Faith

Dancing Like Nobby Stiles
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Dancing Like Nobby Stiles

A piece written for Alex Strangeways-Booth for the BBC. With Passion ft Chris Tomlin – God’s Great Dancefloor (Reyer remix) and David Crowder Band – Undignified (writer Matt Redman)

The winsome, toothless dad-dancer Nobby Stiles

Dancing like Nobby Stiles

Sometimes it’s good to be undignified..

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this? In 1966 England managed to lose and win the World Cup in the same year. Before the tournament, while on display at a stamp exhibition in Westminster Central Hall in London, the Jules Rimet trophy was stolen from under the guards’ noses.

During their noon patrol, the guards found the rear doors of the building forced open and the display cabinet broken into. The trophy, which had been awarded to World Cup winners since 1930, had been nicked.

Three days later, the Football Association received a ransom note. An undercover police officer took fake money to an arranged spot and met Edward Bletchley, a petty thief. He was arrested, but didn’t have the cup, insisting he was only a middleman. The thief was never found but Pickles, the dog who found it was turned into a national hero, even invited to the celebrations after England won the World Cup.

His owner David Corbett shared in this celebrity and allegedly danced down the road with joy – in a manner similar to Nobby Stiles at the end of the final. Dignified no. Victorious, yes..

We hate to lose things. Football matches, world cups, or the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was Israel’s holiest artefact, lost in a humiliating battlefield defeat to the Philistines. Why? Because David’s predecessor as king, Saul, had lost his relationship with God and was turning to snake oil salesmen and tarot card readers.

The Philistines went on a kind of celebration tour of the country to show off their prize. But instead of excited crowds lining the streets, there was death and destruction. God objected to being taken on a victory tour by unqualified people who couldn’t even dance.

The Philistines realised that they had taken a poisoned chalice, sent it back to Israel and parked it in a field. David, who had spent years on a campaign to reclaim the Ark, was delighted. He could just send a cart with some hardy mules and collect it. The trouble was that God didn’t like Reliant Robin-style transport and killed one of David’s top men as he was leading the wagon.

Dancing David, who had been made to look like a fool, got angry and told his men to take the Ark to the house of the Levite Obed-Edom. David had done his research and discovered that only Levites were allowed to carry the Ark. The Ark spent 3 months with Obed-Edom during which time his house was blessed to the level of a FIFA expense account.

Properly packaged and with Levites in control of the logistics, the Ark moved in a stately manner into Jerusalem. Unable to contain himself, David body-popped like a dervish, Dad-dancing in front of the Ark.  His wife Michal remarked dryly that it wasn’t very dignified for a king to dance like a wild-eyed, teeth-missing former undertaker.

David answered like this: “I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes….” (II Samuel 6:22)

When it comes to our relationship with God, the best thing we can do is not gain status, but lose our inhibitions.

David was a King, but he was also a dancer and a musician; he wrote Psalms and made loads of mistakes – and yet God blessed him

So what is the difference between the slightly embarrassing Nobby Stiles and the uber cool German Captain Uwe Seeler? Uwe lost the cup and most of his hair. And Nobby won the World Cup – the one that was lost and then found..

As convention-free people, we are proud to be undignified because we get the Ark over the line.

Roy Stannard 13.2.22

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Always, my Friend

Always, my friend

The warm muffler of friendship

The kind you put on

Without thinking

before going out into the cold air

of mere acquaintance

the scent of many walks, many talks

The Swallows and Amazons hide-out

Safe from stalkers

Camouflaged from the inquisitive

 A place for after the apocalypse

The tenderness amongst the elements

The uncrazy point in the kaleidoscope

Where nothing changes except the seasons

And a word given is never ungiven

Where there is nothing unforgiven

That special seat in your favourite bar

The thoughts

who know who you are

The words that don’t need to be spoken

Because there are no cracks in the pavement

No promises broken

No potholes in the road

The one-eyed teddy

The veteran of childhood

The record with your past scratched into it

The tree house safe from the for-sale sign

The car that always starts

And drives without question

Even after the crash

The arm on the shoulder

When the shoulder is shaking

Time given

Rather than taken.

This is the nest without cuckoos

The place of rest

The church door that is never closed

A friendship that is never tested

Because there is no cross examination.

Where the beginning

Is also the end.

Always, my friend.

For Howard, and friends everywhere.

Words and Voice Roy Stannard / Music Matt Staples (‘One and Only’) 1.2.20

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Winter

IMG_0148

Rodmell 5.12.12

Winter

 

 When Winter dons its black cap

and passes judgement on Autumn

and the landscape loses its colour certificate

I can trace the Summer synapses in the leaves

shorting in miniature Nagasakis

as the ground melts into uncertainty beneath my feet.

The flower negatives freeze into graven images

that no-one can hear but all can feel

This is the bitter seasoning spooned by designer ladle

We count the minutes of daylight like poll station misers

And watch birds shiver in mid-flight

Sometimes the time of year becomes a time of life

As we read the meteorology

And protest as the sundial ratchets out our fate

We sniff the spirits

hovering above the heather blankets on Rodmell Down

As they absorb us into their private mythology

So many beaten paths trodden by beaten men

Splinters of nearly victories stream by the hardworn path

December pedestrians discover a spring in the step

to ordnance our way into the future

Provisioned against the cold in the souls

of the waking, sentient dead

enjoying the golden lottery ticket of their birth

in their far away Westminster palaces

where there is no Winter

written out of some long forgotten manifesto

when principle became pragmatism

and faith could be fathomed.

And now we tremble in the face of Winter

But in that shivering lies the first spasm of chlorophyll

biology and squalling protest

Reaching selfishly for a measure of selflessness

Springing from the ground in a kind of baptism

Because even in this special death,

there is the first baby wriggle of life.

Roy Stannard 5th December 2012

Listen to it live here:

https://soundcloud.com/roystannard/roy-stannard-winter

..and again a year later on December 12th 2013

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Mean Time

Shadows Mingle

 

Mean Time

 

Where the sea kisses the horizon

Someone once drew a line

and now we see the boundary when before there was just a deeper blue.

In the beginning there were days when I drew you with words

that turned into sentences.

Why is it when we see a gate

we want to close it?

Even if there is nothing either side?

And when there is grass

We long to shorten it.

The long misty country trails turn into infinity

not destinations

as far as the eye can see.

When we walk together and our shadows mingle

There is no point where one person ends and another begins

Perhaps there isn’t meant to be.

When you fully discover another

and the soft edges become a little harder

the temptation to repaint the masterpiece

pouring trouble onto oily waters

doesn’t lead to change, only the desire to change the very thing

that was autographed by the Creator.

From here

in the deep, uncharted sun-chipped pools

On the endless shore of being

Where the you meets the me

Someone has drawn a line

Like a monstrous meridian

Snatching mean time

from a perfect eternity.

 

Roy Stannard. 17th May 2011

 

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Henry Olonga – Today a good man stood up

Today a man stood up.

Today I attended Sussex County Cricket’s Mark Davis’ Testimonial Dinner at the Grand Hotel.

Nearly 350 supporters and cricket fans were there to give Mark’s Testimonial year a good start. After the usual cricket stories and dressing room humour, a dreadlocked guy stood up and walked to the microphone. He apologised for not indulging in the usual cricket stats and introduced himself as Henry Olonga from Zimbabwe.

After a short introduction to his life, he sang four songs, beautifully. It was unexpected and poignant. Like a flower sprouting in the desert. His version of ‘You Lift Me Up’ was particularly piquant. It was sung by someone who had made a major life choice. Someone who knew that the here and now wasn’t the be and all.

Henry Olonga is an impressive man. Clear of voice, clear of purpose. He stands tall and today he won over a crowd of Sussex business people with his simple honesty and sincere beliefs. He had made a decision a few years ago to not tolerate corruption, oppression and intimidation. He had stood up and been counted. He is still standing, and he still counts.

Olonga was the first black and youngest-ever cricketer to represent Zimbabwe. Yet he was nearly a non-runner before he started. He was called for throwing in a Test in early 1995 and had to start again on his action from scratch. One of the fastest and least accurate bowlers, he had a poor hit rate with no-balls and wides.  He also suffered more than his fair share of injuries. However, as a strike bowler he could play with devastating effect as he showed in the 1998-99 tour of Pakistan when he destroyed the Pakistan top-order to engineer a win in the first Test.

Olonga was just 17 when he debuted in first class cricket in the Logan Cup for Matabeleland against Mashonaland, emerging from it with five wickets. He was chosen for the Test team to play Pakistan in 1994-95 when he took a wicket in his first over but was then penalized for throwing. A dramatic remedy was called for. He was coached by Dennis Lillee, who modified his action slightly and the shortcoming was turned into an asset.

From 1998 onwards Olonga became a regular in the Zimbabwe side. Selected for the 2003 World Cup, Olonga made international headlines when, along with Andy Flower, he donned a black armband to protest against the ‘death of democracy’ in Zimbabwe.

Henry Olonga with black arm band

This was a brave but foolish act. It would lead to his having to leave his adopted country in fear of his life. He played no meaningful part in the remainder of the competition and could not return to his homeland after the tournament. He fled Zimbabwe and found a new home in England.

Henry Olonga picks up the story in his own words, “Back in 1995 Zimbabwe got involved in a war in the DCR. Things became bad in our country. I was involved in helping an orphanage and began to ask how we got into this mess. I had always respected Robert Mugabe. But I began to hear people speak about him as a dictator and I started doing some research. I found references, for example, to the fact that he had killed some 30,000 of his own people in Matabeleland and the whole thing had been hushed up. I felt a deep, righteous anger.

To cut a long story short, I and another cricketer named Andy Flower decided to make a peaceful protest. We wore black armbands at the 2003 cricket world cup which was taking place in Zimbabwe and wrote a statement mourning the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. As a result I was in trouble.

At that time God proved himself very real. There were threats made against my life by those within the Mugabe regime. I needed to get out of the country – otherwise a mysterious ‘accident’ would happen to me. I called to God.

The day before the final game, we were poised to play Pakistan. If we won – which was highly unlikely – or drew the match, the Zimbabwe team would progress to the next stage of the world cup and go to South Africa and I would escape. So I prayed, ‘O God I need your help’. Unbeknown to me, a cyclone started to brew over the coast of Mozambique. We caught the edge of it and it washed out our game at Bulawayo. We were through to South Africa. The next day the weather in Bulawayo was absolutely fine. You can call it a coincidence, but I believe it was God’s way of answering my prayer.

In South Africa, I was put up by a wonderful family. I later put in my resignation to the cricket authorities in Zimbabwe. I had people still after me. It was just weird. But it was a quiet time in my life. I was on my own. I had left my country. I didn’t know where I was going to go. But God intervened again.

What Andy Flower and I had done was in the headlines. Still in South Africa, I gave an interview to CNN. And it was really through that I was able to come to Britain. I got an offer to come and play cricket in this country if I could raise the air fare. But I had no means of doing that. Out of the blue I got a phone call from a man I had never met before. I was a little frightened of this. Was he really someone who was involved with those who were still after me? He had seen the interview and turned out to be an American, who had been helped out of a very difficult situation in his past, and now had become very rich and just felt that he should help out someone else. He bought me the ticket to Britain.

All I know is that God says, ‘Call on me in the day of trouble and I will answer you’.”

When Henry Olonga entered the room today, the people in the room realised that here was a man who had met a defining moment in his life and had not blinked. As he put it, ‘evil will flourish when good men don’t stand up to it.’  Today, Henry Olonga stood up. Again.

Watch the video below and ask yourself the question, what would you do?

http://vimeo.com/13385623

Henry Olonga’s website: 

http://www.henryolonga.net/

Interview with Henrry Olonga reproduced with kind permission from ‘Cricket at the Cross’ – Evangelicals Now Dec 2008

http://www.e-n.org.uk/p-4448-Cricket-at-the-Cross.htm

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Walter Tull. Why have you never heard of him?

Walter Tull - the first black English Army Officer

The 25th March marks a lonely anniversary. There should be parades, bunting, crowds.  But there will not be a single Reveille. On that day ninety-three years ago an authentic hero died in the Second Battle of the Somme. A Boys Own hero, a sporting legend who had played for Spurs, a leader of men who had stood side by side with them as they went over the top in some of the most dangerous fighting in modern warfare. A man who had been sent into care after the early death of his parents, separated from his brother and left to survive alone. A man of principle, impeccable morals, and the highest standards. An example, an icon, a man you probably haven’t heard of.

This man was Walter Tull.

Walter Tull was born in Folkestone in 1888. By 1900, both his Barbadian father and his English mother were dead. Walter and his elder brother Edward were placed in a children’s’ home in Bethnal Green.

Spotted while playing for the children’s’ home team, he was invited to join Clapton, a top amateur team, in 1908. Helping them to victory in the FA Amateur Cup, the London Senior Cup and the London County Amateur Cup that same season, he was soon attracting the attention of other clubs. It was Tottenham Hotspur who moved in for him, trialling him in their ‘A’ and reserve teams throughout the season. Still an amateur, Walter Tull was invited to tour Argentina and Uruguay with Spurs, signing as a professional on his return. After only seven first team games, he was dropped. This may have been a consequence of the racial abuse he received playing at Bristol City. Rather than stand by Tull, the Spurs management consigned their young star to the reserves.

In 1911, Herbert Chapman signed him for Southern League Northampton Town where he stayed until, like many of his contemporaries, he joined the army in September 1914. Serving in the famous ‘Footballers’ Battalion’ the 17th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, he reached the rank of Sergeant. Still able to play football when on leave, he guested for Fulham in 1915.

Recommended for a commission, Walter Tull became an officer cadet in 1917. Commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 23rd Battalion in the Middlesex Regiment, he was mentioned in dispatches early the following year.

The strange thing is this. There was a ban of black men becoming officers in the British Army. It was somehow ungentlemanly to have a man of colour leading white men into battle. Yet that is what Tull did, heroically.

He was destined for further greatness. In 1917, Tull signed for Glasgow Rangers. Unfortunately, Walter Tull didn’t live to lead the Ibrox attack in the same way that he had led his soldiers. He was killed in action during the German Spring Offensive of March 1918 whilst serving with the 23rd Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment.

Walter, like many professional players, had joined the Football Battalion in 1914. The Army recognised Tull’s stature as a leader and he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant.

In July 1916, Tull took part in the major Somme offensive. Tull survived this experience but in December 1916 he developed trench fever and was sent home to England to recover. Tull had impressed his senior officers who recommended that he should be considered for further promotion. When he recovered from his illness, instead of being sent back to France, he went to the officer training school at Gailes in Scotland. Despite military regulations forbidding “any negro or person of colour” being an officer, Tull received his commission in May, 1917.

Tull became the first Black combat officer in the British Army.  Phil Vasili celebrates this in his superb story and scholarly work, ‘Walter Tull. Officer, Footballer – All The Guns In France Couldn’t Wake Me’  (Raw Press ISBN-10: 0956395406  ISBN-13: 978-0956395405)  He relates, “According to The Manual of Military Law, Black soldiers of any rank were not desirable. During the First World War, military chiefs of staff, with government approval, argued that White soldiers would not accept orders issued by men of colour and on no account should Black soldiers serve on the front line.”

Lieutenant Walter Tull was sent to the Italian front. This was epoch-making in its own right because Tull was the first ever black officer in the British Army. He led his men at the Battle of Piave and was mentioned in dispatches for his “gallantry and coolness” under fire.

Tull stayed in Italy until 1918 when he was transferred to France to take part in the attempt to break through the German lines on the Western Front. On 25th March, 1918, 2nd Lieutenant Tull was ordered to lead his men on an attack on the German trenches at Favreuil. On penetrating No Mans Land Tull was hit by a German bullet. Tull was loved by his men and several of them ran under a hail of machine gun bullets to try and bring him back.  These efforts were in vain as Tull had died soon after being hit.

One of the soldiers who tried to rescue him later told his commanding officer that Tull was “killed instantaneously with a bullet through his head.” Tull’s body was never recovered.

So on the 25th March the distant guns of the Western Front will lay silent. The campaign to award Walter Tull a posthumous Military Cross after an Early Day Motion in June 2008 failed will also fall silent. The fluttering white papers of bureaucracy in Whitehall will fall like feathers over the memories of gallantry against impossible odds. The battle for Walter Tull began the day he was born in Folkestone in 1888, an Englishman of valour and faith. He died a hero twenty-nine years later.

The German Army shot him. His body was never found. And yet we have still managed to bury him.

Walter Tull (left), a true English hero

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Faith in a Big Society


Faith that we're going somewhere

The Big Society as defined by David Cameron and the new Right puts the wider community ahead of narrow self-interest. Without faith this won’t work.

Faith tells us:

  • That when we flick a switch there will be electricity
  • That paying into a mortgage is an investment in the future
  • That this is not all there is
  • That tomorrow will arrive as usual
  • That the future will be better than the past
  • That it is worth helping our neighbour
  • That we are not just the sum of our chemical components
  • That Society (Big or otherwise) has a future

We negotiate life hoping that the future will bear fruit. Without faith, family planning would be a family gamble. Without faith, we wouldn’t sacrifice for the future – the present would be a cynical, nihlistic pig’s trough of satiated appetites. Nothing to hold onto – or for.

The opposite of faith is worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness. Or put it another way – despair.

Human Beings need faith

How God changes your brain (2009) / Born to Believe (2006) – Andrew Newberg MD and Mark Robert Waldman

These very astute Psychologists have produced research to show how human beings are wired for a belief in and an antenna for God. Humans need to believe in something. Time spent meditating improves memory and slows down neurological damage caused by growing old. They show that energy spent dwelling on negative thoughts for any longer than 20 seconds starts to damage the physiology of the brain. At Powerchange we call this the 19 seconds theory. Spend any longer than that on bad stuff and it will take ten times as long to repair the damage. Newberg and Waldman argue that we have a God neuron in the brain that expands the more we contemplate spiritual matters. The more we tune in, the better the reception.

Maybe that’s why, for many, God is more of a feeling than an idea. God came to earth because he was lonely and missed us and was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to get us back. Logically, this seems absurd. Delusional. But there is a wellspring of desire in our hearts that wants it to be true. Faith and hope speak to our hearts more than to our heads.

People with faith tend to live longer, live happier lives, have longer marriages, divorce less and have less illness. Oh yes, and they have fewer heart attacks..

Even atheists think faith is a good idea.

Matthew Parris – ‘As an Atheist I truly believe that Africa needs God’ published in The Sunday Times Dec 28th 2008

“Christianity .. offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.”

Joan McGregor, Professor of philosophy and bioethics at Arizona State University, contends that the mind can influence the body, citing the power of prayer, meditation and social groups.

“We waste a lot of money on drugs and invasive therapies when we could go in another direction,” she says, “We ought to be studying this and harnessing the power of the mind.”

Professor Tor Wager, Professor of Psychology at Columbia University has researched the role of placebo in the human brain:

“The human brain is not like a machine, but like a river with a lot of ongoing processes,” said Wager. “What you do when you give someone a drug is you nudge that and produce all sorts of ripple effects.”

Wager has shown how the neurochemistry of the placebo effect can relieve pain in humans. He found that the placebo effect caused the brains of test volunteers to release more of a natural painkiller.

The placebo effect is an improvement in a medical condition caused by a patient’s belief as opposed to actual treatment.

The human being naturally generates faith in the process of healing. Healing results even when no actual chemical or clinical intervention is made. Our psychology needs faith wired into it. Take it away and illness, darkness and death result.

Why do We Need Faith?

Because jumping over the ledge into the unknown is better than certain death in the burning building.

Even if God were a placebo, we would still keep a packet of him on our person. What Dawkins and the selfish mob fail to realise is that the human race is better off believing in the idea of God.

Take that away and you take away hope.

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A letter to the six year old me

'One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.''

There are many things it would have been useful to know back then..

I was a cute kid, light brown hair with bright, wide open eyes, curious about everything, trusting about a lot more. I was a first born so for the first four years of my life I was Le Petit Prince, the centre of attention and the focus of everything – except that for the first five years I didn’t speak. I don’t know why. I was bright, inquisitive, played inside and outside the home with brave abandon. I just didn’t communicate in the dimension we call language.

Maybe I was scared, fearful of something deep inside. Afraid of being wrong, of mistakes that I wasn’t fully conscious of, but knew I could make if I wasn’t careful. I think I was told I was wrong a lot, but that could be a retrospectively imposed memory because I was told off a lot later. I think I was happy, but I can’t be sure which probably says it all.

For more than fifty years I have stored my only memory of this period in my life. I have a recollection – in fact, more than that, a dramatic video clip in my head of me on a tricycle pedalling furiously around the block where we lived in Southend, trying to get home before the storm broke. The black clouds were gathering like bullfrogs in the sky above and that heavy feeling in the air that gathers before a thunderstorm was pressing down on me. I could hear a distant rumble, like a chest of drawers being pulled forcibly across next door’s landing. The first spots of rain started to fall out of the sky and my urge to get home or at least out of the storm led me to propel the pedals faster. I was no more than a street away yet I felt as if I had accidentally drifted into a foreign country. I started crying, still pedalling furiously, in an attempt to beat the storm, to keep ahead of it, to work harder in order to beat it. But however hard I turned the wheels of my tricycle, I could not overtake the storm. The clouds opened, the rain fell, the thunder tumbled out of the sky and the lightning whipped across my retinas in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It was my first storm. I didn’t know that it wasn’t the end of the world. It would have been good to have been told that.

Earlier today I learned some lines by rote to use them in a minor drama. I learned them assiduously in order to be able to perform a two-handed piece with a friend who had also learned his lines. The cues were important. I assembled the script in my head. I could recite it word for word perfectly. In rehearsal I could speak and act like Gielgud – with no hesitation. When it came to it in front of an audience, my mind went blank in the middle of the piece – almost as if a piece of my brain had decided to bolt for the door.  Afterwards, I realised that I had unconsciously gone back to when I was six at Bournemouth Park Junior School in Southend where I was performing T.S. Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat in its entirety on stage. I lost my way half way through and was castigated in a most unpleasant way for it by my class teacher. Since then, I have had a block about performing learned lines on stage. I have excused this by saying that I am a free spirit, that lines represent restraints, that I am an improviser, a spontaneous speaker, a kind of frontiersman of the performing world. That’s why I have worked in radio. No script. That’s why I have been a teacher. No script. That’s why I love to speak unrehearsed on stage to anyone who will listen. No script. My life as a whole has been lived without a script. All because a misguided Mrs Squeers gave me a hard time when I was six years old.

No script, ergo no safety net, no balance wheels, no seat belt, no contingency plan, no pension, does make for a more interesting life. But having cues simply means you can ignore them if you want to. Maybe I went off the rails because the rails resembled lines. ‘You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.‘

Now that the six year old me and I have got acquainted, here are some things that I could share with him.

Just to make him feel a little better.

You are loved, little guy. There is no-one else in the world like you. You will give a whole lot of pleasure to a lot of people before you’re done. You will make mistakes but these won’t matter that much, not compared with the good you’ll do. All those mistaken ideas about not being worth very much are wrong. They were put into you by people who were damaged themselves. In fact, you’re priceless. Priceless in a way that might lead to people dying for you, perhaps even God himself. The love that you missed out on as a kid will be made up to you many times over, because you will hand it out plentifully to others. You will make an integral and unique difference to other people’s lives. You will brighten up many people’s days, every day. You will feel the black heart of other’s prejudices and blame yourself before understanding that it is their heart, not yours, that is hurt. You will have a place that you can call home in your own heart. You will cry, you will despair, but you will never be worthless. You will think you’ve failed, but that will just be another step towards success. You may feel lost, but that will just be exploration. You may feel like you have gone down dead ends but these will be just be paths less trodden. You will experience fear, but it will seem much better when you call it excitement instead. You will feel driven, but you will realise that no-one can drive like you, and it was you driving all along. Your ambition will feel out of reach until you understand that it is your ambition and you can do what you like with it. You will feel like a failure, but you will also feel like another hug, and have that instead. You will find out that the difference between depression and happiness is just a raising of the eyes from the ground into the eyes of another and smiling. Anything you decide to do will be your decision, even though you may feel guided by someone one else. There is no-one to blame. But the credit belongs to you as well. All of it. However hard you try, you will never stop being a human being of infinite worth.

You are now and will always be loved, little Prince.

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Are we God’s weakness?

God's weak link?

It’s liberating not to be an expert. Great to admit that there’s a million things that I simply don’t know. All I’m sure about is that I’m still curious.

For example, I don’t know for sure if the Earth is warming up or that the Poles are thawing at a faster rate than the oceans can absorb the water. I don’t know what the weather will do next week. I’m in the dark about the amount of electricity we need to save before the energy stocks dim. I’m swinging either way over the question of a hung Parliament. I’m poleaxed over the polls and dithering over the political debates raging daily.

I’m not sure whether we should be in Europe or whether Europe should be in us. I’m fairly easy about Quantitative Easing.  I could be convinced that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is really a canny old man. I’m unsure over whether if you laid all the economists end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. Neither would I. I’m curious. Open to persuasion. The more I know, the more I don’t know.

I sense that God exists, yet I can’t prove it. I know that a lot of people don’t believe in him, yet he believes in them. If he’s omnipotent and omniscient then he is powerful enough to know everything and yet on the other hand if God is Love then he must hurt a lot when people he loves don’t reciprocate.

He could command them to love him – but lovers don’t command anyone to love them. It happens naturally. So that makes him vulnerable. He’s standing at the door and knocking and if we hear him and open the door then he comes in. That’s not a door-crashing God, it’s a meek, exposed Dad who loves his child knocking at the bedroom door hoping that the teenager will let him in so they can talk.

So what I thought I knew about God isn’t true. He doesn’t make us do anything.  He asks, politely.

He woos us gently and he died in the process of proving his love. It doesn’t seem fair – and probably isn’t. I guess I don’t know the truth. I can only feel. That’s human and yet strangely God-like.

Luke 15:20 (New International Version)

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

Hebrews 5:2 (New International Version)

He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness.

Maybe we are his weakness.