My wife and I had been doing the rounds of relatives, delivering Christmas presents during Advent 1990 and I remember having a conversation in the car as we headed for home. We were talking about the turn of the milennium in just ten years time and I will never forget the moment Karen (my wife) asked when we were likely to start wearing upturned fish bowls on our heads, we laughed so much at the thought, that I’m sure the Police would have breath tested me if they’d seen me in charge of a motor car. We both remembered drawing pictures at school as children, trying to imagine what life would look like in the year two thousand. I’d love to have those pictures today, a bit like the impression above, borrowed courtesy of Google, we imagined flying cars, people wearing space suits in a sterile environment and an automated world.
Alright, so we got the upturned goldfish bowls completely wrong and twenty one years into the twenty first century, I still haven’t donned a space suit, or driven a flying car. On that night thirty one years ago I might never have imagined a world where people wore masks to go shopping, a world where silent cars would whisper past, powered by electricity and equipped with amazing features like GPS, automated parking, cruise control and power everything. I could never have imagined chairing meetings from my home with people across the nation and across the world. Life has changed way beyond my imagination during the thirty years since we howled with laughter about our expectations of the year two thousand.
On this second week of our reflection on the climate crisis, we remember the commitment to reduce our carbon footprint by the year twenty fifty. I am reminded that as a little lad growing up in the sixties, the turn of the millennium was a lifetime away, and yet here we are twenty one years on the opposite side of that landmark occasion. Our Climate Crisis team in the Ipswich Methodist Circuit have prepared an excellent document which can be found at https://methodistic.org.uk/climate-action/learn/week-2-net-zero/ and I would encourage you to read it please. There are children today sitting in schools and learning how to live in an environmentally friendly way, they might be our children, grand children or even great grandchildren and we owe it to them, to be able to live on a greener planet. The little changes we make today will shape the world for the future. Let us all strive for Net Zero.
A prayer for this week: Creator God, we pray for urgent action and understanding to the need to move to a net zero carbon economy, with a political resolve to drive the necessary policies, backed by clear information and encouragement. Amen