The Incongruent Believer

When I first started work many decades ago, I remember working with a young engineer (who was older than me at the time) who was constantly being barracked by our MD. I remember the MD’s name as we soon became good friends as I climbed both the managerial and social ladder at the company where I worked, and Jim (I won’t share his surname) and I both practiced the same martial art. But early in my time at the company I asked one of the managers why it was that Jim would often come out of his office shout at this young engineer, then reassured by something they said, return to his office. The manager, ‘Dickie’ Bird (not the Yorkshire cricketer, but one with the same name and nickname as that famous gentleman), said “It’s because he always tells him what he wants to hear” and went on to explain that if something was going bad they would tell Jim that it wasn’t, or offer some bogus account just to get him off the hook, then Jim would find out, and things would escalate, and again the young...

Driving past a local church the other day I noticed a banner outside inviting people to a “Prayer Café” held at the church, the banner headlined “Prayer Changes Things”. This bold statement got me to wondering; Does prayer change things? And if it does, in what way? My first thought was that if you were reading that poster as someone who did not believe in God or some benevolent deity or deities you were probably were drawn to the secular idea of prayer where one asks for things, such as the delivery of a loved one from a serious illness, or help finding that perfect job, or even a big win on a lottery. My understanding of prayer is not even close to that, and the comment on prayer in Matthew 6:7-8 speaks volumes, here Jesus says, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”  The most poignant statement in these verses be...

I'm still making my way slowly through the Old Testament, savouring the content and seriously reflecting on it. A question I ask myself, particularly when reading some of the more mundane chapters, is “why is that included?” Sometimes I am perplexed, as I have been reading Chapters 34 and 35 of Genesis. Reflecting over a few days on this I realised something; I am constantly looking for the deep spiritual meaning when I should be looking from perhaps a more secular perspective. This realisation has been a breath of fresh air. I have come to understand that some of this content is there to show what the real life was like behind Bible heavyweights such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and also where it fitted in to the world at that time. The fact that we read of these people having children with their servants or servants of their wives, or we read of the ‘rape’ of Dinah and Rueben sleeping with Jacob’s concubine, or the fact that Jacob’s even had concubines we see real life; messy, ...

How many times have you heard in folklore, read in a book, seen in a movie, or even witnessed in your own life someone trying to make a contract with God? It normally takes the form of "God if you get me out of this situation, I will never do wrong for the rest of my life" or something like that. I find it interesting that people in fiction or in real life acknowledge that they knew there might be a God around but have refrained from testing that knowledge, in a sense ignored God, until they find themselves in a sticky situation. The other scenario we might find is when someone needs something or needs guidance making a plea to God like, “God, if you make this happen for me then I will go to church for the rest of my days.” One might be forgiven to think that this kind of contracting with God is found in the latter verses of Genesis 28 where following a dream Jacob makes this vow, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat an...

Man fathers children with his two daughters, shock, horror! Upstanding member of the community found to have married his half-sister; people are stunned! Although these sound like headlines from a tabloid newspaper, they are actually facts (with a little bit of sensationalism added by me for effect) from Genesis 19:36 and Genesis 20:12. We have all probably read these passages dozens of times, yet I have no doubt we haven’t let those facts sink in, either because they are not palatable considering they are in God’s word, or we don’t focus on what we are reading at the time, or that God has not chosen, through His Spirit, to make them known to us. When it comes down to it the word of God, as expressed in the Bible, is as shocking as an 18 rated Hollywood movie, perhaps it should have a warning banner on the front similar to that we see on Sky: What we read in those blessed pages may assault our twenty-first century sensibilities, even to the point that we subconsciously refuse to ...

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...