Stop and Take Stock

Lenten Lilies, or a close relation

Many Christians all over the world are now observing Lent.  Traditionally Lent was a time for fasting, especially going without meat because meat was in short supply at this time of year. The Church turned this into a virtue saying that going without was a way to learn self-control and instigated a 40 day period of fasting to correspond to Jesus' time of fasting in the Wilderness, which in turn reflected the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the Wilderness after fleeing Egypt.

Lent is 40 days plus Sundays. Sundays don't count as fast days because Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, so that is always a day for rejoicing.   In church today our vicar suggested that the Sundays in Lent could be seen as a glimpse of Easter to come. She also suggested that rather than use Sunday as a day to over-indulge if we've been struggling to keep off chocolate, biscuits, alcohol or whatever all week, we might do better to reflect on how we'd been doing in the week, where we might have struggled and why, so that we could consider how we might do better next week.

So I'd like to encourage you to join me in taking a little time on Sundays to take stock by reflecting on how well we did at fighting Climate Change in the last week and how well we managed to live in a way that did as little harm as possible to anyone or anything.  Hopefully we'll also manage to have a positive effect on the people around us and maybe our environment as well.   These are all things I hope to look at over the coming weeks.

So how did I do?

Love God, Love God's Creation

If we love God we'll  take care of God's creation

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", or so the first verse of the Bible is often translated and this has been the dominant rendering of Genesis 1:1 since the Greek Septuagint, the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible (into Greek), produced by Jewish scholars in the third century BC.  There is now some debate as to whether this is the best way to understand precisely what the original words would have meant to their first audience, but that isn't relevant here.

If all the Christians and Jews the world over believe God made our world, whether they believe in a literal six day creation or that there was a certain amount of divine intervention in the Big Bang and the formation of our Earth, I would also expect them to believe our world is a pretty special place and so we should all be doing our best to look after it.

As writer Veronica Zundel tweeted recently,

"God's chief interest in life is not religion, but the world, and especially (but not exclusively) human beings."