistically positive rather than unrealistically negative.  We all know what it’s like to be around someone who is always negative, always finding faults and always finding reasons not to try something and always complaining that everything is bad.  We might even have friends like this; we might even be like this ourselves. 

What is the answer to being extremely negative?  I think first we need to pray about it, and then maybe ask ourselves why we are so negative.  I have had a lot of unhappy experiences with women, and for a long time you could say for the most part I hated women.  I think there are many men who hate women, and I think there are many women who hate men, because of bad experiences of one kind or another.  You can spend a long time with this mind-set, even if you have good reason for it, but you won’t have anything to show for it at the end of the day other than an unfulfilling bitterness.  And, when it boils right down to it, this kind of thinking is a negative trait; our thinking and behaviour and our mind-set are either positive or negative.  You might say quite honestly, certainly at this time, that life seems to be more negative than positive in general, and also that no matter how positive we might be, no one’s life ever runs smoothly.  I would answer, yes it’s true life isn’t perfect, but ultimately it’s how we face things in life whether good or bad that really defines us; a positive person might find a way, whereas a bitterly negative person usually won’t.  If you think you can, you just might, if you think you can’t, you probably won’t.  My dream is to be a published author; I’m realistically positive about this, rather than unrealistically negative; if it doesn’t happen then at least I’ve tried and if it does happen I will have seen my dream realised.  So, for me, it’s always better to be positive than negative.

The second Chance

In the last couple of months I feel my life has tumbled into chaos, and I’m only too aware that I am far from God; a painful thing for a Christian to admit.  But, if I have one thing, at least it’s honesty!

Pretending?

How many Christians pretend that their lives are perfect and everything’s ticking along just nicely, when the truth might be very different?  I’ve known people who seemed to go from one crisis to another in unfortunately quick succession, and I’ve known people who seem to breeze through life and never seem to have a troubled moment.  Me?  Well, I tend to be somewhere in the middle; I go along nicely for a while, and then for some reason everything seems to collapse around my ears.  When we are happy or relatively untroubled, we don’t really reflect on why, but when we are troubled or something unpleasant occurs, it’s perhaps then that we might reflect.  I’ve suffered on and off with depression for over half my life; I know when I am suffering as I begin to struggle to get out of bed, and for some reason I start questioning everything; the meaning of life, why we are here, what does it all mean, and so on.

Suffering seems such a large part of the human experience; I think everyone suffers in some way or other, suffering that we bring on ourselves because of what we have done and suffering that often might come out of a clear blue sky, so to speak.  No one escapes it, and we all have to come to terms with it.  It might be for some Christians that the suffering they are going through is because God is trying to bring them to an understanding or a revelation of some kind.  I have lived in so much error as a Christian, and endured so much of God’s punishment, really correction, that I have developed a kind of savvy, a kind of wisdom, all ‘after the fact’ I may add.  I can speak of God’s mercy and I can speak of His wrath because I have personally experienced both in my life, and a number of times too.  What have I learnt?  I have learnt that God means what He says, and that He has the power to operate in our lives and move mountains too.

The Second Chance

If we are being honest, we all need a second chance from time to time.  I don’t just mean criminals either, I mean every one of us.  God has the ability to allow us to start again, to begin afresh, to be made anew, so that we can find in life just what it is God wants from us and for us for that matter.  Being a Christian, trying to actively serve God on a daily basis, means we more than most will, hopefully, be more in tune with God.  What does God want with us, after all?  Why should He be so concerned with a bunch of hopeless sinners anyway?  Well, He created us, so maybe He has the right to involve Himself in our affairs.

A second chance means that we can get right with God again, when perhaps we haven’t been serving Him at all really.  I need a second chance quite frankly because I find myself in the wilderness, and struggle to see any signposts and struggle to make any headway in my life at this time.  But I have a tenacious faith, it’s probably the only thing I do have in abundance.  I’m right in the middle of the storm.  I am I feel in a transitional period of my life, waiting for something to happen but not knowing what; isn’t that only too human?

I think those who are criminals need a second chance as well; if we don’t allow people to change and to move on, and to enjoy God’s mercy, what happens when we ourselves cry out for the mercy of God; won’t He ignore us?  I have found that I have so much of my own sin to contend with that I just haven’t any time to look at anyone else’s sin.  I think God wants us to be aware of our own faults before we start pointing out everyone else’s.

God’s Mercy

I have understood this too; God’s mercy is bigger than His wrath.  I have experienced His mercy and His wrath throughout my adult life.  It has taken me a lot of ups and downs with God to come to some understanding with Him.  I don’t go to a church as yet, and am just in the process of sorting this out, so it has always been just me and God.  It is obvious that, sooner or later, God wants us as individuals to have Christian friends to share in the Christian walk.  Being quite a private and even shy person, at times anyway, this has always been hard for me to come to terms with; but, slowly but surely, I see the first beginnings of my Christian life being shared with others. 

So, certainly God’s mercy is more important than His wrath; His anger lasts but a moment but His love lasts for ever.  I find myself going from one stage of life to another, I also find that I have to have faith in God each day to see me through each painful day; without leaning on God I would probably be an alcoholic or a burnt-out wreck, a shell of a man in fact.  And, once, without God I was a wreck, a complete mess going nowhere and going from one unhappy experience to another almost in quick succession.  That period of life has gone now.  I won’t tell you that my life is perfect now, but it’s a whole lot better now than it was.  God’s mercy is beginning to shine brightly in my life.

Mind Your Own Business!

Part of our walk with God is an utterly personal and completely individual experience; we are all often very different people and God deals with people as He finds them.  We are all at different places with God.  To some, God needs to be hard, to others He is gentler than a new born lamb.  To one person, He is the brightest star revealing everything, and to another He is darkness itself, almost unfathomable and unknowable; for a season anyway.  We are all going towards the same light, but we are all coming at Him from different angles.  This means that my walk is very different from someone else’s; we can share our experiences of God with each other but we can’t often know what someone else is going through and because of this God treats us all individually.  I also believe quite firmly that there are no favourites with God of any kind regardless of class differences, racial differences, whether we are men or women, American or British, Jew or Gentile.  I believe God loves us all equally and can take anyone of us and raise us to great heights.  In the light of this, sometimes it’s best for us to be concerned about other people and care for them, but not to get too hung up about their walk with God; mind you own business, in other words!

Troubles of all Kinds

If we look around us, even in wealthy societies and nations, there seems a never-ending stream of suffering people, and certainly unhappy people.  I suppose I was one of them.  Some people seem beset by problems of one kind and another, whilst others breeze through life, or seem to anyway.  What is the answer to such unhappiness?  Especially if it seems people have no serious thing to be unhappy about.  What is the cause of so much trouble and unhappiness in wealthy western countries?  Are we ever satisfied with what we have?  Aren’t we, if we are honest, always clamouring for more, when we don’t really need it?  One of the things I have learnt as a Christian, is that we should learn to be grateful for what we have whilst not worrying about what we don’t have.  I’m not suggesting we accept poverty in our lives or anything like that, I don’t think God wants anyone to live in any kind of poverty, just that we should count our blessings before we complain.

God is the perfect source for bringing us better lives, of all kinds, and He can bring us peace in the storm.

Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just wanted to wish everyone who comes to my blog and reads it, a very Happy Christmas and a very happy and peaceful New Year!!!  Don't indulge too much, but do enjoy yourself!!!!!!

Tim

The Dynamic Struggle

We all have struggles in life; it’s nothing new to humanity.  For the Christian, we might struggle with the ideal of perfection whilst at the same knowing that we will never be perfect this side of Heaven.  This can create a dichotomy, as although we are meant to strive towards perfection, we know we will never attain it in this life, and we know that we will never attain it without leaning fully on God.  No matter what we do, we will make mistakes, no matter how much we watch ourselves, no matter how good we might be, no matter how hard and long we might pray, we will mess up; it’s that simple, and perhaps that annoying too.

We struggle with our growing godly selves, and our old sinful natural selves.  In our natural state, without recourse to God, we cannot do much else but sin, and even live in sin.  What might feel right, may just be very wrong to God.  As Christians, we need to put on the new clothes each day, and learn to leave off our old clothes, so to speak.  In short, we are in a battle, and because of this, we need God’s divine help and guidance each day, to walk in victory.  You cannot do it on your own, no matter how good you may be or how good you may think you are.  We struggle because we are daily caught in this battle; we struggle because we want revenge, but are supposed to forgive; we struggle because we hate, and we are meant to love; we struggle because we want everything, and we are meant to be grateful for what we already have; we struggle, well simply because we struggle.  There is a struggle created by the pull of the world and all its disorder, and the pull of God’s perfect will.

A Purpose in Life

I have found in my own life that when I have a purpose, even if that purpose in life is merely to serve God and live as a Christian each day, I have a reason to get out of bed.  God will give us a purpose and a reason in life and will bring meaning and purpose to existence itself.  Without God, and without His purpose, we can drift, and sometimes unhappily from place to place, and from one unhappy encounter to another; I know, I have been there.  So, we definitely need a purpose in life; it doesn’t have to be to become the richest person in the world or have the biggest corporation, at first it can simply be to find out what God’s will is for our lives; that’s a start.  Being a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean we have to be ‘suffering saints’ any more than being some kind of ‘holy Joe’, you can still be an ordinary person whilst learning to serve God; I have found in my thirty or so years as a Christian, as a person with God’s call very much on my life, that He wants us to be ourselves, to be real to ourselves, real to other people and most of all real to God Himself.  In short, I feel we don’t have to put on ‘airs and graces’ with God or anyone else for that matter; we don’t have to speak ‘posh’ if we don’t normally, we don’t necessarily have to be pretend to be something we’re not; I believe God takes us as He finds us, as long as we are prepared to listen and learn.

Obedience to God

For many of us who have grown up in liberal Western societies, wealthy Western societies throughout the world, or who have just been fortunate enough to never know real want or real hardship, we can be grateful to God for this. But, sometimes, when we have been brought up not to know real trouble in our lives, we might think that we know best, we might think that we can do what we like, maybe as we always have done.

For some, and certainly for me at one time, being obedient for any reason let alone to God was something that I struggled with and didn’t come easy at all.  In many cases I had always had my own way.  Again, there was a struggle with what I wanted, and what God wanted from me.  I can tell you this for sure; God does want us to be obedient to His will and He wants us to be obedient to His laws and ways and precepts.  We cannot live in any kind of sin, we cannot live disobediently to God; sooner or later we will pay the price.  For some people obedience is a struggle, and perhaps for others it comes easier; but whatever the case, if we want to be good servants we have to learn to be obedient. 

Forgiveness is the Key

I believe one of the ways we get closer to God, and become more like Him, is when we try to take on His attributes; in short, we become more like God when we try to live like Him and modify our behaviour accordingly.  One of the things that separates sinful humans from God can be our unwillingness to forgive; for whatever reason.  I am certain many Christians will say they forgive, but when it boils down to it, they haven’t forgiven at all.  I have struggled with this myself and have found it far easier to live in a state of hate towards other people than living in a state of forgiveness; I don’t think I’m the only one however.  But in the final analysis, a Christian must learn not to live in a spirit of hate, but in a spirit of love and forgiveness.  For most people, and certainly for me, this doesn’t come easy.  But in the long run I have found it is truly for the best. 

When we harbour resentments, really for whatever reason, even for a good reason, we only damage ourselves; we can make ourselves ill and unhappy, and I have found that hatred is like a drug in that we need more and more of it to justify that very hatred we might have.  Hatred can’t be fulfilled, it just gets worse and worse.  Love can be fulfilled, and we were created to live in harmony with our fellow humans; not easy, but possible.  When we learn to forgive, truly forgive, we are taking on an important attribute of God; love is bigger than hate, and forgiveness is bigger than vengeance after all.  So forgiveness is the key, the key to salvation and the key towards God and a better way of life.  When we learn to forgive truly, we close a door on a part of us, a part of us that is hateful and vengeful, and we move onto a better life, a life lived through God’s values that will bring us closer to our destiny, whatever that may be. 

I may add that learning to forgive others helps us to forgive ourselves and will bring happiness into our lives, sooner or later.

Getting Older

Getting older, getting old.

As life rushes by, we wonder what it’s all about, we struggle to make sense of it all,

and we come to the end of our understanding; we are baffled by it all, in the end.

We are all whole universes; whole universes of trouble, whole universes of love,

whole universes of complexity; when we die a whole universe dies with us.

In the wee small hours we sit, and hope that life goes on forever. We watch our movies, drink our

beer, and think our thoughts, lost in space and time.

Those moments, when we are lost even to ourselves, when everything seems possible and nothing

seems impossible, are fleeting, but they are what keeps us going.

Feel like I’m living on borrowed time, all the time, feel like I’m living on borrowed time.

All the dreams I had when I was young; did they just disappear into the ether?

People move in and out of your life as you get older. New things appear, and old things go, go the

way of all things, to be forgotten, as we no doubt will be forgotten.

Who wants to get older, and give way to the younger? We all dream that we will live forever; but we

don’t.

So, we get old, and we can’t do a thing about it; we are on a long journey, and we will find ourselves

at the end of it. 

Somebody Has Got to Do Something!

I have written on this topic before, but I feel I need to write about it again; whilst the majority of people in the Western world are not particularly wealthy, we find again and again that prices of this, that and the other are going up, whilst wages are being frozen, people are losing their jobs and there is real uncertainty in many people’s lives in just how they are going to make ends meet and what plans they are to take in life.

The people who helped cause the financial meltdown and the subsequent economic chaos we find ourselves in are living privileged lives, sheltered from the very mess they helped to create.  When the banks messed up, we bailed them out.  So, in effect, they failed but didn’t fail!  Nice for some.  Many millions of people in the United Kingdom are feeling the serious consequences of this economic mess, and are having to make all sorts of budget cuts to all sorts of things they were used to, and we are seeing that things like gas and electricity, the price of petrol, the price of food, transport and many other things are going up month after month, whilst wages and benefits remain the same, or in some cases are being cut.

Shouldn’t a Christian stay out of politics and economics, you might say?  Well, I believe we must speak out where there is injustice, and I believe we have the right to challenge, in a lawful way, the way our country is run.  It is not being run well at this time, but no matter how hard the ordinary person is squeezed, the wealthy and powerful and those who rule and make laws seem to live well beyond the means of the ordinary person.  And whilst many of us are dreading the next round of price rises, the people at the top seem not to care, primarily because those at the top have wealth and high-paying careers to shelter them from the worst of it.

All over the world people are campaigning against sharp practises by the wealthy, corporations and governments that don’t care or who seem impotent to do anything really radical, like tackle the high prices of goods and services, the price of utilities, and the rising tide of unemployment.  The ordinary person has no real say in how their countries are run, if they ever did, but at this time the gulf between the wealthy and powerful and the person at or near the bottom is very wide indeed.

There is a moral dimension to all of this, and if we are to be honest we need to look at and explore the moral dimension.  From one angle, price rises are wonderful; if you are benefitting from them, that is!  From another angle, the price rises are something that many millions of people around the world are dreading.  I refer specifically to the UK: it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just food and household goods that were increasing, but it is so many other things as well, like the cost of petrol, the cost of public travel especially train travel, the ever-rising cost of utilities like gas and electricity prices; there seems no end in sight, and yet our politicians, of whatever political persuasion, and the people who run and own these companies seem unable to do anything about it, and seem less to care, perhaps because they are all wealthy and well-provided for.  It’s the same old story, it seems.  So let’s come back to the moral issue at stake.  The moral issue is that these price rises are, when it boils down to it, an issue of greed.  And I believe implicitly that God does not countenance injustice and does not turn a blind eye to injustice for ever.  Some people may get away with their sin this side of Heaven, but will certainly not on the other.  There is immorality, greed and injustice woven into these price rises and they are at worst making some people’s lives worse than they really need to be.  There will be an answer to this injustice; mark my words.  

It seems that, as ever, we in Britain have the highest prices for food, general goods and services, train travel, petrol and gas and electricity prices; why is this?  Will we ever get a real answer from any politician about why we are always paying more for almost everything than any other Western European country, without the usual bluster and waffle and patronising tone all around?  We can but hope.  But deep down, if we are honest, we know that we are being ripped off and taken for a ride, often by the very people who are supposed to be fighting our corner.  If we can’t get rid of capitalism and I personally don’t want to, then it needs changing.  Firstly, if you have and make lots of money, you can pay more tax; if you are poor or make little, you pay less tax.  It’s that simple really.  We need to redistribute wealth fairly this way, unless we want anarchy on the streets; not in a ‘hippy-dippy’ or Communist way or anything that has links to any political ideology, just a fair and simple redistribution that makes sense and is easy to administer.  Secondly, we need to truly work together, governments, bosses, corporations, businesses and the regular person on the street in making our finances work, and perhaps we all need to stop living beyond our means and stop living on borrowed credit.  Thirdly, we all need to find a purpose in life; I believe that goes beyond normal concerns but is very much the most important consideration in being human.  

There is another problem I feel with Britain too; it seems that too much power and wealth and influence is concentrated in the hands of a relatively few people and also especially in the South East of England.  This reflects history and tradition, but isn’t it time we began to live in a modern nation, one that is based on genuine equality and fairness, as opposed to privileged status and unfairness?

When people give to charity, people from the Western nations to countries like India, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, no one questions the fact that richer people are giving to poorer people; why should they?  But why, when people are talking about redistributing wealth from the richest to the poorest within wealthy Western nations, is there a complete reluctance?  Why are many wealthy people in the West so greedy and selfish?  The only aim of charity, in any circumstance, is to redistribute wealth and resources from those who have to those who don’t have.

What is the Christian answer?  Well, as I wrote, I believe Christians need a purpose in life, even if at first that is just being obedient to God and walking in His ways.  We also need to ask why there needs to be, in some circles, absolute unlimited wealth, and for others near-wretched poverty. Just what is the purpose of such wealth creation if it only benefits a handful of people?  If a person is living in poverty, or struggling financially in any way, then maybe, and for the first time, they need to pray and ask God for help; He really can help!  I’m not being religious here or anything like that, I’m just telling you the truth; God can, and does, work in the real world.  For Christians, we need to lean hard on Jesus and to ask in prayer that we can satisfy our need before our greed and we need to be honest about ambitions and understand quite simply that if we make a lot, we need to put a lot back, and if we don’t make a lot or if we are struggling and poor we can as I said ask God to make our lives better without the need necessarily to have millions and millions of pounds, even though I believe there is nothing fundamentally wrong with being wealthy provided you use some of that wealth  wisely and to help others and you are prepared to pay a fair rate of tax.

Finally, I don’t believe it’s necessary to be wealthy to be happy, and it’s not necessarily a prime requisite for being a Christian either.  True happiness, and contentment, go beyond wealth creation and is a spiritual kind of wealth, one which lasts and no one can steal from you.  I’m not suggesting either that being poor or wretchedly poor makes you super-spiritual in some way either; who wants to live in poverty after all?  It’s beyond that too.  God will provide, and is able to provide all your needs, regardless of whether you are rich or poor.  It’s having faith in God that enables us to see the bigger picture, and will teach us that money is not the most important thing in the world.