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.