When our girls were growing up, we bought a season ticket each year for Eureka! The children’s museum in Halifax. It is a museum designed to capture the imagination of children from birth to eleven and grown-ups are only permitted if accompanying children. Our season ticket was money well spent as our girls walked through a human body, played with scientific toys, went to the bank to get cash and then spent it in the supermarket, they learned about disability, propelling themselves in wheelchairs, walking with crutches and walking sticks, working in a factory, driving a truck and working in a garage. It was a truly magical place and entertained children for hours.
There were two fixtures in the reception that we always had to stop and look at, one was a large model of a recumbent Archimedes being slowly lowered into his bath, which would overflow as his body replaced the space previously filled with water, which always entertained crowds of children and even the adults as the whole process started again. The other point of fascination was the Population counter, a big display, which displayed the population of the world and the population of the UK which would fluctuate constantly, dropping by two or three, in theory as people died and increasing as new life came into the world, I could never imagine how it could be that accurate, but it fired the imagination of children which was what mattered.
That clock, teaches us an important lesson, the population of the world is never a static figure, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can see this from the comfort of your own home, spend a moment or two looking at worldometers.info I find it a fascinating website, which gives us a window on the world second by second. The problem is, that as science improves, people live longer and births around the world are more than twice the number of deaths, meaning that the world’s population has increased by just over sixty million people so far this year, which means that by the end of the year, that figure will have reached a comparable number to the population of Great Britain!
You might think that is good news, but there are massive implications. We have already considered feeding the ever-growing population, but there is so much more going on in the world. Community looks so different today, you might have lived in the same city, town or village all your life, but people are becoming increasingly migrant and not just for political reasons, teenagers go off to university and never return to their native community, people relocate to other parts of the world and our country becomes increasingly cosmopolitan and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But we need to understand that as communities break down, competitiveness increases, hunger for equality becomes more dominant and we put increasing demands on the wonderful world God created, which is already groaning under the pressure of sustaining a population of 7.9 billion people, all making their demands. Maybe we need to stop for a moment, before spending our next bit of money and ask “do I really need this?”
A prayer for this week:
Pray to end selfish division pitting communities against each other; for a renewed unity to protect all God’s creation, committing to lasting change for equality, mutual respect and understanding.