Pride and the Devil

I'm shocked to discover it's over 2 months since I last wrote about harvest and had such a huge response (15 genuine comments is a record for this blog!!) which has completely thrown out my objectve to be more regular in my blogging.

One of the reasons for not having been on for so long is because I've had a fair bit of turmoil in my life since the 3rd October. On the 14th October I lost my job which at 46 with three teenage kids and a wife who is a full time student for the next three years is not the easiest thing to face up to. Two months in though things are looking up - I'm setting up my own company and beginning to pick up work already so we're all much more optimistic than we were on the 15th October!

What it has done is set me thinking a little about the relationship between good things happening and evil.

The harvest initiative described in my previous blog was the culmination of a summer working intensively with my local church during our interegnum where we managed to achieve great things together and got a real sense of God being at work. There were many other good things going on at the same time including our continued involvement at Eden (www.edenzone.com) and a great Greenbelt. This was all followed with a pretty tough October, with not just my redundancy but a whole bunch of other bad things happening at the same time.

It often seems the case that after times of great blessing, things take a turn for the worse. I know it's not fashionable or 'politically correct' these days to say that it's the Devil attacking us for doing God's work, but I'll tell you what - when you're in the middle of it, that's how it feels. And it seems to make sense of it all to connect these in this way to a certain extent.

Now perhaps it's just that after having had a great time, the bad times are more obvious. Or maybe they're not even bad times at all, they're just times that are not as good as the good times that have just happened. I am certainly one of those who believes very strongly 'that shit happens' and sometimes as christians we spend too much time looking for meaning in things that are just part of daily life and we shouldn't spend so much time investing these events with spritual significance rather than just getting on with the business of living our lives.

On the other hand, if we believe ourselves to be spiritual beings and we believe the truth of the incarnation and everything that means, shouldn't we be able to interpret everything around us as signs of God and a life beyond the here and now?

What I do know is that the events of the last two months have distracted me from developing the work started at harvest and I would rather it hadn't. Hopefully writing this blog is a sign that I'm coming out of the dark place that unemployment puts you into and am able once again to focus on bigger things, let's hope so.

As Oscar Wilde said: "We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". Maybe one of the things about being a christian is that we are the star gazers?