This time last year terror raids divided the country, race relations hit a low point, Turkey was threatening Iraq and the police were embroiled in historic sex inquiries. But that was nothing - petrol prices were rising!
A year later petrol prices are crashing and so is the global economy. When you’ve been around a few years you start to wonder if the world’s naysayers are ever right. Whenever the country is in the grip of some crisis of earth shaking magnitude we are told things will never be the same. If that’s the case then we all have the memory of Goldfish. The crisis passes and we move on – often far too quickly. It’s questionable whether we really learn anything from crisis at all.
I’ve been watching the American elections lately and I’m amazed that Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been centre stage in politics for years, have been dropped from the debate as if they don’t exist. The economy (which no one seems to understand) is the only real crisis. This means many issues that do matter can now be avoided. No promises need to be made, no acknowledgments need to be aired. Dirty little issues of the past can be ignored.
There are hundreds of millions of poor people around the world. There are even a few in New Zealand, the United State and the UK. I wonder if they are too concerned by the global economic crisis? For them it has always been in crisis. There has never been enough to go around. From their perspective a tiny minority have hogged the wealth and carefully controlled the distribution of what’s left. Even Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you.” And for many technically “Christian” countries that has become the excuse for allowing poverty to continue. Jesus point was that our hardness of heart means they would always be there. He was right!
Every now and then life has a way of revealing what really matters. It happens to most people at some stage: diagnosis of a terminal disease, the loss of a child, public humiliation, redundancy, or sudden physical disability. We meander through life thinking certain things are important until we are confronted with reality they aren’t. It’s the things we take for granted, the things that slip under our “needs” radar that are truly important.
For those of us who’ve made those discoveries, isn’t it amazing how quickly we forget them?
The Apostle Paul said that in the great scheme of things only three things really matter, “faith, hope and love”. He wasn’t being trite - they really do matter. They determine how we live – that’s no small thing. Think about those three words: faith, hope, love. Imagine life without them.
In a world obsessed with economics as the basis of all things, these three necessities evaporate into shadows. What do they mean for you? If you can’t imagine life without them, what will you do to restore them as the axis of real life? They might just change your world.