For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
I don’t think most Christians want Jesus. They would deny it, of course, but what they really want is a violent god. They want an angry god. They want a god who looks like everybody else’s god, only better. A mightier smiter; a my-god-can-kick-your-god’s-butt-Chuck-Norris-style god. We suffer from the theological equivalent of trying to keep... Continue Reading →
Millenia ago in Judea a young man sat in the cool silence of a cloudless desert night. It could be that he was accustomed to solitude, had spent many nights out here alone. Perhaps – as always – he was enthralled by the hypnotizing vermilion of the campfire coals; perhaps his fingers sought the reassuring... Continue Reading →
I am still battling to find it, I must confess. Hope, that is. It is elusive. Please do not worry, if you are a long-standing personal friend and know my struggle with depression. This is not that kind of hopelessness I mean. It is not me, personally, that I have a problem with (although no... Continue Reading →
You may have been wondering why you have not heard from me in a while, and the truth of the matter is that I have not really known what to write about. I have been working through a sort of existential angst. It is not depression: I have suffered from that for much of... Continue Reading →
As I write this, a week before your birthday, I am sitting four hundred kilometres away from you. It is nine o’ clock in the morning and it is already 30 degrees outside. The air is heavy with the heat. The cicadas hum steadily in the background and somewhere in the nearby acacias I can... Continue Reading →
When my family gets together, things get loud. I have a very – how shall I put it?... animated family. We feel things deeply. We engage with life and with other people with passion. That has its downside, of course. It means that most of us have battled with depression or anxiety at some stage... Continue Reading →
I am not sure who it was who actually dodged the bullet. I was on a two hour flight this week and I sat behind a man who was an elder in a charismatic church. I shall call him Mr X. For almost the entire two hours, Mr X spoke to the man next to... Continue Reading →
I have been to enough of your concerts now that I am no longer surprised that you do your own thing and refuse to just follow the crowd. While all of the other children at your graduation sat, still and compliant, you participated fully in each moment: you mouthed the words to other classes’ songs,... Continue Reading →
With low, brooding rainclouds and gently rolling hills, the Oxfordshire countryside was everything I had imagined it would be. I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Billy Bunter, and William, so driving down narrow country lanes, flanked by hedgerows laden with berries, seemed a bit like coming home after years away. But this was not my... Continue Reading →
