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From the newsletter ... |
Light of the world...I don't know about you, but I've been overwhelmed this year by the magnitude of suffering in the world. I remember in the Easter CrossTalk, trying to make a response to the suffering we had all witnessed on Boxing Day last year, when the Tsunami struck. Since then we've watched appalling images of starving families in Niger and Malawi. Now we hear the Pakistan authorities have confirmed a death toll of nearly 80,000 after the terrible earthquake that has devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Closer to home, we experienced our own vulnerability on a much smaller, but nonetheless frightening scale, with the London Tube bombings. On a global scale, most of us in the UK remain relatively secure and indeed remote from the rest of the world's suffering, yet I sense a general social anxiety about what the future holds. The financial security that my father's generation enjoyed -- retiring on maximum pension benefits -- is long gone. Funding for state and private pensions is unsustainable. Most endowments, for repaying mortgage capital, will fail to meet their projected maturity values and a high proportion of NHS trusts are facing huge budget deficits. My dear doctor friend passed on to me some worrying statistics the other day -- half the hospital beds in this country are occupied by the mentally ill; Valium based drugs are the second most prescribed drug on the NHS; heart disease is set to become the number one killer in coming years; it's thought that some serious medical conditions have a stress-related component. I bet you're thinking "some Christmas article this is!" But please don't put it down, read on, for there is hope -- great words of hope spoken to us by Jesus Christ:
As hard as it might be to believe -- YOU are valuable to God. One of the greatest causes of anxiety is unbelief -- our difficulty in believing that God cares passionately about us. At its root lies the thought that "I matter more to me than I matter to God". The person of little belief has a little God -- too small, they believe, to care about the details of their lives so that they worry about them for themselves. I believe there is an answer to our worry and anxiety, and it's this -- to stop believing in a man-made lttle God -- locked up in the wonder of nature, distant and remote from each of us and to start believing in the real God who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Once we understand that we are truly valued by God we begin to develop the capacity to be orientated towards the needs of his world. Not only is this God's intention but, amazingly, it liberates us from our own anxieties and social dis-ease. In this edition of CrossTalk you'll find details of a whole range of Christmas services and I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas in your Parish Church. Cogges Parish | Other articles | 
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© 2005; Published in Cogges Parish monthly newsletter, December 2005 | |