The Incongruent Believer

When I think about the creation story in Genesis the enormity and weight of those passages fills my mind and all my senses. For me the first few words of the Bible are the most powerful that have ever found themselves consigned to paper, "In the beginning God.." When I hear these it's as if I can hear and feel the entire universe pulsating in response. Yet when one opens one's Bible the creation story only takes up two chapters, a mere couple of pages of text. Is it only me who thinks that's strange? I think one has to ask oneself why these words carry such weight. Perhaps it's because the impact that these words have had on billions of people alive today; Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike. More likely we find the answer in the New Testament, John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The words that we read are living, the living God. If we read on in John we hear that these words also are imbued with th...

When I was a child, it was common for only one parent to work whilst the other ran the home and dealt with the welfare of the children, which worked for me as I could read and write before I went to school aged 4 years and 9 months. Work would mean 9 to 5.30 or a 40-hour week, with Saturday and Sunday off. Saturday would be spent on hobbies, chores, or watching TV and Sundays were truly a day of rest, barely any shops were open, pubs closed at 12noon and reopened at 7pm, even television went off air for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, public holidays would have the same restrictions. Summer holidays whilst generally very basic for working folk, really were an opportunity to escape from work and take a break, which for me was to go for a week or two to a caravan on the Kent coast. Today both parents generally work full time with mothers returning to work when a child is barely finished breast-feeding (perhaps this is why one in four children start school without being toilet trained an...