Tough Decisions

This was an article I wrote for something that never got used. It seemed a shame to see it go to waste, so I thought I’d post it up here…

‘You can’t serve both God and money’. This was Jesus’ statement to his listeners and, with it, he presented them and us with a decision to make: who will we follow, God or Money?

The choice might sound easy: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Creator of the universe on the one hand, bits of paper and metal on the other…. hmmm now, let me think! In reality, of course, the decision is far from easy and, whilst we may make the choice in our heads and genuinely mean it in our hearts, it can sometimes be harder to follow it through.

In a recent interview I was asked why I thought there was so much injustice at the moment in our world. I answered that injustice is nothing new, both in our society and in the world at large, and that all we have to do is look at Genesis 3 to see the reason for that. And yet there is no doubt that we do seem to find ourselves in a particularly stark period of horrendous inequality and injustice at a global level.

Today, as you read this, 27 000 children under the age of five will die from poverty-related illnesses. When you have an area of the world (sub-Saharan Africa) in which 41% of the population is living below a $1 a day, you know that there’s something wrong. My personal opinion is that we are reaping the consequences of a global economic system that has been built on the foundations of the slave trade and colonialism. For some those consequences are negative, for others those consequences are positive, and the harsh reality that we face in the UK is that our wealth has been built on the backs and the lands of other people.

Well, I’m no economist and I don’t have all the answers, although I wish I did and I spend a lot of time thinking about it! But, what I do know is that I don’t want my own life to perpetuate the problem – or, maybe it’s less naïve to say that I want my life to perpetuate it as little as possible.

The ultimate injustice, of course, is climate change. While some in this country are still publicly questioning its reality, millions around the world are already suffering its consequences. Try as I might, I just can’t wriggle out of the fact that everything I do plays a part in this issue. Even writing this article on my computer is using energy I’d rather not think about! That means that, for those of us who care, our lives are made up of decisions every day as to what we do or don’t do.