When I was a lad, shopping looked very different to how it does today, we travelled by bus into town and visited a range of different shops to buy different products, each shop with shop assistants behind counters and tills to store the cash that you’d just paid with. I remember going as a family to shop in a new supermarket that had just opened, where we helped ourselves to the products we fancied and then paid a woman at a checkout. I remember the day I first ventured onto a very different looking shop whose name begins with an A and found myself flicking through a catalogue and then writing a code with a tiny pen on a slip of paper and queueing for somebody to go and get my wares. I remember first visiting a Dutch home furnishing store that had just opened nearby and felt all at sea as I traipsed around the gigantic store following a route predetermined by somebody else. I remember my early experiences of shopping on line, when I feared buying the wrong product or running up a huge bill I couldn’t afford to pay.
Over the six decades of my life, I have become accustomed to change although I would possibly say that I hate it. Change makes me feel uncomfortable, nervous and I sometimes long for “the good old days” but whether I like it or not, we live in a progressive world and I’m not sure whether it is my age, or not, it seems to me that change happens more frequently and faster, the older I get and I recall the words of the musical and book from the early sixties “Stop the world – I want to get off” yet deep down, I know that throughout the rest of my earthly life, change will happen no matter how much I might want to resist it.
The Leaders of the nation’s gather in Glasgow today and for the next twelve days, they will discuss the international response to the Climate Crisis. Over the last few centuries, we have polluted the planet, consumed its resources, abused the countryside and all to please ourselves. That needs to change, the aim is ambitious, net zero carbon within some of our lifetimes. To achieve this, all the leaders of the nations will have to make a commitment, we will need to channel our intelligence into discovering new, cleaner solutions to problems, we need to learn how to resolve problems that have challenged us for centuries, we need to do different, work in new ways, invest in new initiatives.
For us as individuals we need to be open to change, we are used to it, change has been happening at an accelerated rate because of the pandemic, we need to think in different ways, live in different ways and make more informed decisions. Please pray for the COP26 summit, please look back at some of the issues we have discussed over the last nine weeks (all available on the Circuit Website Methodistic.org.uk) and please think of ways that you can make small changes, to play your part.
A prayer for this week:
Pray for a successful summit; that the climate crisis may be understood; there will be global unity to reach courageous decisions and global political leadership to ensure urgent action protecting even the most vulnerable.