Personal Blogs

“God could not be everywhere, so He made mothers”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Compassion in the Chicken Coop

My wife and I had a strange discussion on Sunday evening whilst travelling home from being with friends.

She was raised on a farm in the Philippines, where compassion found its way even into the chicken coop. When they collected the hens’ eggs each morning, they always left one behind. It was a small act of empathy, a quiet gesture of respect toward the bird’s maternal instinct, as though to say, we understand what these eggs mean to you.

A hen’s response when her eggs are taken can vary depending on her breed, her instincts, and how often it happens. Most commercial laying hens today have had their brooding instincts bred out of them. They lay, move on, and lay again, their cycle reduced to production rather than nurture. But the old, broody breeds; the ones still allowed to follow the rhythm of nature show something deeper. They cluck anxiously when the nest is empty, search the straw for their missing clutch, or even puff up and peck when someone reaches too close.

In such cases, it’s fair to say the hen feels a form of loss. Not quite grief as we know it, but an interruption of purpose. In nature, she would gather her clutch, settle down, and wait patiently for life to stir beneath her. To take the eggs away is to sever that maternal rhythm, to break a small circle of creation.

There’s something quietly sad about that, isn’t there? The thwarted instinct, the empty nest, the silence that follows. Yet there’s also something enduring in the way she carries on — scratching at the ground, foraging, laying again. Life persists, even when the pattern is disturbed.

Perhaps that’s what my wife’s family understood: that kindness isn’t only for people. Sometimes it’s found in the smallest gestures in leaving one egg behind as a token of empathy for a creature that feels more than we often imagine.

Image by Copilot

They Tell Me This is the Age of Enlightenment. 

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil”

 They tell me this is the age of enlightenment. We are wise now, liberated, informed. Yet every morning as I walk to my local  graveyard for some solitude  in the stillness of early morning, I see a giant skeleton waving from a garden. At my dentist’s surgery, bats hang from the ceiling. In the supermarket, entire aisles are devoted to gruesome masks, witches’ faces, sinister pumpkins, and plastic wands. Children’s books are filled with demons and darkness, and before long, local children—dressed as everything evil—will come knocking at my door, expecting a few coins for their imitation of hell.

We congratulate ourselves on our sophistication, our modernity, our progress. But there’s something more sinister happening, something spiritual, that most are unaware of. Politicians, civil servants, and pressure groups are steadily eroding Christianity from public life. The rights of believers—to speak, to teach, even to pray—are being diluted or dismissed. Christians are mocked, beaten, and silenced for preaching a gospel that once shaped the very laws we now use to prosecute them.

This UK and Europe in the age of  enlightenment.

I recall a scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Judge Claude Frollo, that self-righteous villain, stands in the cathedral, gazing into the fire as he sings of sin and desire. The animation is stunning, the music haunting—but what lingers is its surrender to darkness. It is not that it lacked truth, but that it mistook torment for depth. Evil is presented as complexity, while goodness is dismissed as naivety.

Why, I wonder, do we glorify the grotesque? What strange thrill do we find in the demonic, the deranged, the depraved? As a teenager, I saw a film about the occult before I became a Christian. When I left the cinema, I felt something unclean, as though the images had left a residue on the soul. Half a century later, they remain vivid. That’s the power of darkness—it imprints, it infects.

Even travel documentaries do it. A village is introduced not through its music or laughter or harvest, but through its masks and rituals of fear. The macabre becomes the measure of authenticity, while goodness is treated as shallow or sentimental. Who decided that the grotesque was more “real” than the gentle, the spiritual, the good?

Perhaps evil shocks us, and shock, in a numb culture, feels like truth. Or maybe we’ve lost our belief in goodness altogether. We treat it like a fairy tale for children, while evil is seen as sophisticated, intellectual, and brave.

But there is nothing enlightened about darkness.

C.S. Lewis observed that evil is always parasitic. It has no life of its own. It feeds on what is good, twisting and deforming it. That’s why evil is so theatrical; it must draw attention to itself because it has no substance apart from what it corrupts. The Devil is in the details, indeed.

Evil is not just cruelty. hatred or violence; it is the rejection of love. Sometimes it is loud and brutal. Sometimes it is quiet and respectable—the slow erosion of compassion, the polite muting of conscience. Something eroding from within.

And yet, in every age, there are those who quietly defy this darkness—not with slogans, but with service. Christians who visit prisons, feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and walk through city streets at night to find the forgotten. Those who build medical missions, pay their taxes honestly, keep their vows, and raise their families in truth. Those who forgive. Who show mercy. Who do not make a spectacle of their virtue but live it faithfully, like candlelight in a world of neon.

These are the truly enlightened.

They are mocked by those who claim to be progressive, dismissed by intellectuals who call faith superstition. But tell me—what is rational about tearing down the very foundations that once held society upright? What wisdom is there in teaching children to laugh at evil and scoff at holiness?

A culture that cannot tell the difference between light and darkness is not enlightened; it is blind.

As a writer, I try to write about what is good and has human value. Not because I am naïve or blind to suffering—on the contrary, I see it too clearly. But goodness needs a louder voice. Evil already has a press team with global reach. The grotesque has a marketing department; goodness must rely on word of mouth.

Why write about what is good? Because the world is starving for it. Beauty restores the soul. Kindness is radical. Joy is courageous. When I write about forgiveness, or a gentle act, or grace breaking through despair, I am not ignoring the shadows—I am defying them.

There is courage in joy.
There is rebellion in hope.
And there is enlightenment—not in the worship of darkness—but in the quiet, radiant light of those who still believe that goodness is real.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
— Isaiah 5:20

Living Evidence There is a Creator

Freeman Dyson once wrote, “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”

It’s a powerful thought as I watch an Asian child play the piano in a hall. She presses a key and hears a pure note ring out — an A minor.
She presses another, and another, until she discovers that every key, no matter how far apart, follows a perfect pattern.
Soon she manages to play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

She has discovered something: How come these notes should sound so beautifully together?

Years pass, and the child becomes a composer. The more she understands harmony and rhythm, the more she realises that music wasn’t something she had invented; it had been waiting for her to discover it. The laws of sound were not made by her; she had only learned their language. Like objective morality, it was there all the time.

As she grows, her curiosity widens, from the scales on the piano to the elements in nature. She gazes at the periodic table and sees another kind of music: the ordered dance of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Each element, like a note, has its place in a grand composition.

Just as music depends on harmony, so creation depends on mathematical order — the rhythm of planets, the symmetry of petals, the ratio that shapes a shell or a galaxy.

Mathematics works because it describes a universe already composed with intention.

We are like the child at the piano: discovering, not designing — playing, not creating — the music that was there long before us.

“His eternal power and divinity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known…  They knew all the time that there is a God, yet they refused to acknowledge him as such, or to thank him for what he is or does. “

Romans 1:20 J.B. Phillips Translation

Image by Copilot

Finding Providence Amid Life’s Storm

It is 3:30am on Saturday October 4 and I cannot sleep. Scotland is being battered by gales and heavy rain. Storm Amy has taken a tantrum. A few hours ago, a tree fell into my garden; a sudden, violent reminder of nature’s force. Now, taller and mightier trees sway ominously above my roof, their branches thrashing in the wind, threatening to come down and wreck my home.

In the midst of the storm, I reach for my Bible, seeking calm in the chaos. It randomly  opens at Psalm 121 and my eyes fall upon these words:

“The Eternal will keep you safe
from all of life’s evils,
from your first breath to the last breath you breathe,
from this day and forever.”

What are the chances? God whispers through a line of Scripture, finding us in the dark, reminding us that He is near. Sometimes His communication is so personal, so precise, that it feels as though the words were written for this that night—for that very hour.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.

Image by Copilot

"Didn’t all ten receive the same healing this fellow did? 

Where are the other nine? "

Where Are the Other Nine?

It’s not much to report, I suppose. But this morning, as I drove out of my street, I paused and flashed my lights to let a father and his little girl cross before I went further. They stepped out hand in hand, and when they reached the other side, the girl turned and waved, a small, bright flutter of her hand encouraged by her father’s smile.

It was such a simple thing, yet it stayed with me as I drove on. That wave was more than a polite thank you. It felt like a shared recognition that we need each other, that life is not just about getting where we’re going but noticing those around us. Gratitude has that power. It lifts the moment and lightens the heart. And yet, I can’t help but notice how rare it seems to be these days with a world with spiraling ingrates.

The smallest act of gratitude costs nothing. It is an acknowledgment that we are not self-sufficient, that we depend on the kindness and patience of others. But we live in a time that celebrates independence and self-made lives. To say “thank you” is to admit we have received something, and many people now seem uncomfortable with that. We rush through our days distracted, often too busy to notice what has been done for us, let alone to express appreciation.

It reminds me of one of Jesus’ most striking questions: “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” Ten men with leprosy cried out to Him for mercy. All ten were healed. Yet only one, a Samaritan, turned back, threw himself at Jesus’ feet, and thanked Him. The others rushed ahead with their new lives and never looked back.

That story still speaks loudly today. We know people like that. Gratitude is not just a social grace. It is a spiritual posture. It recognises that life itself is a gift, that every breath and every kindness received is not owed but given. Without gratitude, we grow entitled and indifferent. We stop seeing the good around us. We even stop seeing God’s hand in our lives. Like the nine lepers, we hurry on, healed but unchanged.

And there are consequences when gratitude fades. Communities weaken when kindness goes unacknowledged. Relationships become colder when generosity is expected rather than appreciated. Even our care for the natural world diminishes when we no longer feel thankful for its beauty and abundance. Gratitude nurtures reverence. Without it, the heart hardens, and the world grows smaller.

The little girl’s wave was a small thing, but it reminded me that gratitude is not gone. It still exists in these fleeting, everyday moments. And perhaps that is where its renewal must begin — not in grand gestures or speeches, but in a child’s wave, a sincere thank you, a quiet prayer of thanks.

Jesus noticed the one who returned. He still does. And maybe His question still lingers over our own hurried, distracted age: Where are the other nine?

And remember dear reader, I am deeply grateful for reading these thoughts as it is encouraging to know that others are on the same page in the metaphorical sense.

Luke 17:11-19 "Where are the nine?

Image by Copilot

The Day I Almost closed my Eyes

I must have been twelve years old, I’m sure I was. It was that age when everything begins to shift—when the world starts to look a little brighter, and far more confusing. My friends had just packed up their two-week holiday on the island, leaving me with an odd sense of emptiness. For the first time, I realized I wasn’t just missing the boys; I was missing the girls too—particularly a girl whose name I can’t recall. There was no real romance, of course; who’s ever heard of a twelve-year-old romantic? She was only a pal. Just like the boys.

That Saturday, with the holiday cabin feeling unusually quiet, I wandered through the fields and down to Ascog beach. Nature has always drawn me when I’m confused or lonely. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just a way to occupy the strange loneliness I couldn’t quite name. The beach was rocky and wild, the waves crashing in their endless rhythm. I ventured out, picking my way across the jagged rocks with the overconfidence only a boy on the cusp of adolescence can have.

Then I slipped.

The fall was sudden and brutal. The sharp edge of a rock grazed my arm as the waves seized me, pulling me into their chaotic embrace. For a terrifying moment, I couldn’t tell which way was up. My arms flailed, desperate to find purchase, until finally, I managed to grab the top of a rock and pull myself free.

I sat there on the sharp, wet stone, shivering and catching my breath. My heart pounded like a bodhrán in my chest. All the “what ifs" began to flood my mind. What if I hadn’t caught that rock? What if the waves had dragged me further out? What if I had drowned right there, on that ordinary Saturday, with no one around to see or save me?

For the first time, I felt the weight of my own fragility, the startling realization that life could be taken from me as easily as a wave dragging a pebble back to sea. I had always assumed I was invincible; children often do. But sitting there, dripping wet and utterly shaken, I began to wonder about things far bigger than myself.

Selma Lagerlöf, I think it was, who wrote something about imploring God to let her reach her full potential before her life was gleaned from this earth.

And when I reflect on that day, Lagerlöf’s words come back to me.

I began to wrestle with questions far beyond my years. How would God judge a life so young? I had many sins to confess.

What happens to a child who closes their eyes on life before they've had the chance to really open them? Would there be understanding, or only silence?

That day marked the first time I truly felt the weight of my own mortality—not as a distant, abstract concept, but as something immediate and deeply personal. It didn’t stop me from climbing rocks again. Life went on, as it does. But the memory of that day stayed with me, a quiet reminder of how thin the line is between being and not being, and how quickly everything can change.

Even now, decades later, I visit that boy sitting on the rocks, trembling and thoughtful, his childhood beginning to slip away with the tide. I wonder if, in those moments of quiet panic and reflection, I began to grow up just a little. Without realizing it, I was starting to understand the preciousness of life—not in a grand or dramatic way, but in the simple, shivering recognition that it is fragile and fleeting.

And that’s enough. After all, we are never truly ready; there are always ifs.

Image by Copilot

Some Thoughts About Themes and Worldview

I was at the movies last night and an ad for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen movie was featured. The theme, Deliver Me from Nowhere. Now I wonder if we watched that movie without knowing the theme if we would conclude that was the theme. It’s not as easy as you may think. Worldview comes into play. Let’s illustrate.

Take a moment to read Luke 15:11–32 for yourself. You can find it here on BibleGateway. It's one of the most familiar stories in Scripture. A younger son demands his inheritance, leaves home, wastes it all on reckless living, and completely screws up his life. He ends up in misery. He finally returns to a father who is working in the field and sees his son afar off and runs to welcome him home.

We usually call it the parable of the prodigal son. But what if the real theme is bigger than we think?

In the 1980s, New Testament scholar Mark Allan Powell asked students from three different countries, the States, Russia, and Tanzania, to read the parable, set the Bible aside, and then retell the story from memory. What they remembered, and what they forgot, revealed something powerful.

Most of the American students completely left out a key detail. They forgot the line that says, “There was a severe famine in that country, and he began to be in need.” This wasn’t intentional. Many didn’t even realize they had skipped it. For them, the young man’s downfall was entirely due to his own bad choices. He blew his money. He ended up in the mud. It was a story of personal failure. That perspective reflects a culture that strongly values individual responsibility and self-reliance.

The Russian students almost always remembered the famine. In fact, many of them pointed to it as the turning point in the story. Coming from a country with painful memories of hunger under Soviet rule, they knew what famine meant. The son's suffering wasn’t just about reckless living. He was also caught in something bigger than himself — a disaster no one could control. In their telling, the story became a reminder that hardship is not always self-inflicted.

The Tanzanian students noticed something else. What stood out to them was the sentence, “No one gave him anything.” In their cultural context, where community support and mutual responsibility are deeply rooted, this was a shocking failure. The son was starving, and the people around him chose to do nothing. For them, the heart of the story was not just personal or political — it was social. The problem wasn’t just sin or famine. It was neglect. No one helped.

Three cultures. Three different emphases. One story.

Powell’s experiment reveals something important. The way we read a story often depends on where we come from. Our culture shapes what we see, what we remember, and what we believe matters most. That’s not always wrong, but it’s not the whole picture either.

The Americans emphasized personal responsibility. The Russians saw the weight of history and external crisis. The Tanzanians focused on the breakdown of community. Each view offers a truth, but none of them capture the full story by themselves.

So, what is the theme? Is it about a son who wasted his life? A famine that made everything worse? A society that failed to show compassion?

Yes. It is about all of that. The parable only makes sense when all the pieces are in place. The son made foolish choices. The famine struck. The people around him did nothing. His life unravelled through a mix of personal mistakes, unfortunate events, and social indifference. And at the end of all that mess, grace met him in the form of a father who ran toward him because this lossed son realised he had amends to make with God and his father. "I have sinned against heaven and against you, Father."

That’s the deeper message here. We often want a single, clean answer. But human stories, like this one, are more tangled than that. And God’s grace meets us in the middle of the tangle, not after we figure everything out.

This parable also reminds us to stay humble in how we read Scripture. We often assume we’re reading it “as it is,” when in fact we’re reading it through our own lens or the lens of the religion we were raised in. When I left my religion of thirty-three years, I read the scriptures afresh and was surprised how wrong my concept was. We highlight the parts that match our experience and quietly skip past what doesn’t. Like the students who forgot the famine, we may not even realize what we’ve left behind.

That’s why we need each other. We need to read with people who see things differently. Not just to broaden our understanding, but to correct it. When others point out what we missed, they’re not challenging the truth. They’re helping us see more of it.

So, what’s the theme? Maybe it’s that no single theme is enough. The power of this story is that it holds space for human failure, historical hardship, communal breakdown, and still ends with grace. The story is about ypu and I who need reconcilliation with God and those we have hurt.

And that’s exactly the kind of story we need.

The Unmoved Mover

"God is the first mover, Himself unmoved."
— Thomas Aquinas

Imagine sitting quietly in a park and watching a child roll a ball down a hill. You know instinctively that the ball didn’t begin to move by itself — someone had to give it that first gentle push. It’s such a simple image, yet it holds one of the oldest and most profound questions humans have ever asked: What set everything in motion?

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, used that kind of everyday observation to reach toward something vast. He wasn’t just speaking of physical motion — of stones rolling or planets spinning — but of change itself: a spark igniting wood into flame, a seed swelling and splitting to become a tree, a thought awakening in the stillness of the mind. All movement, all change, Aquinas said, begins because something else acted first.

But follow that chain backwards — like tracing a row of falling dominoes to the one that was first tipped — and you arrive at a question that echoes through every age: What was the first cause? If every motion is the result of a prior motion, then at the root of everything must be something that moves without being moved, changes without being changed, causes without being caused.

For Aquinas, that source is God — the First Mover, eternal and unchanging, the reason there is something rather than nothing. Without such a source, he argued, the entire sequence of causes and effects that make up the fabric of reality would have no foundation. It would be like a line of dominoes falling with no first push — an impossibility.

Some will object and say, “The chain has always existed. There is no beginning.” Others will point to the Big Bang and the vast explanations of science. Yet even there, Aquinas’ question lingers stubbornly: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Science may trace the unfolding of the universe back to an initial singularity, but it cannot explain why that singularity — or the laws that shaped it — existed in the first place.

Aquinas invites us to look beyond the physical chain of events to the ground of being itself — to the One who is actus purus, pure actuality, the source of all potential. God does not simply start the universe like a watchmaker winding a spring. God is the reason motion, existence, and being are possible at all. The universe is not an accident; it is a masterpiece, and behind every brushstroke is the hand of the Artist.

It’s worth pausing to feel the weight of that thought. When you next watch a leaf drifting down a street in autumn or see the tides rising and falling beneath a silver moon, consider that none of this happens in isolation. Every motion is part of a vast, unfolding story that began — and is sustained — by One who was never moved Himself.

The ancient poet of Job heard the same question whispered in the night sky:

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades
or loosen the belt of Orion?
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
or lead out the Bear and her cubs?
Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set their dominion over the earth?
— Job 38

Behind every falling domino, every rolling ball, every star in its appointed course, is the same mystery Aquinas tried to name: the Unmoved Mover. And the truest wisdom is not to solve that mystery, but to revere it — and let that awe change how we live.

Image by Copilot

Non, je ne regrette rien

A year ago, I was out walking with a friend; the Island of Arran, if memory serves. As we climbed a winding path overlooking the sea, I asked him a question that had been turning over quietly in my mind.
     “Do you have any regrets?”
     “No,” he said without hesitation.

I remember finding that answer strange. Who among us has no regrets?

That conversation came back to me this morning as I watched a boy skateboarding to school, a violin case slung over his shoulder. There was something deeply beautiful about the sight; a child in motion and going somewhere. 

In that moment, I felt the ache of a regret I’ve carried for most of my life. I would have loved to learn the violin as a child. But I grew up in the Govan of the 1960s, where poverty was the norm and such things were far beyond reach. People now look back on those days as the “good old days.” I’m not sure why. They were hard days, and while they taught us resilience, they also taught us the art of doing without.

Of course, I could have taken up the violin later, once I had more control over my own life. But I didn’t. Life’s currents carried me in other directions, you have children to look after, clothing them, taking them on holidays and weddings to pay for. By then, there isn't much left.  and the dream was quietly left behind.

Now, when I listen to the soaring beauty of Duncan Chisholm’s bow gliding over the strings, or lose myself in the great violin concertos played on Classic FM, or watch the wild joy of a klezmer fiddler or a Cajun musician breathing fire into their instrument, the words rise unbidden from somewhere deep within me:

“Oui, je regrette beaucoup de choses.”

And yet, perhaps that is what it means to be human; to live with our regrets, not as chains, but as reminders of the roads we didn’t take and the songs we still carry in our hearts.

Image by Copilot

Verbindung and Human Connection

Four years ago, I read a short news piece about a young family driving home from church somewhere down south. Their car was involved in a crash. The father woke up in a hospital bed to the unbearable truth that he was the only one left. His wife and two children were gone.

I never knew this man. I don’t know the colour of his eyes, what prayers he uttered with his children the night before, or what hymn they had sung that morning, or the last words spoken in the car. Yet, he lingers in my thoughts. Even now, years later, he appears unbidden — while I’m walking by the sea, or when I hear a church bell toll, or see a father holding a child’s hand. Why should the sorrow of a stranger take up residence in my heart?

The Germans have a word, Verbindung. It means connection, but not merely in the way we connect a plug to a socket or link one thing to another. It is richer, deeper — a “binding together,” a joining of threads into a single weave. It suggests that between all human beings there is a hidden lattice of belonging, invisible yet unbreakable, and that sometimes, without knowing why, a strand is tugged.

That man’s grief tugged on something in me. It crossed the boundaries of anonymity and distance, entered quietly into the private rooms of my heart, and stayed. That is Verbindung: the soul’s refusal to believe we are separate. It is the truth Martin Buber gestured towards when he wrote, “All real living is meeting.” Not just the meetings we arrange with friends, but the ones that happen silently — when one life brushes another and changes it, even if they never share a word.

His suffering illuminated something I would rather ignore: that the membrane between my life and loss is thin and easily pierced. In his story I glimpse my own vulnerability, and that of those I love. The word makes the sorrow of another mirror my own. It dissolves the “them” and the “me” until all that remains is us — a fragile, fearful, loving us.

C.S. Lewis wrote after losing his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The fear, perhaps, is not just of loss, but of the illusion it strips away — the illusion that we are islands, safe and separate. Verbindung insists we are not islands at all. We are peninsulas jutting into one another’s seas, shaped and reshaped by every tide of joy and sorrow that laps against us.

It is the connection that makes the tears of a stranger salt our own eyes. It is Verbindung that lets us feel less alone in our private griefs because someone, somewhere, has felt this too. And it is that word that characterises  and  stirs in me a quiet hope that the man in the hospital bed, four years older now, has found a way to live within the ruins — that perhaps he too senses the unseen threads that still connect him to the world.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” That is the essence of Verbindung: to see the human being not as stranger or statistic but as kin, bound to us in the vast, aching story of what it means to live and lose and still love.

And so I think of him. I cannot help it. His sorrow is stitched into my own sense of the world, a small knot in the fabric of my humanity. Perhaps that is why we are here — to bear witness to each other’s stories, even the silent ones, and to keep alive the knowledge that we belong to one another.

The word hums quietly beneath it all. A binding. A thread. A reminder that, though our paths may never cross, our lives are woven together, strand by invisible strand.

Image by Copilot

A Ghost, but Not as We Know Him

I’m walking up Buchanan Street in Glasgow this week. Alone, and yet not. There’s a boy beside me. He is  fifteen, wearing the clothing of a 70s teen. He is awkward, shy, dreaming, full of questions and fears with no father or mother to turn to. He is me. Or rather, he was me. And as we walk together through the noise of the present, I’m struck by a quiet, unsettling wonder: why is he still here? Why does he walk beside me after all these years?

Is this just the mind’s trickery; our memory looping back on itself like an old song? Or is it something far deeper, something we’ve never stopped to explore because it frightens us too much?

The ancient Hebrews, like the Greeks, knew we were not just flesh and blood. They spoke of two realities within us — body and soul, basar and nephesh. And then they spoke of something deeper still: the spirit, the breath of God. The writer of Hebrews puts it with startling clarity:

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” — Hebrews 4:12

There is something here that science cannot dissect. A mystery that resists reduction. The boy beside me is not just a bundle of neurons firing in nostalgia;  he is part of the “recording” that lives on, the essence of who I am and who I have been.

Think of it: millions of bodies buried, burned, or swallowed by the sea — their flesh long gone the way of all mankind. And yet, like the indestructible black box of an aircraft, something locked in time , Not just the data, but the being, the loves, the sorrows, the laughter, the prayers whispered in the dark. All waiting, perhaps, to be retrieved at the command of Jesus.

It’s why Stephen, as stones rained down upon him, could cry out with unwavering confidence:

“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” — Acts 7:59

He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He knew there was something more — something beyond the ruin of the body, something that even death cannot touch.

And so I keep walking. Older now, but not alone. The boy is still beside me because he was never meant to disappear. He is part of the unbroken thread that ties who I was to who I am, and perhaps, who I will yet become.

Maybe that is the great, luminous secret at the heart of all this: we are not just fleeting shadows passing through time. We are known, remembered, and held, every version of us in the eternal memory of God. And one day, like a voice drawn from the wreckage, the boy and the man will stand together, whole.

Wow. What if the self you once were is not lost at all, only waiting to be called by name?

P.S. Ghost: It can mean spirit, soul, breath, the very life force itself.

Verses from The Berean Literal Bible

Image by Copilot

Two years ago, I was informed that the very cells that had served me faithfully all my life had gone rogue. They staged a rebellion in my prostate, then marched to my pancreas, and finally made their home in my liver. A cancerous time bomb ticking away inside me.

A few weeks ago, that time bomb almost went off. My out-of-hours doctor rushed me to A&E with what is called a carcinoid crisis — when the body suddenly floods itself with hormones, raising blood pressure to a fatal level. That is what it feels like to live with cancer: never quite knowing when the wires inside your body might spark, when the mechanism might fail.

How can random acts in the body like this be controlled? The doctors tell me stress makes it worse. Easier said than done. It means avoiding certain situations, planning carefully, and steering clear of people who emit stress. This has caused tension at times as others who do not communicate well with me, who  do not understand and feel I am being unloving. But I love everyone, but I also love myself and want to go through life quietly and avoid those who will never change. It's a decision I made in my late teens and more radically now.  

I am grateful to consultants, doctors and nurses in hospitals and my local surgery who treat me with dignity and compassion in a practical way. They will never know how far human compassion feels; we all crave it. Beyond that, my more important steadying act is speaking with my Creator, God. The diagnosis was first delivered to me on September 2023; I was given a short time to live.

It came quietly, almost tenderly: neuroendocrine cancer, spreading from prostate to pancreas to liver. The words were spoken gently and sympathetically. There is no script for receiving such news. And yet, I discovered there was a script after all. One already written, long before I knew I would need it.

The morning, I was due to receive my results, something extraordinary happened. Before I even stepped into the hospital, before the diagnosis had a name or a timeline, God spoke to me through words I hadn’t sought, but that found me like a lifeline dropped into deep waters:

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.’”
— Psalm 91:1–2

I didn’t read those words casually. They were spoken into my spirit. Not just read but revealed. It was as if God leaned close and said: This is for you. For today. For what you’re about to hear.

And He didn’t stop there.

That evening, my wife — who has walked each step of this path with me — pointed out something I had overlooked. She had been reading the same psalm, but her eyes were drawn to the closing verses:

“Because he loves Me, I will deliver him;
because he knows My name, I will protect him.
When he calls out to Me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble.
I will deliver him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him
and show him My salvation.”
— Psalm 91:14–16

In her quiet way, she showed me what I needed most. God was not only promising protection, He was promising presence. Not just a fortress, but companionship in trouble. Not just deliverance, but honour. And most tender of all, long life, whether measured in days here or in eternity with Him, and salvation.

Cancer can make you feel absurdly small, like Sisyphus condemned to push the stone of your own body uphill, knowing it will only roll back down. Albert Camus once said: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” But unlike Camus’ Sisyphus, my life is not condemned to futility. The stone is heavy, yes — but I do not push it alone. God’s presence transforms the absurd into the bearable, the unbearable into the meaningful.

Viktor Frankl, who endured the concentration camps, wrote: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” My “why” is clear. It is anchored not in medicine or prognosis, but in God — my refuge, my fortress, my salvation. This all sounds like clichéd Christian rhetoric, but unless you have walked the path with God, you may never know.

Psalm 91 does not promise the absence of pain. It promises His presence in it. It promises that when we love Him and call on Him, He hears, He answers, He walks with us.

I may have been given a year, but I have been given far more than that — I have been given hope. Not wishful thinking, but anchored hope. The kind that steadies a man living with a time bomb inside him.

To anyone who has sat in that sterile room and heard the doctor say “cancer,” or who lies awake wondering what the future holds: I want you to know that God still speaks. And more than that — He stays.

Note: If you are going through a similar crisis , feel free to contact me for a supporting Email chat at JimAlba@proton.me

Updated at God and the Two Cosmic Dancers | learn1