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Jim McCrory

Timshel: The Dignity of Choice

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday, 22 July 2025, 12:23

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Timshel: The Dignity of Choice

I always mention in my blog words that teach us what it means to be human. Timshel is one I have in my notebook. In Hebrew, it means “thou mayest.” Or “you may.” It’s a phrase I loved to hear from my parents when I was given the freedom to go with friends or some other liberty. It’s a small phrase, tucked into the folds of language and literature, but like a camel on the silk path, it carries the weight of eternity.

I encountered it in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, where it opens up like a key in the lock of human will. “Thou mayest” do right. “Thou mayest” choose the path of light. It does not say you must, nor does it say you shall not. It says: the choice is yours. And what a sobering gift that is.

I’m not happy with this world right now. I no longer read or watch the news. Why dwell on the hatreds, the quiet tragedies playing out behind closed doors? People exercising this freedom in wildly different ways. Some use it to love. Others weaponise it. And the frightening part? God allows it. He watches it unfold like the gardener who plants both wheat and weeds in a highland field and waits until the harvest.

Free will, then, is not just a philosophical concept. It’s the soil of our existence. It’s what makes us human—or not.

In this period before the great harvest, every life plays out on this level ground, and no one is coerced into goodness. That’s the thing about Timshel—it implies not only the possibility of righteousness but the possibility of rejecting it too. And that is where things fall apart.

The Bible tells us, at 2 Chronicles 16:9: “For the eyes of the LORD roam to and fro over all the earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are fully devoted to Him.”

Like a farmer observing his field over the growing season, He is watching and observing each one to see what we will do with life—with what outcome.

The Book of John draws a stark line: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life.” (John 3:36). There is no mention of eternal damnation here—just life or death. A death where one does not wake.

It’s not a punishment; it’s the logical conclusion of a life lived in rebellion against light. You can choose not to see life. You can turn your face from it, step by step, until the very idea of it grows dim.

But you can also choose otherwise.

Sometimes I wonder why God doesn’t intervene in the ways we expect. He doesn't suspend natural laws every time a good man suffers or step in to rewrite the ending when evil has the upper hand. He waits. Not with indifference, but with patience. Because love that is compelled is no love at all. And goodness that is forced is merely compliance. He honours our will because He made it in His image.

That’s what dignity is, isn’t it? The right to choose. The right to fall. The right to rise again.

It’s why, when Jesus stood before the rich young ruler, He didn’t argue. He didn’t chase after him with threats or promises. He let him go. “Thou mayest,” he said in silence. You may follow. You may walk away. It’s up to you.

As for me, I choose to believe there is life—not just biological animation, but life in the truest sense: eternal, vibrant, incorruptible. And it begins with this quiet, radical freedom. The kind that says: You are not a puppet dancing to your DNA. You are a soul with potential, everlastingly so.  Choose well.

Timshel.

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Jim McCrory

Why Do I Bother To Write?

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday, 22 July 2025, 09:10

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Why Do I Bother To Write?

Like most days over the past four years, I sit to write. The blank page often stays blank, stirring that familiar anxiety, especially when a deadline looms. The clock stifles creativity. The page stares back, unyielding. Sentences surface and audition, but most are quickly dismissed. For every twenty, one might be acceptable. I hope for that spine-tingling line you find in a Tranströmer poem. The iambic pulse in my poetry. The quiet clarity of Mankell. A whole world contained in a Lydia Davis paragraph. But nothing worthy emerges.

So, I go down, make coffee, and turn on the radio. A song catches my thoughts and sends shivers up my spine. A song about a man walking under African skies.

I dwell on the imagery. The sense of place. The tantalising syntax and its gentle, fluid rhythm. How the artist’s words unfurl like a film in my mind. Where did such lyrical magic come from? Was it composed in minutes, or did it take weeks? I look it up. The songwriter’s reflections are absent. I return to the screen more uneasy than before. My short foray into the cyber-hive under the guise of research has only distracted me. The clock ticks louder now. I sit back at my desk, disheartened, like Pasternak’s figure in The Passion of Creation.

So why put myself through this struggle? Why not ride a mountain bike around the Alps, walk the Camino de Santiago, or join my local philosophical society?

Well, It happened like this:

I originally set out to become a social psychologist. I had a deep desire to understand human nature. But like many sciences, psychology is a battleground of contradicting theories. What is learned today is often unlearned tomorrow. It felt like a Sisyphean task.

Yet I carried something else with me: a lifelong fascination with words that resist translation. Swedish lagom, German Torschlusspanik, Danish hygge. Each offered a glimpse into the soul of a culture. There are stories of being human in these words.

Years later, when life quieted down, I took my notebooks to the Philippines. My wife and I were staying in Pagudpud, a northern coastal resort. Each morning, I would rise early, walk to the breakfast hut, and choose a seat where only the ocean separated me from China. There, I wrote nonfiction pieces shaped by these cultural insights.

In the late afternoons, children would come with trays of handmade bracelets and trinkets, their wide eyes gently pleading. When I bought from one, others soon followed. A Western visitor with deep pockets became a community event. It reminded me of the sociological idea of Gemeinschaft—a society where the welfare of the group outweighs individual gain. I was learning social psychology not from textbooks, but from life itself.

Later, I visited a university and asked for reading recommendations. The social science department kindly gave me access to their library. I read widely—fiction and nonfiction that deepened my understanding of people and place. And so, this is where my writing began. Not as a career, but as a return to those earlier questions about what it means to be human.

But writing soon became more than inquiry. More than storytelling. It became a mirror of mortality.

In this year of 2025, I write because I’m dying. Not imminently, but inevitably. Neuroendocrine cancer will one day win the battle between life and death.

Is that reason enough to write?

I first read about Gustaf Hjortberg in an essay by Henning Mankell. Inside a small church in Släp, on Sweden’s west coast, hangs a portrait unlike any other. Long before the invention of photography, the wealthy commissioned paintings. This one feature Hjortberg—a clergyman—and his wife Hanna, surrounded by their fifteen children.

He stands with one foot in faith and the other in science. Behind him hangs a crucifix inscribed with 1 Timothy 1:15. On the table beside him lie navigational tools, a globe, and an academic paper. Sample jars on the shelf point to his work as a student of Linnaeus. A row of African spears, a lemur on the floor, and stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling reveal a well-travelled man.

Yet the portrait is playful. His shoe lies casually on the floor. The boys wear half-smiles. The girls are more reserved, perhaps reflecting Lutheran modesty.

Then comes the detail that halts the breath: six of the fifteen children are dead. Yet they appear in the painting, faint and shadowy, hovering between worlds. Not fully gone. No other image captures so poignantly the human urge not to leave life behind.

And this is why I write. I want to be remembered. I want to leave a mark that says, I was here. Writing is my defiance of death.

I often think about Hjortberg. Did the children die during his long absences? What caused him to include them in the painting?

And why that verse: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst”? Was it guilt—or humility? Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, had no word for humility. Paul coined tapeinophrosune—to make the mind low.

Perhaps that’s what Hjortberg intended. Perhaps the relaxed expressions of the children reflect warmth in their father’s presence. It takes humility to commission a painting that future generations might deem strange. But this was the norm of the day. And yet, I walk through my local graveyard and see portraits of children who have passed, surrounded by messages of heartbreak and flowers.

That portrait reminds me of another truth: the dead cannot defend themselves. Unlike the characters in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust, the departed cannot answer accusations, correct myths, or confront gossip.

Identity is something we help shape, but do not fully own. We know whether we are kind or vain, broken or brave. But once we are gone, our image is left in the hands of others. Skeletons—real or imagined—are dragged from cupboards. So I write to leave a record of who I am. Essays that, if read carefully, might reveal me. An apologia pro vita sua, you might say.

I also write because I mourn something that never quite existed. The Germans call it Fernweh—a homesickness for a place never visited.

I felt it when my music teacher played Grieg’s Morning, speaking of trolls, Peer Gynt, and the Scandinavian landscape. Norway felt like where I should have been born.

I feel it again watching The Children of Noisy Village, based on Astrid Lindgren’s books. The village is simple, kind, and imaginative. A place I long for, though it lives only in fiction.

But Fernweh runs deeper.

As I write, the Russian invasion of Ukraine rages on. Body counts appear in news columns like stock indexes. Millions are displaced—tired, grieving, and stateless. In UK, more and more people are living on the streets. In winter, zero degrees and under. Dickens lives again.

So why write?

Because I stand at the Wailing Wall of humanity. Writing brings release. But more than that, it becomes a land where reality and hope can meet. Fernweh, you might say.

Maya Angelou once said that when she began a project, she brought with her everyone who had ever been kind to her. I, too, write about the nobler qualities of human nature: kindness, hope, empathy, and unconditional love.

I write to make sense of life. To hold its sorrows and its wonders up to the light. To ask what it means to be human—and to try, through words, to answer

Hjortberg Portrait : https://preview.redd.it/7smofare5dw71.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=418f545f1586c68c59f94f080d3e4e3449f93ea9

Paul Simon - Under African Skies (Live from The African Concert, 1987)

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Jim McCrory

The Crushing Weight of Being Alone

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday, 21 July 2025, 16:29

“I am, yet none cares or knows”

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I Am Alone

I was reading a poem yesterday that caught my attention. Poems at times can relate heavily to my own experience in life. Especially this one that deals with loneliness and isolation; an experience that affected me when I left my religion of thirty years. See how this poem might relate to your own circumstances. 

In the silence of a forgotten room in an English asylum, a man once wrote, “I am—yet what I am none cares or knows.” The voice belonged to John Clare, a poet worn down by life, mental illness, and the slow unravelling of his world. Yet in that bleak space, he penned lines that still echo with tender power, especially to those today who sit in the long shadows of estrangement, displacement, and despair.

There is something sacred about such honesty. Clare's words come not from the polished pulpit or the safety of social acceptance, but from the deep, unvarnished truth of human vulnerability. He names what so many feel but cannot say: the crushing weight of being invisible.

I’ve met such souls. A mother weeping softly in a refugee camp, her children asleep beside her but her home a thousand miles away and burnt to ash. Siblings, mother, and son, once close, now divided by religious indoctrination that prize rules over relationship. A quiet woman sitting alone on a bench in a bustling Western city, the language around her foreign, the culture unfamiliar, the ache of belonging unbearable.

To all of these, Clare might simply say: I understand.

Yet the miracle of “I Am” is not only its sorrow—it’s the final turn of the soul. In his last lines, Clare reaches for something not of this world:

There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept.

This is not a theological claim. It is something more intimate. Clare is not arguing for God—he is resting in Him, reaching toward the One who knew him when no one else did. It is the voice of a child returning to the Father’s arms. And in that return, Clare finds what war, madness, and estrangement could never steal: peace.

What a quiet triumph that is.

We live in a world swollen with voices and noise yet strangely emptied of understanding. People are exiled not only by politics and geography but by emotional walls, invisible but high. How many walk among us, smiling on the outside while inwardly crying, “I am, yet none cares or knows”?

And yet, for all its despair, Clare’s poem holds out a hand. It offers solidarity with the forgotten, and more than that, it offers the hope of being seen. Not by the world, which can be fickle and cruel, but by God, who knows every thought and tear.

There is deep comfort here for those who suffer. For those cut off from their families by human doctrine. It speaks to those cast adrift by war, its separation and exile. To those who just don’t fit in. It affirms that we have a home in Him that cannot be taken. For the foreigner, for the forgotten, for the emotionally broken; Clare’s cry becomes a prayer, and his prayer becomes a promise.

That though we may feel lost, we are never beyond the reach of our Creator.

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept.

Sleep, not in despair, but in trust. In the arms of the One who saw Clare in his cell—and sees us still.

 

I Am—Yet Not Alone: John Clare : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43948/i-am

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Jim McCrory

The Ship That Still Speaks

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday, 21 July 2025, 11:22

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The Ship That Still Speaks

Visiting the Titanic Museum in Belfast does more than recount a historic voyage, it confronts us with solemn questions, the scale of loss, and a quiet, aching “Why?” that echoes through time.

The Titanic was never just a ship. It was a symbol of human progress, industrial mastery, and the towering confidence that defined the dawn of the twentieth century. Built with the finest materials and the latest technology, she was hailed as unsinkable. A phrase, now heavy with irony, clings to her legacy: “Even God cannot sink this ship.”

Whether spoken in jest or earnest, the words have become a monument to human hubris. For perhaps the real danger was not the iceberg, but the spirit in which the journey began—a spirit that forgot frailty, limits, and the divine.

An old folk song recounts the tragedy in humble, unvarnished lines:

Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue,
And they thought they had a ship that the water would never go through.
But the Lord's Almighty hand said that ship would never land—
It was sad when that great ship went down.

The theology here is not cruel, but sober. Not because God struck, but because He allowed. And in that allowing lies the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 9:11:“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong;

neither is bread to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent,
nor favor to the skillful. For time and chance happen to them all.”

No speed, strength, or intellect can shield us from life’s deep uncertainties. Time and chance run like wild currents beneath all we build. Ships may sink. Dreams may founder. Even the wise must admit—we do not hold the reins.

The Titanic reminds us that even our finest achievements sail on fragile waters. There is something profoundly biblical in that—not punishment, but perspective. A humbling. It invites us to look up, to remember that beneath all our planning lies a precarious foundation. When the Titanic sank, it was not only steel and souls that were lost—it was the illusion of invincibility.

And yet—even here—grace.
Grace in remembering that we are not God.
That limits are not curses, but reminders of where to place our trust.

The psalmist understood this:

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” (Psalm 20:7)

There is a place for ships, and science, and skill. But not for forgetting. Not for the quiet arrogance that whispers, “Even God cannot…”—whatever we are tempted to put there. That sentence never ends well.

Let the Titanic continue to speak—not only through history books or ballads, but through the deep of human experience. Let it remind us, as Ecclesiastes does, that time and chance happen to all, but reverence, not recklessness, keeps us afloat.

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Jim McCrory

Find Your True Ikigai

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 08:08

 

'And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him'

Romans 8:28

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A newfound friend asked my wife and I in a gentle voice,  “What is your purpose in life?”

The question lingered in the sort of me, and I found myself drifting back to the tender years when my children were small. I had made it a priority to teach them a few simple, enduring truths, none more important than the words of Jesus in Luke 10:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”

These are not just words to memorize. They are the essence of what it means to be human. They speak of a divine pattern etched into our being, a way of living that opens the door to joy; not only now, but in whatever life awaits us beyond this one. After all, to live in that future paradise that Jesus promised, Jesus words would be fundamental to peace and happiness.

We look around and shake our heads at the state of the world. We grow weary and carry many mental scars inflicted by humans who have no interest in human kindness. Cruelty is everywhere and goodness is vanishing. But if we see the world growing darker, then we have more reason to hold out the candle to humankind and show them a better way, however small it may seem. Even one flame is enough to draw the eye in a pitch-black room.

Life has a way of throwing us curve balls. We sit alone with our thoughts, wondering how things unravelled, how we got lost in the confusion of it all. In those moments, the words of Psalm 32:2 come alive: “How happy are those who no longer lie—to themselves or to others.”

There is such quiet power in that verse. Sometimes the lie is not loud. Sometimes it whispers. It tells us we are fine when we are not. It hardens our hearts with blame and justifications. It allows us to go on hurting, deceiving, closing off. It convinces us that forgiveness is weakness and that resentment is strength and you rejoice in rallying the support of others. But when you drift away from the noise, refrain from stroking your mobile and withdrawing from social media and the noise of humankind. Reflect in a quiet place, sit in stillness, and look inward, we often discover that our unhappiness is not just circumstantial. It runs deeper. It’s the ache of disconnection—from God, from others, and even from our truest selves. We were made for love, and when we drift from that purpose, we begin to slowly unravel.

To love with our whole being is the highest calling we have. It is not sentimental. It is costly. It asks something of us, our time, our attention, our honesty, our humility. Yet it also gives us something in return. It brings us home. It restores our dignity. It lights up the path ahead.

This is not idealism. It is reality, the kind that touches the soul and refuses to let go. To love God, and to love others as we love ourselves, is not simply good advice. It is the map back to life. It is the only way forward, no matter how lost we feel.

So, if you find yourself in a dark place, ask again: What is my purpose? Then listen, not for noise, but for truth. There is a quiet answer waiting, and it has never changed.

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Movies That Change Lives: Bajrangi Bhaijaan

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 07:06

 

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Movies That Change Lives: Bajrangi Bhaijaan

There are stories that entertain, and then there are stories that leave a mark, not merely for their craftsmanship, but for the resonance they strike in the human heart. Mainly because we are in the image of God; we love justice in the positive sense. Bajrangi Bhaijaan is such a film. My wife and I watched it together one quiet evening, expecting perhaps a light-hearted tale, but we were unprepared for the quiet spiritual power it carried. In a world scarred by borders, drawn in ink, culture, and blood—this story chose not to cross them, but to dissolve them entirely, using only the tools of innocence, honesty, and love.

At the centre is Pawan, nicknamed Bajrangi, a man of guileless simplicity and profound faith. He is no theologian. He recites scripture with childlike enthusiasm and folds his hands toward the sun with the kind of reverence that feels both ancient and immediate. And yet, his religion is not about division—it is about compassion. When he finds Munni, a lost Pakistani girl who cannot speak, there is no calculation, no hesitation. Just the plain decision that love makes she needs help, and he will give it.

What moved us most was the moral consistency that Pawan displayed. In many stories, heroes are born of transformation, they change, they grow, they become. But Bajrangi doesn’t change; he endures. He is good from the start, and against all odds, ridicule, rejection, danger, he remains good. It is that steadfast moral compass that reminded us both of something we often forget it doesn’t take brilliance to be kind. It takes courage.

The child, Munni, embodies a different kind of power. She is voiceless, but not powerless. Her silence says what the loudest voices often cannot: that vulnerability has its own form of grace. Her trust in Bajrangi, her unspoken love, softened the hearts of all she encountered, including ours. Her innocence was not naivety—it was clarity. In her presence, the complications of nationality, religion, and language fell away. What remained was the universal human instinct to belong and to be loved.

What astonished us was how the film refused to turn its message into something neat. It didn't offer political solutions. It didn’t preach. Instead, it let human goodness do what it does best, move quietly, slowly, like water over stone. In one of the most powerful scenes, a border officer, moved by Bajrangi’s sincerity and Munni’s eyes, makes a decision not by law but by conscience. That is the essence of the film's moral lesson: that in a world often ruled by fear and suspicion, it is still possible to act with integrity and compassion.

As my wife and I sat together, the credits rolling, we said very little. Sometimes silence is the only fitting response. But I know we both felt the same thing: a small renewal of faith—not only in the stories that film can tell, but in people. Because Bajrangi Bhaijaan reminded us that what unites us is far greater than what divides us. That kindness is not weakness. That faith—when married to love—is the most powerful force in the world.

There are many lines on the map. But the only line that matters is the one we draw around another soul and call it home.

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Yuánfèn: A Mysterious Cosmic Bond.

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 07:06

The wind blows all around us as if it has a will of its own;

we feel and hear it,

but we do not understand where it has come from

or where it will end up.

 Life in the Spirit is as if it were the wind of God,

John 3:8

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Yuánfèn: A Mysterious Cosmic Bond.

緣分

Yesterday, my wife and I took a trip to Edinburgh to see the Royal Yacht Britannia. But, as always, we began our day by reading God’s word and praying before we left. We also asked God, as we often do, to guide someone to us; someone who might need a bit of company or human connection.

Do you think it strange that we should ask this? Experience has taught us that there is nothing strange in such a request. We don’t belong to any church or congregation; we simply believe that God blesses all Christians who have sincere hearts.

Therefore, we’re not out to evangelise for any religion. We simply want to be human in a Christlike way.

The Taiwanese word Yuánfèn is very apt for our travels: a kind of fated affinity or destiny that brings people together. It’s more than mere coincidence; it implies a mysterious cosmic bond.

After visiting Britannia at Leith Ocean Terminal, we sat in Princes Street Gardens having a snack. A young Asian girl came and sat beside us. A conversation began. The usual: “Where are you from?” “Are you studying in Edinburgh?” “How are your parents back home?”

It quickly became clear, just as with all humans, that we all need a bit of company and connection in a world that, more often than not, seems indifferent. We ended up spending the day with our new friend—walking, sharing coffee, watching a street performer on the Royal Mile. A bond formed, but not an ordinary one. One could sense something deeper, a quiet friendship, something woven with Yuánfèn. Something cosmic, divinely  inspired.

It felt as though God and Jesus had responded to that prayer my wife uttered that morning: “Heavenly Father, if there is someone out there today who needs friendship, guide them to us.” And He did in this low-level miraculous way. I would like to say we went home happier that God spread some sunshine on all of us.

“His purpose in all this was that people of every culture and religion would search for this ultimate God, grope for Him in the darkness, as it were, hoping to find Him. Yet, in truth, God is not far from any of us.”
— Acts 17:27 (The Voice Bible)

" 他的意图是使人们寻求他,也许他们会摸索并找到他,但是他离我们每个人都不遥远"

*****

Chinese New Version permissions,

 中文聖經《新譯本》,版權所有 © 環球聖經公會,蒙允使用。

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

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Empathy: The Lost Language of Connection

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Saturday, 19 July 2025, 20:00

 

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Empathy: The Lost Language of Connection

Empathy is the ability to feel with another person—not simply to feel for them, which is sympathy, but to enter their world, to stand in their shoes, however briefly, and see life from behind their eyes. It is the quiet miracle of one human heart recognizing another. The word stems from the Greek empatheia, meaning “in feeling,” yet no single culture owns its full expression. In fact, some languages carry richer nuances that reveal empathy’s deeper layers.

In Japanese, the word “omoiyari” conveys a form of empathy that is anticipatory—it means sensing and responding to the unspoken needs of others, especially before those needs are voiced. In the African philosophy of Ubuntu, we find the phrase: “I am because we are.” It suggests our humanity is shared and incomplete without others. The Danish concept of “hjertemøde”, a “meeting of hearts,” implies a silent understanding, a wordless connection. And in Portuguese, “saudade”—a bittersweet longing—often arises from deep bonds, echoing the ache we feel when we miss someone so profoundly that we momentarily inhabit their absence.

Yet in today’s world, empathy is increasingly absent. Despite the illusion of connection via digital media, many suffer in silence, drowned out by noise or passed over in the blur of busyness. Society rewards speed, success, and self-promotion, leaving little room for the slow, sacred act of listening. In such a climate, vulnerability becomes risky. People hold their grief in, suppress their fears, and smile through sorrow. As novelist George Eliot wrote, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” But this wisdom is too often forgotten.

Empathy cannot be downloaded or manufactured. It must be practiced, cultivated, chosen—especially when inconvenient. We must resist the instinct to judge, to fix, or to rush in with platitudes. Sometimes, the most human thing we can do is simply be there. As Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

What can we do?

We can pause. We can ask, “How are you—really?” and mean it. We can notice the quiet ones. We can create space for stories to be shared without shame. We can teach our children emotional literacy—how to name feelings and respond to others with kindness. We can choose not to scroll past pain but to hold it gently.

Empathy is not weakness. It is strength under control. It is the soul’s muscle memory, remembering what it is to be human. And in a world aching with loneliness, perhaps the most radical act of love is to say, “I see you. You are not alone.”

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A Year to Live — and a Psalm to Hold on To

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Saturday, 19 July 2025, 20:05

I sat in that sterile room and heard the doctor say “cancer,” 

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A Year to Live — and a Psalm to Hold on To

In September 2023, I was given a year to live.

Neuroendocrine cancer, which began quietly in the prostate, had spread its wings and made itself at home in my pancreas and liver. The words came gently from the doctor, but they shook the earth beneath me. How do you take news like that? There’s no script for it.

And yet… God had already written one.

The morning, I was due to receive my results, something extraordinary happened. Before I 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.

It was Psalm 91:1–2:

"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.’"

I didn’t read those words casually. They were spoken into my spirit — not just read, but revealed. It was as if God said, “This is for you. For today. For what you’re about to hear.”

And He didn’t stop there.

Later that evening, my wife — who has walked every step of this 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 saw what I needed. God was not just speaking to me about protection — He was promising presence. Not just shelter, but companionship in trouble. Not just deliverance, but honor. And most tenderly of all, long life — whether in days or eternity — and salvation.

To anyone who is suffering, 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.

Psalm 91 doesn't promise the absence of pain. It promises His presence in it. It promises that when we love Him, when we 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 — I have been given hope. Not wishful thinking, but anchored hope. And I want to pass that on to you.

Because you are not alone.

He is with you.

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No Time For Love

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Saturday, 19 July 2025, 20:06

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In 1973, two social psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson, conducted a study with a title that immediately catches the eye: “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” The title borrows from Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, and the study asks a question as old as that story: why do some people stop to help while others walk by?

Darley and Batson didn’t take their research to a desert road in ancient Judea. They stayed on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary, recruiting students training to become ministers. If anyone should stop to help a stranger, surely it would be them—or so we might think.

The setup was clever and simple. Each student was asked to walk to another building to give a short talk. Some were told the talk would be on job prospects for ministers, others on the parable of the Good Samaritan itself. On the way, each student passed someone slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning—a man clearly in need of help.

The twist? Time pressure. Some students were told they were already late. Others were told they were just on time. A third group was told they had a few minutes to spare. That small variable changed everything.

The results were stark. Of those in a hurry, only 10 percent stopped to help. Of those not rushed, 63 percent did. And what about the topic of their talk? Whether they were about to speak on the Good Samaritan or on ministry careers made little difference. Ironically, some students on their way to deliver a sermon about compassion stepped right over the man in need.

It’s easy to smile wryly at that—but then the discomfort sets in. Isn’t this us? How many times have we passed someone in need, not because we’re heartless, but because we’re in a rush? The world may no longer demand ritual purity as it did for the priest and Levite in Jesus’ story, but it certainly demands efficiency. And in that demand, something gets squeezed out: the space to see, to notice, to care.

What strikes me most is the weak influence of personal disposition on behaviour. Being more “religious” or inwardly spiritual didn’t make much difference. Even preparing a talk on the Good Samaritan wasn’t enough to make someone act like one. That’s a sobering thought. It suggests that moral character on its own is fragile. We like to believe we’re guided by principles, but so often we’re shaped by pressures—the tyranny of the urgent.

For people of faith, this raises uncomfortable questions. If theological training, spiritual reflection, and even preaching on mercy don’t automatically translate into compassionate action, what does? Perhaps the answer is less about what we believe in the abstract and more about the rhythms of our lives. If we never allow margin, if we’re always rushing, the groaning man in the doorway becomes invisible.

Reading about this experiment feels like holding up a mirror. In the past I was part of a religious group where there was always a driving force to do more. I felt Like a whirling Dervish.  I can recall moments when I’ve walked by—not always physically, but emotionally or spiritually. Times when someone near me needed help and I had the words, but not the time. And I wonder if that isn’t the quiet tragedy of our age: not that we don’t care, but that we don’t pause long enough to show it.

And yet there’s hope in these findings too. If environment plays such a big role, then we can shape it. We can slow down. We can create breathing space in our lives. We can choose to look up. Helping behaviour, after all, often begins with something as simple as stopping.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho may have been short, but it revealed everything about the travellers who walked it. In our own modern roads—crowded schedules, relentless alerts, tasks demanding attention—the challenge remains the same. Will we notice? Will we stop?

Darley and Batson’s study is more than an academic exercise. It’s a quiet parable about us. Belief without action is noise. Compassion without time is a dream. And out there, still, are people in doorways, coughing, waiting, hoping someone will care enough to be late.

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Beyond Blame: How Young Men Grow Up

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Saturday, 19 July 2025, 20:05

“Other people are never the problem, although blaming them for your own misery is.”

— Jordan Peterson

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 Beyond Blame: How Young Men Grow Up

There’s a stage in many young men’s lives when the world feels unfair, and somewhere in that tangle of frustration and identity, they turn their eyes back, to childhood, to family, to the parents who raised them, and ask, “Is this their fault?”

It’s an understandable question. For many, the early years weren’t easy. Some fathers were distant or demanding, some mothers overwhelmed or emotionally unreachable. Some homes were fraught with silence, others with shouting. When life in adulthood becomes difficult, when relationships break down, ambition falters, or confidence thins. It's easy to trace the outline of those early years and see failure stamped on every corner. And easier still to assign blame rather than seeing your own faults and failures.

Jordan Peterson has spoken directly to this kind of thinking, particularly among young men who feel unmoored. In one of his many talks, he delivers it plainly: “Other people are never the problem, although blaming them for your own misery is.” It's not that he denies trauma or downplays pain. His point is sharper: staying in the blame keeps you stuck. It puts your life’s steering wheel in someone else’s hands.

That hits a nerve. Because the truth is, blaming your parents feels like doing something—but it achieves nothing. It’s a way to hold the past accountable while avoiding the difficult work of changing the present.

Peterson’s message here isn’t cruel. It’s a call to agency. You may not be responsible for what happened to you, but you are responsible for what happens next. That distinction is everything.

There’s a point when a man has to make peace with his past—not by approving it, but by refusing to be ruled by it. Some never get there. They become experts in pointing backward. They rehearse old grievances until the memory of their father becomes bigger than their own reflection in the mirror. They wait for healing to come from someone else’s apology. But healing doesn’t work like that. Healing begins when you accept that no one else is coming to rescue you—and that you don’t need them to.

Growing up is partly learning that people are flawed. That your parents, however sacred or disappointing, were human beings working with what they had. Sometimes they didn’t know better. Sometimes they did and still failed. But endlessly re-litigating those failures is a poor substitute for growth.

What matters is what you do with the pieces.

You can blame the men before you—or you can become the man you needed them to be.

Responsibility sounds dull compared to the heat of resentment. But responsibility is where the real fire is. It’s where your life begins to take shape on your terms. When you decide to build something better—not out of spite, but out of vision—you become something different. You stop being a reaction and start being a force.

Blame is passive. Ownership is active.

There’s no ceremony for this kind of transition. It’s quiet, private. Often, no one sees it. But the moment you stop fixating on who failed you and start asking what you can do now, something shifts. You move from being a passenger to taking the wheel.

Some carry father wounds for life. But others become fathers themselves—not just biologically, but in the broader sense: creators, mentors, builders of a better legacy. They don’t pretend the past was perfect. They simply stop letting it dictate their future.

Not because it didn’t matter.

But because something else matters more.

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Signals of Hope in Europe’s Apathy

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 18:23

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Signals of Hope in Europe’s Apathy

I remember coming home one quiet Friday evening some years ago and switching on the television. What greeted me was not a blockbuster or a newsflash, but a live broadcast of a train weaving its way from Oslo to Bergen. Just a train, simply moving forward, yet something about it stirred me deeply. Perhaps it was the rhythm of the rails echoing the rhythm of my own memories. I had once lived in Stavanger, and as the Norwegian landscape slipped past the window, I felt something unspoken draw near. A homesickness, not just for a place, but for a time, a life, a self that seemed to hover just beyond the reach of the present.

It happened again, unexpectedly, last Friday. I clicked on YouTube and was met with the sound of praise echoing through Buchanan Street—Glasgow voices joined by Christians from Amsterdam, singing into the bright evening with hearts full of devotion. I’m a non-denominational Christian, cautious of labels and institutions, but this moment transcended categories. It wasn’t about where they were from, or which group they belonged to. It was the spirit behind the song; the courage to lift their voices in public, to speak of something higher in a world so often pinned down by cynicism.

There’s something holy about this uninvited moment that arrived without fanfare. A street chorus. They pierce the ordinary with hints of the eternal, small signals in the fog reminding us of we’re not alone, and that faith—quiet, personal, and sometimes faltering—is still strong enough to sing in the open air.

We’re all on a journey. Sometimes we travel by train, sometimes by memory, and sometimes by spirit. But every so often, grace appears in the window or at the street corner, and we remember who we are and where we’re going.

 

LIVE Glasgow, Scotland · Presence Worship on the Streets · Worship and Prayer at Buchanan Street

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The Father Wound

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 18:25

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The Father Wound

I have yet to meet someone who does not carry, in some form, a scar shaped like their father.

Some wear it openly and rich with exaggeration and embellishment  — an ache wrapped in anger or longing. Others tuck it away, quiet and folded like an old letter never sent. But it is there. Behind the eyes of grown men who still seek approval. Beneath the strength of women who learned early to protect their hearts. In the silence between generations, where things are felt but never said.

There is something universal about father wounds. They are not always born of cruelty. More often, they arise from absence — of words, of warmth, of presence. Even in homes where the father stayed, there are many ways a man can be gone.

Part of the weight lies in what the father represents. Across cultures and centuries, “Father” has not only been a man but a metaphor — for authority, protection, provision, and identity. In scripture, God is called Father. In myth, the patriarch is the one who bestows names, blessing, and land. He is the one we turn to, or run from, or try to become. Or, failing all that, the one we write about when we finally find the words.

No man can bear that symbolic weight. To be called ‘Father’ is to be cast in a role written by divine hands and performed by mortal ones; imperfect and flawed. Is it any wonder so many stumbles under its gravity? This is more acute when a child is sensitive. 

And so the ache passes down. Generation to generation. A man unloved becomes a father unsure of how to love. A boy raised on correction but starved of affection may either repeat the pattern or break under the strain of resisting it. Even the most tender-hearted father wrestles with the tension between authority and gentleness, between providing and being present. And many father complainers who become fathers learn this lesson. A man once said, "I let my son do as he wishes." But this came back to bite when the son's life spiralled into depression through wrong decisions  and later said to his father, "Why didn't you guide me?"

These days there are many fathers walk out in their marriages and leave a child feeling lost and confused. This produces mental and emotional scars that live with them for eternity. My father closed his eyes in my early teens and I know that pain.

Sons often grow up trying to earn their father's blessing, even if it was never offered. Daughters may grow up seeking the kind of safe embrace that protects without control. Both may enter adulthood still reaching for a word that was never spoken: You are enough.

Some of us spiritualize this longing, casting our eyes upward. We learn to speak of God as Father — a perfect parent who sees, knows, and understands. And yet even here the wounds speak. Many find it hard to trust a heavenly Father when their earthly one was distant, angry, or absent. The metaphors of scripture are not always healing at first. They must be lived into, slowly, like sunlight warming a long-shadowed room.

What does it mean, then, to grow beyond the wound?

If the ache is universal, so too is the hope of healing. Our stories need not end where they began. For many, healing comes slowly through self analysis and re-parenting the child within. For some, it comes in becoming a better father — or even a spiritual father — to others.

And for others still, it comes with the quiet conviction that we are not alone. That the One who called himself “Abba” meets us in our longing. Not with judgment, but with presence. Not with law, but with love.

No father can be perfect. But in the ache left behind, there is a strange kind of invitation — to look  inward, and forward. 

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Boots of Hope

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Thursday, 17 July 2025, 09:28

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Boots of Hope

They sit quietly behind glass in Paisley Museum—two small, leather boots scuffed at the toe, the laces thin and frayed like breath on a frosted window. If you didn't know, you'd pass them by. Just another display. Just another lost pair.

But they belonged to a child who never came home from the Glen Cinema.

It was Hogmanay, 1929. The cinema had been packed with over 700 children, excited to see the afternoon matinee. Some were given the day’s fare as a treat from their parents, others had gathered coins from neighbours, eager to escape the grey drizzle of the town for the silver light of the screen. No one foresaw the horror to come. When smoke began to rise from the projection room, panic swept the theatre. The doors, in a cruel twist, opened inward. Children pushed, stumbled, fell. Seventy-one never rose again.

These boots tell none of that story outright. They do not scream or accuse. They are too small for that. But they whisper. They whisper of a child once clothed and kissed and coaxed out the door by a mother who tied those laces tight. They speak of life—unfinished, interrupted, innocent.

And yet, here they are. Still standing. Quiet testimony not only to what was lost, but to what refuses to be forgotten.

We live in a world that often feels the same, fragile, breathless, absurd. We, too, are pushed by unseen forces, unsure of the exits. But somehow, amid tragedy, the human soul clings to meaning. We keep small boots. We build museums. We write names on walls. We gather memory like firewood against the cold.

Because we believe, sometimes dimly, sometimes defiantly that life matters. That every child matters. That we are more than breath and bone.

These little boots, mute as they are, proclaim what the world so often denies: that even in horror, love survives. And that one day, perhaps beyond time itself, the lost will be found and the trampled will rise.

And the laces will be untied.

And the child will run again.

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I’ll Be Waiting

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 15:14

 

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 After a busy morning yesterday, I decided I deserved the afternoon off. I sat in front of YouTube, allowing it to numb me. I was barely paying attention when the algorithm threw me a curveball, one that carried me straight back to the seventies.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I once worked night shifts in the Safeway supermarket on Paisley Road West. One morning, after finishing work, I wandered into Glasgow for no particular reason. As I passed Midland Street, a haunting piece of music drifted from a record shop. It was called Daybreak by an Irish group named Horslips. I walked straight in and bought it.

Back on the nightshift, I would play it over the public address system. My colleagues heard it too, and soon they were buying the album for themselves.

Their next album, The Man Who Built America, ended—if I remember rightly—with a melancholic track called I’ll Be Waiting. It’s a song about migration and It always made me feel strangely lonely, as though I were standing at the end of something.

Yesterday, that very song emerged on YouTube, this time played with the Ulster Orchestra. Some songs aren’t merely heard—they’re imprinted. They lie dormant for years, like seeds scattered across the soul in youth, waiting for time and experience to crack them open. Then, suddenly, decades later, a familiar melody resurfaces—not as background music, but as a key turning in the lock of memory.

In that moment, you’re no longer the age you are. You’re every age you’ve ever been. The tune becomes a threshold, transporting you back to a room you forgot you once inhabited, or to a version of yourself long buried beneath the sediment of years.

But it’s more than memory. It’s a kind of existential vertigo. Because the music doesn’t just bring the past forward—it reveals the distance travelled. It highlights the ache of transience. The weight of being. It reminds you that once, you felt everything with raw immediacy—and that now, you live with the knowledge you will never be that unguarded again.

This is nostalgia not as sentimentality, but as spiritual gravity—a longing for something both lost and eternal. The music becomes the ghost of your former self, and you find yourself mourning not only what was, but what could have been. It’s as if the soul remembers something the mind cannot articulate. I find it faith strengthening; a sense that life is more than chronology, and that these echoes from the past are proof we were meant to be more than dust and decay.

And so, you listen again. Not for pleasure alone, but for anchorage. Because in a world where everything changes, the song still plays—and in it, for a moment, so do you.

I’ll Be Waiting Horslips "I'll Be Waiting"

Tell me dear reader, do you share my sentiment? Share your comment in the comments box 

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Nostalgia and the Glasgow Joke

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 09:39

 

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Hey Mister? 

I heard a joke recently that took me back to childhood.

I was brought up on Copeland Road in Govan. On Saturdays, when Glasgow Rangers were at home, my pals and I would make a few shillings offering to watch visitors’ cars parked along the street.

A simple “Hey Mister, can I watch your car?” usually did the trick. Most folk handed over a shilling—or a half-crown on a good day—perhaps feeling slightly threatened by the idea of a ten-year-old damaging their car if they refused. But that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted a bit of extra pocket money, especially when the Friday-night allowance from my parents had already been squandered at the pictures.

That was my childhood motivation to earn.

I saw similar scenes years later in the Philippines. In Manila, young, shoeless kids would act as jeepney barkers and waving down  passing taxis for guests as  left the hotel. They’d receive a tip from both the driver and the customer. On the motorways, when the traffic ground to a halt—and it often did—kids would appear selling snacks or offering to clean your windscreen. I saw the same in Rome, too.

But I digress.

Back to the joke that kicked this all off.

A match was about to start at Ibrox. A wee street kid said,
“Hey Mister, can I look after your car?”

The man replied, “D’you see that Rottweiler in the back seat? Go near that car and he’ll bite your head off.”

As the man walked away, the kid shouted,
“Hey Mister—can your dug put oot fires?”

(Translated : Hey Mister, can your dog extinguish fires.) 

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Broken-hearted

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday, 21 July 2025, 14:40

 

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Dear Friend,

My wife and I met you sitting on a park bench. At first you seemed happy, but you revealed you were depressed. You cried. You were heartbroken.

When your heart is broken, and the world feels suddenly unfamiliar, it’s hard to think clearly. I want to say that gently, because I know you’re hurting. It’s not that you don’t want to move forward or find peace. It’s that pain has a way of clouding everything. Grief and confusion sit like fog in the mind, and when you’re in that place, wise decisions can feel out of reach.

You’ve loved someone deeply, and they have not returned that love. That is a kind of sorrow many know, but few talk about. It leaves you vulnerable, not just emotionally, but spiritually too. You may question your worth, your choices, even your identity. You may replay moments, imagine different outcomes, and feel drawn again and again to their world, hoping something might change.

Please hear this with kindness: this is not weakness. This is human. When love is unreturned, we sometimes hold on more tightly, hoping to rewrite the ending like its some kind of romance novel. But that kind of holding on keeps us from healing. It keeps us from living fully in the present and from seeing ourselves as we truly are.

You are not unloved. Though this one person did not love you back, there is a love greater still, and it does not change or falter. The Bible speaks of “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation.” That is a promise. Not a quick solution or a call to suppress your feelings, but a reminder that God sees you. He understands the pain of rejection. He knows what it is to love and not be loved in return. And He is near to the broken-hearted.

Let Him be near to you now.

There will come a time when your mind is clearer, and your steps feel more sure. But for now, give yourself grace. Don’t rush the process. Be honest with your emotions. Cry if you need to. Rest when you can. And gently, little by little, try to turn your gaze away from what has hurt you and toward what heals.

You are more than this heartbreak. One day you will look back and see how far you’ve come. You will feel joy again. You will love again. And next time, you will be loved in return.

With care and quiet strength,

Your friends.

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What Did C.S Lewis Mean by "Joy"?

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Thursday, 17 July 2025, 11:20

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The Ache of Joy

Joy is one of the most abused words in the English language. It’s been flattened and repurposed to describe the trivial: a joyride, a joystick, a throwaway feeling. But true Joy—if we’ve ever known it—cannot be summoned at will. It comes like a ghost, or grace. And when it does, it leaves us changed.

The old Gaelic phrase Tìr an Aigh means “Land of Joy.” It speaks not of this world’s fleeting highs but of something promised. A paradise. A homeland of the soul. You’ll find the phrase buried in hymns and sung in Highland verse—an echo of a people who knew what it was to long for something more, something better than here.

C.S. Lewis understood this longing. He called it Joy, but made it clear it was not the same as happiness or pleasure. It was a desire for something we can’t name—a glimpse of Eden, a pull from beyond the veil. He tells of standing beside a flowering currant bush one summer and being struck—not by memory, exactly, but by a longing for a memory, a desire for something he couldn’t hold. “It was a sensation,” he writes, “of desire; but desire for what?” The moment passed, as such moments do. And yet the longing remained—more desirable than the fulfilment of any earthly wish.

I have felt it, too. Often in the quiet, in the ordinary—a shaft of sunlight across the sea, the cry of geese across an autumn sky, a line from a song that stirs tears from nowhere. It arrives, unbidden and unsought, and disappears before we can catch our breath. What remains is not disappointment, but longing. A yearning for the yearning.

That, I believe, is a mercy.

Because this longing is a signpost. It tells me that the world is not enough. That the brokenness and beauty we live with every day are not the whole story. That Joy, in its true form, is not of this world. Not yet.

The day will come when the door that lets in those sudden shafts of light will open wide. When heaven and earth are no longer estranged but unified under Christ Jesus. When the ache is answered. When the glimpse becomes the landscape. When the memory we never knew we had becomes our eternal home.

That is Tìr an Aigh. That is Joy.

And we are not wrong to long for it.

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It's How They Do It in the Philippines

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 08:04

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It's How They Do It in the Philippines

I was in the Philippines some years back and two friends from my future wife’s congregation once took us on a trip to Pagudpud, up in the north of the Philippines. On the way back, we stopped at a roadside market where vendors were selling freshly barbecued fish—caught that morning from the sea.

After some friendly haggling, my Filipino friend managed to buy a whole tuna, about the length of my arm, for around £3. I stared at it, impressed.

“So… what do we do now?” I asked.

“We take it to the restaurant,” he said casually.

“You mean—what, just walk in with some tuna?”

“It’s no problem.”

A short drive later, we pulled up at a small local restaurant. My friend handed over the fish and asked them to cook up some rice, vegetables, and drinks to go with it. A little while later, we were sitting down to a feast.

That’s just how they do it in the Philippines.

I can’t imagine trying the same in the UK; just walking into a restaurant with a fish under your arm and asking them to cook it with a side of rice and greens.

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Why Be Unhappy

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 20 July 2025, 18:27

You need to turn from your past,

and you need to pray

 that the Lord will forgive

 the evil intent of your heart.

Acts 2:22

The Voice Bible

                                                   

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Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald stands out as a figure given to evil—racist, adulterous, arrogant, and proud. He believes in his own superiority, though it is ultimately superficial and performative. He ruins lives yet remains unrepentant and blind to his own moral decay. But this is only fiction, right? And yet, behind every story there are truths played out by the human race. 

There’s a quiet sorrow in living a life that feels off-course. You may not admit it out loud, but something gnaws at you in the early hours or when you’re alone with your thoughts. Perhaps you’ve carried anger too long. Perhaps you’ve nurtured resentment, or worse, justified it. You might even feel the world owes you something, a debt for your pain, your struggle, your story.

But what if that belief is untrue?

What if, deep down, you’ve been hiding from something more difficult to face: the harm you’ve caused, the mistakes you’ve buried, the sense of entitlement you never earned? Maybe a parent overindulged you, perhaps with good intentions. But somewhere along the way, you came to believe that others should bend to your desires, that your pain justified badness. That your privilege was proof of worth.

But true worth isn’t inherited. It isn’t given. It’s forged, by how we treat others, how we respond when we are wrong, how we grow from the truth instead of running from it.

And the truth is this: you cannot be happy while hiding from yourself.

The world does not owe us peace when we have withheld it from others. It cannot gift us joy when we trade in bitterness. And worst of all, we cannot stand tall before God while clinging to a heart that harbours hatred, manipulation, or unrepented harm.

But this is not the end. This moment—right now—can be the beginning of something far better.

You were made for more. Not for secrets, not for self-deception, not for a shallow sense of superiority. You were made to love and be loved. To be at peace with God and at peace with your neighbour. And yes, even to forgive yourself once you’ve truly faced what needs to be faced.

The Bible says God is near to the broken-hearted (Psalm 34:18). That includes those broken by their own doing. It is not weakness to weep for what you’ve done, it’s the first step to becoming whole.

You cannot rewrite your past, but you can change your course. You can own your wrongs. You can apologize, even if forgiveness isn’t granted. You can stop blaming others and start becoming the person you were always meant to be.

This journey requires humility. It requires honesty. But it also offers something incomparable: peace of mind, and the quiet joy of a life lived right.

Don’t wait for the world to change. Change your heart. Change your path. And you will find that happiness, the real kind, the kind that holds up even in storms, has been waiting for you all along.

God has not given up on you. Don’t give up on yourself. Today is a good day to begin again.

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

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Here I Stand, in Scandinavia

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday, 14 July 2025, 09:59

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Here I Stand in Scandinavia

I must have been twelve or thirteen when my music teacher wheeled the record player into our classroom and dropped the needle onto something that would stay with me all my life. The music of Edvard Grieg, and later Sibelius, came spilling out—strange, haunting, majestic. It wasn’t just sound. It was a feeling. As the notes of Morning Mood drifted through the room, I felt something stir, something I couldn’t name then. A kind of ache. A homesickness for a place I’d never been.

That place was Scandinavia.

At the time, I didn’t understand why the music moved me so deeply. I only knew that it reached into some forgotten room of my soul and opened the window wide. The vast fjords, the northern lights, the snow-covered pines—I hadn’t seen them, but I had. I carried them inside me like a memory from another life.

Years later, I found listened carefully to the lyrics of their song, Scandinavia, that gave words to that childhood ache: Scandinavia. I listened and was undone. “Here we stand in Scandinavia,” it begins, a simple line, yet one that placed me not just on a map, but in a moment. A moment thick with memory and mystery.

The song isn’t about tourism. It’s not about hiking trails or Viking museums. It’s about something far deeper: the longing for belonging. A yearning not just for a land, but for a homeland of the soul.

"We watched it rise / In morning skies of fire and wine / The boats that carried us / Young golden lives / Leaving on a rising tide…"

That verse brought back so much. Youth. Departure. The feeling of setting out, wide-eyed, onto life’s open sea, hoping the tide will carry you to meaning, to love, to purpose. But perhaps we’re all really searching for one thing: home.

And not necessarily the one we were born into.

The phrase that haunts the chorus—"Here we stand"—is both declaration and confession. We’re standing, yes. But where? In a landscape that both is and isn't ours. Scandinavia becomes symbolic. A place of memory, of spiritual resonance. Not a destination on a cruise itinerary, but a metaphor for something higher, purer, more eternal ; the soul's destiny.

Here the song becomes prayer. The kind of prayer you whisper without realizing it’s a prayer at all. It’s the kind of longing that can’t be satisfied by geography or even human love. It’s the ache that C.S. Lewis once called “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

That’s what Grieg's music stirred in me all those years ago. And what Runrig reawakened. I see now that what I felt wasn’t just homesickness for Norway or Finland—it was homesickness for another world entirely. The kind of world that Isaiah spoke of when he wrote of deserts blooming and swords beaten into ploughshares. A world where the cold ache of separation is finally healed.

I’ve come to believe that this deep yearning we carry—the one we find in art, music, poetry—is not weakness. It’s not sentimentalism. It’s evidence. Evidence that we are made for something more. For a Kingdom that is not of this world, yet not far from any one of us.

The songwriter of Scandinavia, like many poets and musicians before him, touches something eternal. And like a poem, it becomes part of the reader who engages with it. The listener is drawn into the same river of longing. That current, which begins in the soul, runs through every human heart and finds its source not in nostalgia, but in promise.

“There’s nothing new beneath the sun,” the song says, echoing Ecclesiastes. And it’s true. This yearning isn’t new. But it’s fresh each time we feel it. Every time music moves us, or a northern sky takes our breath away, or a word of Scripture stirs our spirit—we are reminded. We are not yet home.

But we will be.

And in the meantime, here we stand—in Scandinavia, or wherever our feet happen to be—hearts tuned to the music of another world.

Scandinavia: Runrig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8xczE0TOU

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Jim McCrory

A Quart of Wheat for a Denarius

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 13 July 2025, 11:11

"A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius,

and do not harm the oil and wine." — Revelation 6:6 (BSB)

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A Quart of Wheat for a Denarius

L. P. Hartley once wrote in The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
We like to think we've moved on. In our modern age of data, satellites, and instant answers, we walk with the confident gait of the enlightened. We scoff at ancient rituals and mock the gods of the past, shaking our heads at how gullible people once were. But are we so different?

There is a god that has followed us through the ages.
Mamona (מָמוֹנָא), the Aramaic term from long ago, still breathes beneath our economies and ambitions. It doesn’t ask for incense or chanting—it demands loyalty through greed, shortcuts, deception, and exploitation.
We see its influence in the trader who overcharges, the builder who cuts corners, the salesman who promises what he cannot deliver. It's there in the man who robs his own grandmother of her savings, in the corrupt politician whose pockets are full while his conscience is empty, in the corporations lobbying against climate action while the planet burns.

Mamona—money, wealth, greed—has become more than currency. It is a spirit. A force. A false god.
No wonder it’s listed among the great powers that corrupt. No wonder Revelation paints a chilling picture of its grip:
"A quart of wheat for a denarius..."—a day’s wages for a single meal—while the wealthy plead, "Do not harm the oil and wine."
The poor are left to starve; the rich fear for their luxuries.

Is it any different today? We switch on the news and see children with hollow eyes and empty bowls, their faces swarmed by flies. Meanwhile, markets fret over fine wine and artisanal produce. We live in a world where food is a commodity, not a right, and Mamona is the name we dare not speak.

But it’s not too late to think again.
What if we turned our backs on this false god? What if we loosened its grip on our hearts and lifted our eyes to something higher—compassion, justice, mercy? What if, instead of guarding the oil and wine, we poured it out for others?

The past may be a foreign country. But the future is ours to shape. Let us not bow to Mamona. Let us choose love.

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Jim McCrory

The Soft Glow of Natsukashii

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 13 July 2025, 11:14

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The Soft Glow of Natsukashii

The brain has that ability to through us curve balls. This morning as I woke, a sweet little memory popped out of nowhere. We were eleven. Declan and I went to see a film called The Perils of Pauline (1967) in the Plaza Cinema in Govan, Glasgow. We were both quiet boys, reflective types who didn’t say much to each other on the walk home. But the next evening, he asked, “What do you want to do? Shall we go back and see the movie?”

And so, we did, every evening that week.

The truth was, we were both smitten with the actress, though neither of us dared admit it. That kind of confession was too delicate, too exposing, for two young boys navigating the cusp of adolescence.

I remembered it this morning at six, as I read about the Japanese word natsukashii—a word that holds the warmth of cherished memories, the kind that rise unexpectedly, like mist from the fields, softening everything they touch.

 

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Jim McCrory

The Currency of Kindness

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday, 15 July 2025, 11:32

Whoever cares for the poor makes a loan

 to the Eternal;

    such kindness will be repaid in full 

and with interest.

Proverbs 19:17

The Voice Bible

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The Currency of Kindness

I’m sitting in my car tonight and  watching people come and go, as a young man holds out his cup, hoping for a little help. He isn’t drunk or high. That’s clear. But as evening begins to settle, there’s an urgency in his voice — a quiet desperation — as he tries to gather the £20 or so he needs for a bed in the hostel before nightfall.

It’s 31 degrees in Scotland today — a rare, baking heat — and he’s been sitting there for hours in the blistering sun. Some passers-by drop coins into his polystyrene cup. Others walk past, eyes averted. But it’s not enough. You can see the despair in the lines etched on his face.

We so easily make excuses: “He’s probably an addict,” we say, or, “It’s their own fault.” And just like that, we talk ourselves out of compassion. But tell me — if someone is willing to sit for hours in that heat, humbling themselves for the chance of a bed and a shower, how can we justify walking by?

Many young people find themselves in desperate situations through no fault of their own. Life can unravel quickly. A home lost. A relationship broken. A support system gone. Sometimes, all that stands between someone and despair is a kind stranger.

We don’t give to feel good, albeit we do. We don’t give for that adrenalin rush; we don’t give to obtain kudos from God. We give because we are part of a human race that has the quality of selfless love. But in that act of unselfish love, God is in our debt. Try and get your head around that promise from God.

Whoever cares for the poor makes a loan to the Eternal;
    such kindness will be repaid in full and with interest.

Proverbs 19:17

The Voice

 

The Voice (VOICE)

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

 

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And They All Lived Happily Ever After: The Dénouement

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Edited by Jim McCrory, Sunday, 13 July 2025, 11:30

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And They All Lived Happily Ever After: The Dénouement

One of the most enduring gifts my father left me before he passed away was the joy of books. Not just the stories themselves, but the happiness and hope they could carry—sometimes when you needed it most.

I grew up in Govan, a shipyard town in Glasgow. I must have been about seven when I wandered into The Modern Book Shop, a quiet little place that sold second-hand books and comics. That day, a book’s cover caught my eye. Something about the image pulled me in. I opened it and read the first lines of the first chapter:

"Now it happened that Mr Cherry, the carpenter, found a piece of wood that laughed and cried like a child."

And just like that, I was in. The story of Pinocchio had begun.

We all know the tale, how a wooden puppet longs to become a real boy. But do you remember how it ends?

After being lied to, tricked, nearly killed, and running from every bit of responsibility, Pinocchio changes. He begins to care. He sacrifices. He works hard. He chooses love and duty over selfishness. And in doing so, he transforms—not just in form, but in spirit. He wakes up human, and the puppet body is left behind, useless now. He says:

"How funny I was when I was a puppet! And how glad I am that I’ve become a real boy!"

It’s the classic “happily ever after.” But it’s more than that.

Every powerful story follows this same shape—the hero’s journey. Something breaks. Things go wrong. The hero struggles, fails, grows. And eventually, there’s a resolution. A turning point. A moment of justice. We need that resolution. Without it, stories feel incomplete—like the soul of the tale was stolen.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s more than a comforting thought. It speaks to something we instinctively understand we live in a moral universe. And our stories—especially the ones that endure—reflect that.

Imagine if the Fairy had turned Pinocchio back into a block of wood. If everything he had learned, all the growth and love and sacrifice, had been erased. We would have closed the book angry. Empty. Betrayed. Because stories aren’t just entertainment. They’re mirrors of something bigger.

Take the Bible, for example. In Genesis, humanity is given a task: to make the earth a paradise. Then, everything breaks. Pain enters. Struggle begins. But it doesn’t end there. Jesus steps in, offering hope, offering restoration. “You will be with me in paradise,” he promises. And in Revelation, that promise comes full circle into the dénouement :

“See, the home of God is with His people.
He will live among them;
They will be His people,
And God Himself will be with them.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
Mourning no more, crying no more, pain no more,
For the first things have gone away.”

The Voice Bible

This is the ultimate dénouement. Paradise lost, paradise regained.

So maybe the reason we crave resolution in stories is because, deep down, we’re wired for one ourselves. We believe that wrongs can be righted. That the struggle means something. That even in the darkest chapters, the ending is worth waiting for.

That’s the legacy my father left me. A quiet kind of faith hidden in the pages of a second-hand book.

Scripture taken from The Voice™. Copyright © 2012 by Ecclesia Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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