We got married in September 1985 and moved into our first home together, we bought our first ever three-piece suite from a famous northern upholstery company, in their sale with the one and only opportunity to have the thing for one year and not pay a penny and then pay the balance off, interest free! Back in those days I could have paid cash, but why would you? My money was safely earning interest in the bank, as you could in those days, and I believed that I was onto a good thing. Thirty-seven years on, and several incarnations later the identical “once in a lifetime” offers are still available and if we don’t grab them while they are on offer, they will be gone, never to be repeated. I get quite annoyed at the way people are still being enticed to part with their money in this way, particularly in the light of a global energy crisis where increasing numbers of people are struggling with having to make difficult choices about how to spend their money. Manufacturers and service providers have learned over the years that the key to getting their hands on our well-earned cash is to inject the emotion of urgency, if we don’t leap to it, the opportunity will be missed for ever.
I am writing this thought for the day, while keeping an eye on the Methodist Conference live stream as they meet in Telford and have just been watching a debate that has been twenty years in the preparing. I am conscious about how long it takes us to make changes that are necessary in response to the rapidly changing world. I am also quite an avid viewer of the BBC Question Time programme and over the last few years I have listened to lengthy, often heated debates about progress, or indeed the lack of it with Brexit, following the referendum six years ago. I have observed the anxieties relating to how quickly the government took to respond to the spread of the Covid virus, the timing and management of lockdown, the provision of PPE, whether or not we should be shaking hands, wearing masks, and a whole lot more.
Whether we like it or not, there is an immediacy in the modern world, within minutes of the missile attack on the shopping centre in Kremenchuk in Ukraine on Monday 27th June, the world knew and pictures were being streamed around the world, we woke up this morning (Tuesday 28th June) to news that at least forty-six people died in the back of a truck in San Antonio, Texas at six o’clock local time eleven o’clock in the evening GMT. I sometimes feel that the world is travelling to fast for me, and yet I find that decisions I should have taken years ago, plans that I really ought to have actioned, still sit undone. Why is it that some tasks feel to be onerous and time consuming, yet actually only take minutes to accomplish?
God loved the world so much that he sent Jesus to turn the people of the world around and set us on a new course, if you follow the gospel accounts of the life and work of this exceptional man, he gathered around him a motley crew of a dozen of the most unlikely men imaginable to be charged with establishing a Church set to serve the world for at lest the next two thousand years. For just three years, yes, thirty-six months, he prepared them, equipped them, gave them a couple of practice runs and then sent them out, and we are reading about those same three years, generations later. Why is it then that I see an urgency in the retailers trying to get their hands on our money, yet when it comes to a world energy crisis, a climate crisis, a food crisis, nations bombing each other, people taking advantage of peoples vulnerabilities and making fortunes, for them to die in pain and misery, are we suddenly content to take out time, and twenty years on have got little further than the planning stage.
There is an urgency in the world, we need to act, and act now!