Thursday 16 February 2017

Finding the balance

We augment and consolidate in our lives whatever is the focus of our thoughts. We travel in the direction of our thoughts.

I pay attention to the whirling and eddying of present political turbulence. I heed the injustice in our treatment of refugees – the abominable decisions of Britain’s home secretary (and my own MP) to renege on the promise of a British home for 3000 child refugees, and also to deny access to our islands to disabled refugees. Such things, they do not go away, they are not so lightly dismissed. There is a justice built into the nature of things, and what we have done will surely find us out, for God is just, and God – not the British government – determines the course of our destiny. This will come back to us one day. If today we cannot see clearly enough the sorrow and grief and destructiveness of war, the desperation of the destitute, then one day it will be writ more plainly in our lives, so we cannot fail to get the point.

And I pay attention to what human beings are doing to the Earth – our grandmother and our home. After the Spirit of God and the Word of God in Christ, the Earth is our first ancestor, and we owe her the honour due an ancestor – “honour thy father and thy mother, that it may go well with thee, and thou mayest dwell long in the land”.  Unless we honour the Earth our grandmother, we will not have long to dwell here. I cannot fathom what our politicians and grand corporations imagine will be the result of the fracking, the oil spills, the pollution of land and air and sea. Surely they know enough science to understand that oxygen, an element, is finite and its balance with the other elements must be tended? Surely they know that we, made so much of water, need clean water to drink? Surely they grasp that if you reduce the cities of the world to rubble with your war machines, poison what you haven’t extracted for your consumer items in your pursuit of growth economics, inject poison into the aquifers – then you too will be gripped by the turmoil of fear and pain. “For these,” as Jesus said, “are the beginning of sorrows.” Dead right.

I watch and I listen. But I try not to put my focus there, because how futile and absurd my life would become if I looked so intensely into the ugliness and evil that I missed all the beauty and the good.

So I look at this



and this



and this



and this


and this


and this


and this




And I thank God who has filled my life with blessing – so much beauty, so much gentleness, so much health and kindness and creativity and tenderness and laughter and love. How blessed am I, who have all these wonders shining around me like the colours of the dawn. How blessed am I in family life, in the snowdrops, in the soft carpet of moss, in the singing of a bird at dusk, in the fall of rain, in the firelight, in the travelling moon, in the curve of a child’s face, in the quiet of night, in the fresh cold sea air. How blessed, how immensely blessed in sharing, in loving, in doing what little I can to bring good into the world.

14 comments:

PepperReed said...

Amen. AmenAmenAmen.

Pen Wilcock said...

:0) xx

Deborah Jenkins said...

I love your comment about there being a natural justice to things - I have seen this time and time again. And the bit about the earth being our first ancestor. And the part about focusing on the beauty and the blessings. I love your blog. Beautiful (and for me, timely) post ☺️

Pen Wilcock said...

:0) xx

Anonymous said...

It's true that we must remind ourselves to notice and be thankful for the "holy mundane things of life." They are gifts from God.
On another note, are you currently writing any books? Reading the Hawk and the Dove series and beyond was life changing for me. So please, what's next?

Pen Wilcock said...

:0)

I'm so glad you enjoyed The Hawk and the Dove books, and that they did good for you. I'm not writing anything at the present time. x

rebecca said...

How constructive, that last paragraph.
Rather than sucking life out of me (as does angst, criticism, and negative commentary), it was life-GIVING and uplifting.

Pen Wilcock said...

:0)

xx

Elin said...

You are a blessing yourself. I was so happy to see you check out my blog and I have read so many wonderful things on this blog now because I realized when you commented that I hadn't read much on your blog for a long time. I truly needed to read some of it (so many things in many different posts that I am not going to be more specific than that). I love your thoughts on money and the double blessing-curse it can be.

I am poor by my usual standards right now and by society's here in Sweden but I realized that still I am a winner in the global lottery in so many ways. Poor here still means a roof over my head, food on the table, suitable clothes and quite a lot of completely unnecessary things. I can do more for the world and still be happy and have my needs fulfilled. I would love to be able to have a good balance of work and well, the rest of life. I haven't had that when I am not on maternity leave but there is always hope that things will change.

My biggest blessing is the kids, my husband and my relatives. I love them and they bug me constantly. I might be nice and say "challenge" but that is really being nice ;-). Love is like that, wonderful and hard at the same time. My parents not being alive is probably the most challenging aspect of love. My love for them has not died, I just don't have them there to love the same way.

Pen Wilcock said...

Hi Elin! Yes, so much of what you say resonates with me. God bless you in your family life and your commitment to health and sanity and peace ~ "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." xx

Ganeida said...

I have had to shut down the huge amounts of negativity that has become the pulse of our times & return to simplicity, beauty, the small kindnesses that I can actually do that make the only difference I can make. Everything else becomes unwieldy & often ugly & if I let that in that is what I become too ~ so I don't.

Pen Wilcock said...

:0)

As George Fox put it - 'Evil weakened and the good raised up.'

Julie B. said...

I love to look at children's faces, and focus on the kind of beauty I can see in your granddaughter's face. I've wondered for a long time if their faces are some kind of divine portals that give us glimpses of heaven.

Pen Wilcock said...

Ah! William Wordsworth!

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

xx