Wheat

Effort v Efficacy

We can create grand plans and schemes, and these may well be blessed by God, but equally blessed is the hour spent in conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop, with someone who is being prompted by the Spirit to seek, such rejoicing as that one sinner repents. The soul of the one, is the mission field of the many, the single grain of wheat is a worthy and blessed harvest if our scythe is but sharpened for that solitary stem. As frustrating as that may be for our human sensibilities, the acceptance and rejoicing in the toil for the Lord, where the harvest may NOT be plentiful in our particular mission field, is still to be sought and prayed for diligently. Imagine if on that glorious day a stranger whom we do not remember talking to, whom we may not remember walking alongside, comes to us and says “I am here because you were there when I needed to hear the Gospel.”. Such joy and privilege to be a part of this plan of salvation, simply as a servant leading a single person to the Lord’s table of grace.

The spiritual cost of incomplete business

It begins, often, not with a clamour but with a whisper. A quiet, internal notation of a task left incomplete. Perhaps it is the half-completed tax return, its forms a silent rebuke from the drawer. It might be the unopened email from a colleague, its subject line hinting at a complexity we feel ill-equipped to handle. These are not merely items on a to-do list; they are what we might call ‘open loops’. They are the circuits of our intention and responsibility that we have left unclosed, and their persistent, ghostly presence in the background of our minds exerts a far greater toll than we often care to admit. This draining effect is a tangible, psychological weight that operates with a quiet and insidious efficiency, each unresolved matter constituting a small leak in the reservoir of our mental and emotional energy. From the perspective of a Christian faith, this phenomenon speaks to a deeper, theological reality about the nature of sin, responsibility, and the God who calls us into wholeness, inviting us to consider how our spiritual vitality is sapped by that which we fail to do.

The death of beauty

It has long been understood that the Western world is rushing headlong into a god-less future, where the “joy” of freedom from the spiritual (that shackles human “freedom”) will usher in a “utopia”. But at what cost and, what is the shape of that utopia?

The Apostle Paul by Rembrandt

A sign of the times

The recent appointment of a Dame Sara Mullally to the seat of Archbishop of Canterbury may well represent the culmination of decades of theological drift within the Church of England. While it is easy to view such an event merely as another step in the Church’s journey towards “inclusion,” it might also be seen, through the eyes of faith, as a sober act of divine judgement. The question before us is not one of equality or culture, but of fidelity to the revealed will of God and the order He has established for His Church.