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The Happiness Evil Cannot Give

In my early morning today with the Word of God, I became fixed upon a single proverb:

“Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all things.” — Proverbs 28:5

My first instinct might easily have been the instinct of most of us: Well, I am not an evil man.

The word “evil” immediately summons people worse than ourselves. We think of the cruel, the violent, the corrupt and the obviously wicked. Whatever else Proverbs 28:5 might be saying, surely it is talking about them.

But perhaps that instinct itself should make us stop.

Psychologists speak of what is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.” Applied to ourselves, it describes our rather endearing—and sometimes dangerous—tendency to rate ourselves more favourably than is warranted. Most of us find it easier to recognise selfishness, prejudice, pride and questionable motives in other people than in ourselves.

Then we encounter the Hebrew word translated “evil” in Proverbs 28:5.

It is raʿ (רַע), a wonderfully uncomfortable little word. It can certainly describe what is wicked or evil, but its range is broader: that which is bad, harmful, disagreeable, morally wrong or injurious. Suddenly it becomes harder to keep the proverb at a comfortable distance.

The question is not simply, Am I an evil person. It is this: What is there within me that bends away from the good?

And now the proverb becomes intensely personal.

Its remarkable claim is that evil does not merely affect our behaviour; it affects our judgment. “Evil men understand not judgment.” The Hebrew word translated “judgment,” mishpat, carries the idea of justice, right judgment, what is fitting and what ought to be.

In other words, our moral condition affects our ability to see.

That is a profound observation about human nature. We like to imagine ourselves as detached judges of reality, calmly examining evidence and reaching rational conclusions. But human beings are not quite like that. Our reasoning travels in company with our desires. We are remarkably good at finding reasons for believing that the thing we want is also the thing we ought to have.

Greed can rename itself ambition. Pride can masquerade as self-respect. Resentment can call itself justice. Selfishness can present itself as freedom. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the moral compass moves.

And this matters enormously because we are all searching for essentially the same country. Namely, Happiness.

We may give it different names—peace, fulfilment, success, love, contentment—but behind so much human activity lies the hope that somewhere ahead there is a life worth having.

Here Proverbs 28:5 contains a warning of extraordinary importance. If evil distorts judgment, then evil may distort our understanding of happiness itself.

Imagine a traveller whose compass is gradually becoming unreliable. He desperately wants to reach home. He walks faster, works harder and covers enormous distances. His problem is not lack of sincerity or effort. His problem is that the instrument by which he determines direction is pointing away from his destination.

There is something like this in the relationship between goodness and happiness.

We may seek happiness through wealth and gradually become incapable of saying “enough.” We may seek it through admiration and become dependent upon the opinions of others. We may seek it through sexual gratification while damaging our capacity for faithful intimacy. We may seek freedom by avoiding obligation and eventually discover that the deepest friendships are built precisely upon loyalty, sacrifice and commitment.

Evil offers us the fruit while quietly taking an axe to the tree.

This is why goodness and happiness may be much more intimately connected than our culture sometimes imagines. Goodness is not merely the entrance fee God demands before allowing us to be happy. Goodness may describe the very kind of creature a human being must increasingly become in order to experience the deepest forms of happiness.

The grateful person can enjoy what he possesses. The generous person can delight in another’s flourishing. The humble person does not have to win every comparison. The forgiving person is gradually released from the exhausting task of carrying yesterday’s injuries. The faithful person can enter the extraordinary security of being deeply known and deeply trusted.

Virtue enlarges our capacity for certain kinds of joy.

And vice does the opposite.

Envy makes another person’s happiness painful to us. Greed makes “enough” perpetually inaccessible. Pride turns other people into competitors. Lust can turn persons into objects. Resentment permits someone who injured us years ago to continue occupying rooms within our hearts.

The terrible possibility is that evil does not merely prevent us from obtaining happiness. It can damage the person who must experience happiness.

And then comes the glorious second half of the proverb:

“But they that seek the LORD understand all things.”

Notice the word seek. It does not say that those who seek God already possess perfect understanding. They are travellers too. They can make mistakes, take wrong turns and misunderstand the landscape.

But their compass is continually being brought back to true north.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest lessons of Proverbs 28:5. In the great human race for happiness—indeed, for eternal happiness—the first question is not simply, How quickly am I travelling? Nor even, How happy do I feel at this moment?

The greater question is:

What direction am I becoming pointed in?

For if God is the source of goodness, truth, love and ultimately happiness itself, then seeking Him is not a diversion from the human search for happiness.

It is the recalibration of the compass by which we hope to find it.

The Universe Does Not Owe Us Simplicity

The world presents us with great mysteries, and strangely enough, we learn to live with them. Consciousness is one. We experience it every waking moment, yet what consciousness actually is remains profoundly difficult to explain. Time is another. Why does time seem to have a direction, carrying us relentlessly from yesterday into tomorrow? Then there are the quiet mysteries of mathematics. Why is two plus two four? Human beings discovered this truth, but we did not invent the reality behind it. Long before anyone scratched numbers onto stone or paper, two stars added to two stars still made four.

Last year I was sitting in an outdoor café on one of the Scottish islands when I fell into conversation with a physicist. Before long we found ourselves talking about quantum entanglement. It is one of creation’s strangest discoveries. Two particles can become linked in such a way that they have to be described as parts of a single quantum state, even when separated by enormous distances. Measurements reveal correlations between them that cannot be explained by imagining that each particle simply carried a set of hidden instructions from the beginning. Yet this does not allow a usable message to travel instantaneously between them.

There is something wonderfully unsettling about this; "Spooky" said Einstein. At the quantum level, nature refuses to behave according to the common sense we have acquired from living among tables, trees, stones and teacups. Reality is stranger than our everyday intuition tells us it ought to be. The universe does not owe us simplicity.

And this brings me to God.

If God is the creator of this astonishing universe, then all its mysteries ultimately exist within a reality known to him. Yet we human beings continually try to understand God, and there is nothing wrong with that. The desire to understand is one of the beautiful things about us. The difficulty begins when we imagine that God must fit neatly inside the categories our minds have constructed.

Christians themselves have wrestled with this for centuries. Jehovah’s Witnesses distinguish Jehovah from Jesus in a way traditional Trinitarian Christianity does not. Presbyterians, along with most historic Christian traditions, confess Jesus as truly divine, while Christadelphians understand him differently again. These differences are significant, and I am not pretending they do not matter. I am simply saying that a person opening the Bible for the first time need not solve every one of them before being allowed to enjoy the extraordinary story unfolding before them.

Read the Bible first. Let it surprise you.

As you read, you will encounter passages in which God the Father is in heaven while Jesus is walking the dusty roads of Galilee. You will see Jesus praying to the Father, loving the Father and obeying the Father. You will encounter moments in which Jesus speaks of things known by the Father that he himself does not know. Then you will turn another page and find astonishing language applied to Jesus. You will find people worshipping him. You will encounter the mysterious declaration that the Word was with God and that the Word was God, followed by the even more startling claim that this Word became flesh and lived among us.

Then Paul adds another piece to the mystery. He describes Christ as existing in the form of God and yet emptying himself, taking the form of a servant and entering fully into human life. Suddenly the reader is faced with something far larger than a tidy religious formula. God is not becoming easier to put into a box. He is becoming harder.

That need not frighten us. It can be exhilarating.

Think about something much simpler. Can God hear two hundred Christians praying at the same moment? Most believers would answer yes without hesitation. What about two million? What if they are scattered across every continent, praying in hundreds of languages? We do not imagine God frantically switching his attention from London to Lagos, from a hospital room in Glasgow to a kitchen table in Sydney. We instinctively understand that God does not experience presence and attention with the limitations that govern us.

So why should we be astonished when the Bible presents us with a God whose existence exceeds our ordinary categories?

Can God be present in heaven and make himself known on earth? If he created space, why should space imprison him? If he created time, why should time contain him in the way it contains us? If the deepest levels of his creation already overturn our everyday intuitions about distance, matter and relationship, should we expect the Creator himself to be less mysterious than the universe he made?

This is not an attempt to use quantum physics to prove the nature of God. Physics cannot do that. Proton entanglement does not prove the Trinity, nor can a laboratory tell us who Jesus is. The point is simpler and, I think, more beautiful: reality has already taught us some humility. Things can be true without being easy to picture.

We are very small creatures attempting to understand the One who, according to the Bible, called the universe into existence. At times I imagine us like ants living inside a little box in a garden shed. The ants might become remarkably knowledgeable about their box. They could map every corner and examine every grain of dust. Yet beyond the box is the shed, beyond the shed is the garden, beyond the garden are towns and oceans and continents, and above them is a universe whose immensity they could never imagine.

How much greater might the distance be between our understanding and the fullness of God?

So if you are new to the Bible, do not be discouraged when you encounter something you cannot immediately reconcile. Do not feel that you must arrive armed with a theological system and force every verse into its proper compartment like some kind of theological bento box. Read. Explore. Ask questions. Notice the tensions. Notice the beauty. Notice how often the Bible refuses to reduce God to something comfortably manageable.

There will be time to investigate doctrines and listen to the arguments Christians have made across the centuries. Some of those questions matter deeply and deserve serious thought. But do not let the arguments steal the wonder before you have even encountered it.

Open the Bible and meet its God.

Walk beside Jesus through Galilee. Listen to his words. Watch the way he treats frightened people, outsiders, children, sinners and the self-righteous. Hear him pray to his Father. Stand with the disciples when the storm becomes still. Sit at the table at the Last Supper. Follow the bewildered women to an empty tomb. Let the questions come naturally instead of being afraid of them.

You do not have to understand the ocean before you are allowed to stand on the shore and be amazed by it. In the same way, you do not have to solve the mystery of God before you begin seeking him.

Sometimes wonder is where understanding begins.

The  "Huts", Bogany Farm, circa 1960s AI enhanced

Home, Stars, Milkmaids and Bedouin Shepherd Boys 

Some songs seem to accompany us through life without ever asking to be noticed. We hear them when we are young, carry them somewhere beyond conscious memory, and then, years later, they return. When they do, they bring more than melody. They carry people, places, rooms, weather, and versions of ourselves we had almost forgotten.

Clifford T. Ward’s Home Thoughts from Abroad has always been such a song for me. There is something wonderfully restrained about it. It never reaches for grandeur, yet somehow finds it. Ward, an English schoolteacher before music brought him wider recognition, had a quality that made his songs feel less like performances and more like confidences. When I first heard him, I was young, and although I could not have articulated it then, I sensed that he was not singing at me. He was sharing something, and somewhere between his experience and mine we met.

The title reaches further back, of course, to Robert Browning and his poem Home-Thoughts, from Abroad. Browning writes of England from elsewhere, noticing the things absence has made precious: blossom, birdsong and the coming of spring. It is an old human experience. Distance alters our vision. We begin to see the ordinary things we once overlooked, and a place that scarcely announced itself while we inhabited it can acquire an extraordinary power once we have left.

Maybe that is because home is not merely geography. It is emotional ground. It is the place, or sometimes only the memory of a place, where something within us once settled and said, without words, I belong here.

I found myself thinking about this one Saturday evening while sharing a meal with friends. Among us was a friend from Mongolia, and as she spoke about home, I sensed that she meant something larger than the country marked on a map. It led me afterwards to the Mongolian expression нутгаа санах (nutgaa sanakh), commonly translated as homesickness or longing for one’s homeland. Yet “homesickness” seems too slight a word for what I heard in her conversation. This was closer to a tether: an attachment to homeland that survives distance because the landscape itself has somehow become part of the person.

I found myself envying that certainty. Not Mongolia itself, but the knowledge of where one belongs.

I have never really possessed it. There are places I love deeply. My heart is drawn to the Hebrides and to Norway, and to another place I shall come to, but I did not grow up in any of them. The landscape of my childhood was the heartland of the Clydeside shipbuilding industry, a world shaped more by labour than romance. It was soot, tenements, industry and function. Beauty existed, but you had to know where to look for it.

For me, one of the places where it revealed itself was across the water.

We had a cabin on the Isle of Bute, between Rothesay Golf Course and Bogany Farm, and when the summer holidays arrived, I would spend the full six weeks there. The distance from Clydeside was not enormous, yet to a child it might as well have been another country. Loch Ascog lay on one side, quiet and watchful, while the Firth of Clyde opened towards a horizon that seemed impossibly wide.

Then there were the stars.

City darkness is never truly dark, but on Bute the night seemed to reveal what the city had been hiding. The stars did not merely appear; they cascaded.

My days were spent fishing and wandering with the extravagant aimlessness available to children before we discover schedules. Friendships formed quickly because summer demanded it. We knew, without dwelling on it, that most of us would disappear from one another when the season ended, so we belonged intensely for the little time we had.

The cabin had neither running water nor electricity. One of my daily jobs was to take containers to the communal well. Cows would wander towards me with that peculiar combination of suspicion and curiosity that cows seem to have perfected. The smaller ones sometimes ventured closer, studying me as though I were the unusual animal in the field.

When evening came, we lit paraffin lamps. I can still remember their soft, sibilant sound and the warm, imperfect light they cast across the cabin. My father would read aloud to us: Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese folk stories. We ate pancakes with jam and were given small glasses of stout, which seemed to me less like a drink than participation in some ancient ceremony of adulthood.

As the kerosene burned down, the light softened and the cabin became quieter. Sleep did not arrive abruptly. It gathered around us.

I would lie in bed and look through the window at the stars. The stories my father had read were still alive in my imagination, and I wondered whether somewhere far away a Chinese farmer boy, a Bedouin shepherd or a milkmaid among the Swiss mountains might be looking upwards at the same sky.

I did not have theological language for such thoughts. I was simply a boy staring into the immensity of things. Yet I remember a sense of presence, a feeling that the world was greater, deeper and more mysterious than the visible things immediately around me. Looking back, I think those were among my earliest intimations of God. Nothing was spoken. Nothing needed to be. The stillness itself seemed full.

Then came the part every summer had been quietly moving towards: leaving.

There were bags to pack, the ferry to catch and school waiting on Monday. The wide skies disappeared and the tenements of Clydeside closed around us again. I remember a heaviness that I could not explain. It was not ordinary disappointment at the end of a holiday. It felt more like grief, as though I had left something of myself on the island.

Only by leaving did I begin to understand that the cabins near Bogany Farm had become home.

Not home in the conventional sense. We did not own the landscape and our lives there were temporary. Yet something about those summers felt complete. We needed very little. A paraffin lamp, a fishing rod, a campfire, pancakes, stories, friends and six weeks that seemed capable of lasting forever.

Many years later I encountered a word coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: kenopsia, the eerie atmosphere of a place that was once bustling with life but is now abandoned and quiet.

I knew the feeling immediately.

When I return to Bute and walk the stretch between Bogany Farm and Canada Hill, the world I remember has largely disappeared. Once there were fifty or sixty cabins scattered across the land. Now there is overgrowth. Nettles have reclaimed paths once made by human feet, and the outlines of our little summer civilisation are difficult to find beneath everything that has grown in its place.

The cows still look at me, though now they seem to have a stronger claim on the land than I do. In fairness, they are probably right. I am the visitor now. The landscape continued living while I was away.

Yet I can still populate that empty field.

I can smell barbecue smoke and burnt toast carried on the sea air. I can hear songs around campfires and children calling to one another through the dusk. I can see adults sitting outside their cabins, leaning into the last of the evening sunlight as though unconsciously storing it against the darker months ahead.

Memory cannot be trusted as a perfect historian. It edits, rearranges and softens. It illuminates one corner while leaving another in shadow. The people I remember may not have been quite as carefree as memory makes them, nor every summer day as golden. Childhood was no more immune to disappointment then than it is now.

But memory's failure to reproduce the past exactly does not make it false. Memory tells another kind of truth. It tells us what mattered.

Something about those summers made people seem more open to one another. Time moved differently. Nobody appeared to be measuring every hour for its productivity. There was space to wander, to talk, to sit beside a fire, to watch the sea or to do nothing of consequence at all. For a few weeks each year, ordinary people seemed permitted to inhabit their lives rather than constantly hurry through them.

The cabins are gone now, and most of the voices I associate with them have long since fallen silent. Still, when I walk through that landscape, absence does not feel entirely empty. Places absorb our stories. A path remembers us in its own way, even when grass eventually covers it. A field once filled with laughter cannot literally retain the sound, yet we retain it on the field's behalf.

This is one of the strange gifts of landscape. We imagine ourselves passing through places, but places also pass through us. They become part of our interior geography, and years later a smell, a quality of evening light, a bird call or an old song can suddenly open the door.

Time is cruel in that it takes away the world we knew, but it is generous in another sense. Only after something has gone do we sometimes understand what we were given.

That has changed the way I think about home.

I once imagined home should be the place from which you came, a homeland capable of producing the deep certainty I heard in my Mongolian friend's voice. I do not think that way now. Some people inherit a profound sense of homeland, while others discover home in fragments. It may be scattered across landscapes and years, held in people, rituals, sounds and moments of inexplicable peace.

For me, part of it will always lie on Bute: in the walk to the well, in the suspicious cows, in my father's voice reading by paraffin light, in pancakes and jam, in campfire smoke and in a little boy staring through a cabin window wondering whether children on the other side of the world were looking at the same stars.

I could return to the exact coordinates, but I could never return to that place. Not really. The place I long for exists at the meeting point of landscape and memory, and time has closed the road back to it.

Yet I no longer think that makes it less real.

Home may not always be somewhere we can remain. Sometimes we recognise it only after leaving. Sometimes it survives as a collection of moments in which, for reasons we barely understood at the time, life felt whole.

And sometimes it returns as an old song, heard in youth, carrying us across the years to somewhere we thought we had lost.

One final, rather lovely footnote: five years ago, I met a woman who had been taught English by Clifford T. Ward. Somehow that small connection pleased me enormously. A man whose song had accompanied my memories of home had once stood in an ordinary classroom, teaching English to someone I would eventually meet.

Come Sit With the Creator For a While

Sometime back in the fourth century, a troubled man sat weeping in a garden in Milan. His name was Augustine, and although he would eventually become one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history, at that moment he was simply a man in turmoil, painfully aware of the distance between the life he was living and the life he knew he ought to live.

Then, from a nearby house, he heard the voice of a child repeating a little refrain:

Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege.

“Take up and read. Take up and read.”

Augustine later described the moment in his Confessions. He took the words as an instruction, picked up the Scriptures, and read. What he encountered there became part of the great turning point of his life.

There is something wonderfully simple about those words.

Take up and read.

If you have never read the Bible, or have not opened one for many years, I would like to offer you that same invitation. Not an invitation to understand everything at once, to become religious, or even to settle beforehand what you believe about God. Just take it up and read.

We sometimes imagine the Bible as a distant book: ancient, formidable, filled with unfamiliar names, difficult passages and ideas belonging to another age. Yet the Bible says something rather different about itself:

“Assuredly the word is exceedingly close to you—even in your mouth and your heart—so that you might do it.”

—Deuteronomy 30:14 NKJV

I love that expression: exceedingly close to you.

That is increasingly how I have come to think about the Bible. Not merely as a book to be studied, though it certainly rewards study, but as something close enough to enter the ordinary circumstances of a human life.

In my quiet hours, when I sit with the Bible, my prayer is often very simple: Father, what do you have for me today?

Sometimes I need direction. Sometimes discipline. There are aspects of my personality that still need changing, and occasions when I need the uncomfortable honesty of Scripture rather than reassurance. At other times I come carrying a fear, a disappointment, or something I cannot resolve. I read, and sooner or later a sentence seems to arrest me. I stop. Read it again. Sit with it.

And there it is.

For me, this is not merely an interesting thought from an ancient writer. I receive it as communication from God, meeting me in the circumstances of my life.

Cancer medication sometimes has me awake during the night. Oddly enough, I have come to treasure some of those hours. The house is still, the world seems to have withdrawn for a while, and there is time to read without interruption.

Early this morning, my attention settled on a verse in Psalm 118:

“I called on the LORD in distress;
The LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.”

—Psalm 118:5 NKJV

I stayed there for a while.

Life has many ways of hemming us in. Illness can do it. So can fear. There are pressures outside our control: the unkindness of others, slander and gossip, unhappy relationships, financial worries, loneliness, uncertainty about the future. Then there are the pressures within us, those private struggles that other people may know nothing about.

The writer of the psalm knew that feeling.

The Hebrew language behind his words makes the image especially vivid. The word associated with his distress carries the idea of narrowness or confinement—a tight place, somewhere you can hardly move.

Then comes the answer.

The Hebrew word merḥāḇ means breadth, spaciousness, room.

The movement of the verse is therefore almost physical. The psalmist cries to God from the narrow place, and God answers him in spaciousness.

From confinement into room.

I find that image beautiful because God does not always remove the circumstance that confines us. Some things cannot simply be wished away. I still have cancer. A broken relationship may still be broken tomorrow. Someone who has treated us badly may never apologize. Grief does not obey a timetable.

And yet, in circumstances that have not changed, something within us can.

The walls no longer seem quite so close.

There is room to breathe.

That morning the verse was no longer simply something written by a Hebrew poet thousands of years ago. It had reached across those centuries and entered a quiet room where one man happened to be awake because of his medication.

“The word is exceedingly close to you.”

I thought again of Augustine in his garden and that child’s strange little song drifting over the wall.

Take up and read.

You do not need to approach the Bible with someone else’s certainty. You can bring your questions with you. Bring your doubts too, if you have them. Bring your disappointments, your curiosity, your objections, your hopes, and all the untidy pieces of being human. The Bible is remarkably unafraid of such things. Its pages are populated by frightened people and courageous people, doubters and believers, failures and saints, kings and prisoners, grieving mothers, angry prophets, bewildered disciples and people desperately looking for a way home.

So if there is a Bible somewhere in your house, take it down.

Open it.

You might begin with one of the Gospels and meet Jesus through the recollections of those who knew him. Or begin with the Psalms, where almost every human emotion eventually finds a voice. Do not worry about how much you read. A few verses may be enough.

And before you begin, you might even try the little prayer I use in those quiet hours:

Father, what do you have for me?

Then take up and read.

The book that seems so ancient may turn out to be exceedingly close.

Note

Are you a regular visitor or a new visitor? If so, please drop me a note in private and tell me what articles have appealed to you. You can reach me at JimAlba@proton.me

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Paid in Full

Sometimes people come into our lives who remind us that not everything in this world is negative.

This week, I had my boiler serviced. A next day, the bill arrived. But there was something unusual about it. Where I expected to see an amount owed, it simply said: Paid in Full

I contacted the engineer, assuming there had been a mistake. I told him about it, but his response was simple: “It’s a gift.”

“But I can afford to pay,” I replied.

He wasn’t having it.

During his visit, I had mentioned that I had cancer. He felt that life already presents enough challenges when someone is going through something like that, and he wanted to do something to ease the burden, even if only a little.

It was an extraordinary act of kindness, but it got me thinking about something much bigger.

Some years ago, I was in a European country where a friend of mine visited prisoners in a high-security prison. During one visit, a prisoner asked him a question that has stayed with me.

“I have taken many lives. Will God forgive me?”

We know that feeling when conscience tortures us for our smaller sins.  My friend assured him that if he was truly repentant, God would forgive him.

That is an extraordinary thought, isn’t it?

We all carry a debt. We have all fallen short. We are all sinners. Yet the Christian message is that God did not leave humanity to pay that debt ourselves.

Around two thousand years ago, Christ came into the world and gave His life for the sins of mankind.

As Paul wrote in Colossians 2:

“When you were dead in your trespasses...your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our trespasses, having cancelled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross!”

There is something profoundly beautiful in those words: He cancelled the debt.

The boiler engineer could have sent me a bill. I could have paid it. But instead, he chose to give me a gift.

And that little act of kindness became, for me, a reminder of a far greater gift.

Christ did not merely reduce our debt. He did not ask us to pay what we could and somehow make up the difference ourselves.

He paid it. And He Paid it in Full.

Do You Worry About the World Your Children Are Waking Up To?

I often meet a man who is rebuilding his life after addiction, carrying with him some of the weight of his past. He had often seen me taking old books into the charity shop, and one day he asked me, “Can you recommend a book for me?”

I thought for a moment and handed him My Life as a Dog.

I told him about Ingemar, the young Swedish boy at the heart of the story. His mother is seriously ill, and eventually he has to leave home and live with relatives. Suddenly, he is separated from the people, places and things he loves, without really understanding why any of it is happening.

Ingemar has an unusual way of coping with the things he cannot comprehend. He compares his own troubles with the lives of people and animals around him. He thinks about Laika, the famous dog sent into space, and somehow persuades himself that  his own situation is not quite as terrible as it might be. He uses imagination, humour and stories to make sense of pain that is simply too large for a child to face directly.

He makes mistakes. He gets into trouble. Sometimes he behaves badly. But beneath all of that is a frightened and lonely child, desperately searching for somewhere to belong.

That, I think, is what makes the book so special. It does not pretend that suffering is easy, nor does it suggest that sorrow simply disappears. Instead, Ingemar keeps going. He discovers small islands of friendship, kindness, laughter and hope. Slowly, he begins to understand that even when life takes things away from us, there can still be people who care, and there can still be reasons to carry on.

I told my new friend that the book was really about surviving hard things without losing the part of yourself that can still laugh, love and hope. It is simple, funny, sad and warm. Most importantly, it does not lecture you about how to live. It simply tells a story about a boy trying to find his way through a difficult world. That is why I thought of it for him.

As I walked away, though, my thoughts travelled much further back, to my own school days and the boy I once was.

I was a rough kid growing up on Clydeside, and, if truth be told, I seemed destined for trouble. I was not exactly showing early promise as a future Nobel Prize winner. Then one day a science teacher seemed to recognise something in us that perhaps we did not recognise in ourselves. Rather than trying to turn us into scholars, he taught us how to make fishing rods.

Fishing rods.

It sounds almost absurd when I say it now, but it changed my life.

He took us fishing and, without perhaps knowing the full extent of what he was doing, introduced us to another kind of life. A life where patience mattered. Where you could sit quietly beside a river and watch the water. Where the natural world could occupy your mind and, for a while, the troubles of the world could become wonderfully distant.

Every weekend, Sammy, Tom and I would set off fishing, far away from the Clydeside. I learned how to make lead floats using a potato mould. I learned to tie flies onto hooks. I learned the strange pleasure of simply being still.

Years later, I took my own daughter and her friend camping in Europe, and my son too. I suppose I was passing on something that had first been given to me by a teacher who understood that sometimes the best way to help a young person is not to tell them what they should become, but to open a door into another world.

And that brings me back to the man I met as I was going to the charity shop.

But what does fishing have to do with someone rebuilding his life after addiction?

More than we realise.

Sometimes a person does not need another lecture about the mistakes of the past. Sometimes they need an invitation into a different world.

If you love your children, take them into nature. Take them camping. Take them fishing. Teach them to identify butterflies, build a fire, watch birds, walk through a forest or simply sit beside a river and be quiet. Give them experiences that ask nothing of them except their presence.

Recently, I watched families with children and young people coming down from Scotland's West Highland Way. They were tired, their feet were sore, and they looked as though they had earned every blister. Yet there was something else in their faces. They looked renewed.

The natural world has a way of doing that.

When we step away from the noise, the screens, the pressures and the expectations, we remember something fundamental about ourselves. We remember that we belong to the earth, to one another, and to something larger than our immediate troubles.

And that is what my teacher gave us all those years ago. He gave a few rough boys a fishing rod, but what he really gave us was another possibility. He showed us that there was a world beyond the one we knew.

Sometimes, that is where hope begins.

There are people who help restore us. There are books that open doors. There are rivers that teach us to be still, friends who remind us that we matter, teachers who see possibilities in us before we see them ourselves, and small acts of kindness that quietly tell us there is still a place for us in this world.

And sometimes, God uses all of these things to lead us home.

What is This Dark Place We Have Entered?

Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint.” There is something deeply sobering about those words when we look at the direction of much of modern Western society. When people lose sight of God, they can also lose sight of the deeper meaning of life. The boundaries that once gave moral shape to our lives begin to weaken, and ideas that were once understood as destructive can gradually be presented as expressions of freedom.

Across much of Europe, we seem to be living through a kind of spiritual twilight. Faith is increasingly treated by some as an outdated relic, while unbelief is presented as evidence of intellectual progress. We are encouraged to believe that humanity has finally grown mature enough to live without God, without divine authority and without any fixed moral truth beyond what we choose for ourselves.

But I wonder whether we have confused freedom with independence.

What does freedom really mean if we have no higher purpose? What happens when a human being is told that there is no God, no eternal meaning and no moral reality beyond personal choice? We may call that liberation, but perhaps there is another word for it: being adrift.

It reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone praised the emperor's magnificent clothing because nobody wanted to admit what was plainly before them. The truth was uncomfortable, so people chose to participate in the illusion.

Sometimes our culture can feel like that. Certain ideas are accepted because they are called progressive, even when we have not honestly examined where they lead. We are told that throwing off every restraint is freedom, that rejecting God is enlightenment, and that morality is simply something humanity invents for itself. Yet perhaps we should have the courage to ask whether the emperor is actually wearing any clothes.

The Christian answer is not to respond with anger or contempt. Scripture points us towards something much better.

Micah 6:8 says, “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

There is remarkable simplicity in those words. Justice. Mercy. Humility. These are not the foundations of oppression, but of a truly human society. They remind us that Christianity is not simply about winning arguments against unbelief. It is about learning how to live rightly before God and with one another.

Perhaps Europe does not need another political slogan or another attempt to manufacture meaning from within ourselves. Perhaps what we need is the humility to look beyond ourselves again.

When humanity turns away from God, it may believe it has escaped restraint, but it can also lose its direction. We were never created merely to wander through life choosing our own temporary meanings. We were created for relationship with our Creator.

And perhaps the road out of this darkness begins not with pride, but with humility: to seek God again, to love mercy, to practise justice, and to walk humbly with Him.

I Will Miss This World

On our walks along Scotland’s west coast — something my wife and I have done for years — we often drift into our own quiet worlds. The sea, the sky, the wind off the loch lomond: they create a kind of gentle solitude we share without speaking. On one of those walks, I found myself thinking how beautiful this planet is, and how much I will miss it when my time here ends.

The thought was prompted, oddly enough, by a man I met who told me he’d abandoned his disappointing hotel and booked into another, taking the financial hit just to salvage his holiday. I understood him. Life is short, and we try to gather good memories while we can.

If you’re new here and haven’t read the backstory, let me bring you into it.

Three years ago, I learned that the very cells which had served me faithfully all my life had turned traitor. They staged a rebellion in my prostate, marched to my pancreas, and finally settled in my liver — a cancerous time bomb quietly ticking inside me.

The diagnosis arrived in September 2023. Neuroendocrine cancer. Spreading. Serious. Delivered gently, almost tenderly, by a consultant who knew there is no script for receiving such news.

And yet, I discovered there was a script — one written long before I knew I would need it.

On 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 prognosis, God spoke to me through words I hadn’t sought but that arrived like a lifeline dropped into deep water:

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 felt as though God leaned close and whispered: This is for you. For today. For what you’re about to hear.

I turned to my wife and said, “We’re going to get bad news today.”

And He didn’t stop there.

That evening, my wife — who has walked every step of this path with me — showed me something I had missed. She had been reading the same psalm, but her eyes were drawn to its 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 revealed 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.

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. Camus wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, that the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. But unlike Camus’s 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, and the unbearable into the meaningful.

Viktor Frankl, who endured the concentration camps, wrote that those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. My why is clear. It is anchored not in medicine or prognosis, but in God — my refuge, my fortress, my salvation. I know how easily this can sound like well‑worn Christian rhetoric. But unless you’ve walked this path with God yourself, you may never know how it feels from the inside.

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: God still speaks. And more than that — He stays.

There is a future for those who walk with God. John 5:24 says:

Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not come under judgment. Indeed, he has crossed over from death to life.

Before all this, I was working on a book called What It Means to Be Human, exploring the question from Christian, subjective, and objective angles. These days I write smaller, “word of the day” style pieces instead — finishing them when I finish them — many of which appear here. Thank you for reading.

And as for the man searching for a better hotel, a better experience, a better memory — I hope he found it. We all want our days, however many remain, to be good ones.

Frothing For Nature

Yesterday I woke at 7 a.m. and had the thought  to go  "frothing" for nature, as our Aussie cousins would say. But I have always believed that some of the finest encounters with nature are found in conversations with our fellow human beings.

Our plan was to stop for breakfast at Loch Lomond, the gateway to the natural beauty of Scotland's west coast. There we struck up a conversation with an Australian couple from Canberra who, by now, will no doubt have awakened to the bustling harbour at Oban, where the great CalMac ferries come and go between the Inner and Outer Hebrides.  A landscape shaped in my head by the wonderful music and lyrics of Runrig.

"Fancy driving up to Glencoe?" I asked my wife.

"Sure," she replied, as always happy to indulge one of my spontaneous ideas.

The road was busy. Tourists from across Europe manoeuvred oversized campervans through the Highlands, often cramping in on the landscape. Others squeezed into every possible viewpoint, even when there was clearly no room, bringing traffic to a standstill. This is Scotland in July.

On arriving at Glencoe, I missed the turning for the car park, so we decided to continue on to Kinlochleven. The village was filled with tired, but undoubtedly uplifted, walkers completing the penultimate stage of the West Highland Way.

I use the word uplifted deliberately because we met an elderly local lady in the village shared something that stayed with me. After chatting for a while, I asked her about one of her happiest memories.

     "When I'm feeling low," she said, "I walk into our local landscape and simply sit for a while, enjoying the moment. When I come home, I feel rejuvenated."

Her words reminded me of Nathanael's encounter with Jesus. Before Nathanael had even met Him, Jesus said, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree." It was a place of quiet reflection before it became a place of revelation. Sometimes we all need somewhere peaceful to sit, think and simply be.

Later, we stopped at a restaurant for a late lunch, where I found myself talking with a man walkingThe West Highland Way. As the conversation unfolded, I asked him about his happiest childhood memory.

He told me he had grown up near the ski slopes. His mother was the accomplished skier in the family, and as he learned to ski, she would gently remind him, "Don't rush down the mountain. Take in the surroundings."

As a boy he would weave his way slowly between his mother's tracks, savouring both the landscape and the moment. Today he is a highly skilled craftsman and furniture designer, working with wood. Listening to him, I couldn't help wondering whether those childhood journeys down snowy mountains first awakened the creativity that would shape his life's work.

His mother closed her eyes when he was a young man. I left our conversation with a quiet sense of sadness, having lost my parents at a young age. Some people seem to give far more than they ever receive. Mothers often do. I was grateful for having met him and I wish him the best as he journeys through the Highlands and indulging in his own nature walk. 

As we journey through life, it is worth taking time to connect with the people we meet along the way. Everyone carries a story, and every conversation has the potential to leave a lasting impression.

I will never forget the people we met yesterday. And perhaps, in the great renewal that Job longed for—the hope that stretches beyond this present world—we shall meet many of life's fellow travellers again.

Part two

Some months ago, my wife and I were watching a Christian livestream from Amsterdam on Presence Revival. Greetings were appearing from around the world: South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, the United States and across Europe.

And then there was us, watching from Scotland.

We posted our greeting, and a lady named Brenda from Kinlochleven replied to say hello. We returned the greeting and thought little more about it. It was one of those pleasant encounters made possible by the internet, with no expectation that we would ever meet.

Then, on Thursday, we found ourselves in Kinlochleven.

As we were preparing to leave the village, we suddenly remembered Brenda.

     “Let’s see if we can find her before we go.”

We had no address and very little information. Our first attempts drew blanks, and eventually we decided to give up.

Then we passed a lady outside talking with one of her neighbours. On impulse, I asked whether she knew where Brenda lived.

     “I am Brenda,” she replied.

Then she looked at us and asked, “Are you the couple from Ayrshire?”

Of all the people we might have stopped, we had stopped Brenda herself.

There was an immediate bond between us. We discovered that we shared something else too. The three of us were committed Christians, yet none of us regularly attended a conventional church. We found Christian encouragement and fellowship in other ways, including online preaching, teaching and worship.

References

John 1:48 "How do You know me?" Nathanael asked. Jesus replied, "Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree."

Job 1:3 and he owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 female donkeys, and a very large number of servants. Job was the greatest man of all the people of the East.

Job 14:14 When a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, until my renewal comes.

Frothing in Australian slang means being wildly excited and  hyped up about something — usually in a fun, over‑the‑top way. The term is especially common in Aussie surf culture, where “I’m frothing!” basically means “I’m buzzing with enthusiasm.”

How To Write Well

Good prose has a single, rare gift. It draws you close and holds you there. Consider this passage:

“It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two. Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ Having said this, he breathed his last.
When the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, ‘Certainly this was a righteous man.’ All the multitudes that came together to see this, when they saw the things that were done, returned home beating their breasts. All his acquaintances and the women who followed with him from Galilee stood at a distance, watching these things.”

This is Gospel of Luke 23:44–49. It does not argue. It shows. It opens a door and lets the moment speak.

The scene begins at noon, yet the light fails. Day turns strange and heavy, like a room where the air has gone still. It is not only a setting but a signal. Something is wrong at the centre of things.

Then the veil tears. For those who knew the temple, this was no small detail. The veil marked distance. God was near, yet not reached. When it splits, the meaning is plain without explanation. What was closed is now open.

Jesus speaks. His final words are not a protest but a yielding. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” There is pain here, but also trust. He gives himself over, not as defeat, but as an act of will.

A Roman centurion watches. He has seen death before. Yet this death unsettles him. He names what others have missed. “Certainly, this was a righteous man.” The witness comes from an unlikely voice, and that gives it weight.

The crowd shifts. They came to watch. They leave struck by what they have seen, hands to their chests, carrying something they cannot name. The spectacle dissolves into unease.

Those who loved him remain apart. They do not speak. They stand and watch. Their silence is full. It is the silence of people who have no language for loss.

Nothing here is overstated. The power lies in restraint. Each detail is set in place, and together they form a moment that feels larger than itself. The scene does not explain its meaning. It lets you feel it.

And so the question remains, quiet but insistent.

What just happened?

Why it Works

First, it is clear. The language is direct and unadorned. There are no tangled sentences or abstract ideas. “Darkness came over the whole land.” Anyone can grasp it at once. Good prose does not hide behind complexity. It trusts plain words to carry weight. That simplicity allows the reader to step straight into the scene without effort.

Second, it moves with purpose. Each line follows naturally from the last. Darkness. The veil tears. Jesus speaks. He dies. The centurion responds. The crowd disperses. The witnesses remain. There is no wandering. The sequence feels inevitable, like a set of falling stones, each one striking the next. This tight structure gives the passage momentum.

Third, it shows rather than explains. The writer does not pause to interpret the meaning of the torn veil or the darkness. He presents the facts and lets them speak. This invites the reader to take part. Instead of being told what to think, you are drawn into the moment and left to feel its weight for yourself. That trust in the reader is a mark of confident prose.

Fourth, it uses contrast with precision. Light and darkness. Noise and silence. The loud cry of Jesus set against the quiet watching of his followers. The hardened centurion moved to recognition. The crowd that came to watch leaves in distress. These contrasts sharpen the scene and give it emotional depth without any need for commentary.

Fifth, it gives voice at the right moment. Most of the passage is silent observation, but when speech comes, it matters. Jesus’ final words are brief and intimate. The centurion’s statement is just as brief, yet it reframes the whole event. Because there is so little speech, each line spoken carries more force.

Sixth, it respects human experience. The reactions are believable and varied. Some are shaken. Some are reflective. Some stand at a distance, unable to act. There is no attempt to make everyone respond in the same way. This honesty makes the scene feel real rather than staged.

Finally, it leaves space. The passage does not close with a neat conclusion. It ends with people watching. The meaning is not sealed off. It lingers. Like a door left slightly open, it keeps the reader thinking after the words have finished.

All of this is why it draws you in. It does not try to impress. It presents a moment with clarity and care, and in doing so, it gives that moment room to breathe. That is what good prose does. It makes space for truth to be felt as well as understood.

Image by Sarah Olive on Unsplash

Writer's Block and The Timid Mare

The morning found me walking alone toward the beach, accompanied only by the familiar silence of a writer's block. Sometimes the words refuse to come, and all that remains is to keep walking, trusting that nature may speak where language cannot.

A little farther along the path, a young woman sat astride a beautiful buckskin mare—or so I believe she was. The horse had never been this way before. She hesitated, uncertain of what lay ahead, pausing as though every instinct urged her to turn around and retreat to what was familiar. Confidence, I reflected, is not the birthright of either horses or people. It is something gently earned, one small step at a time.

I asked if I might stroke the horse. Up close, I admired the richness of her colouring and the soft abundance of her thick fetlocks. She stood quietly as I ran my hand over her neck, and something seemed to change in that simple exchange. Whether she sensed there was nothing to fear, or whether she merely borrowed a little confidence from the moment, I cannot say.

From then on, she followed me as I continued toward the shore. Together we reached the sand, and where she had once hesitated, she now walked forward willingly. The beach, which moments before had seemed an unknown frontier, became simply another place to explore.

It felt like a small miracle, one of those unplanned encounters that asks nothing of us except our presence. For me, it was a special moment. For the mare, perhaps it was the discovery that courage often begins with trust. And for her patient rider, it may have been a quiet reminder that building confidence bit by bit  is sometimes the greatest teacher of all.

Now I will go and develope this story for my book that should be ready soon.

P.S. I chose sarah's image because the horse 

 displays confidence.

The Question No One Want's To Answer

I have a whole constellation of words flickering through my mind—dancing like the Northern Lights: dystopia-anxiety, eco-anxiety, Weltschmerz, mal du siècle, prolepse hystérique. And perhaps they can all be gathered under one new word: Anthropoklysis—the fear of humanity steering itself toward collapse.

I once lived in what was openly a Christian nation—the United Kingdom. Now it feels as though the day is coming when simply being a Christian will be treated as a crime. Brick by brick, the cultural foundations are shifting, and each shift seems to lean away from anything that affirms Christianity. The devil, as always, is in the details.

Let me frame a paradox.

There’s a moment in the Gospel—Matthew 19:15-18—where a young man approaches Jesus:

Young Man: “Teacher, what good deed can I do to assure myself eternal life?”

Jesus: “Strange that you ask Me about what is good. There is only One who is good. If you want to share in His life, obey the Commandments.”

Young Man: “Which commandments in particular?”

Jesus: “To begin with—do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness. Honour your father and mother. And love your neighbour as yourself.”

Now pause and look at your own life. Has anyone in your family ever been the victim of violence—murder, assault, rape, grooming? Have you ever felt the quiet violation of knowing other men imagine your wife or daughter in ways they never should, or other women looking at your husband in a similar way? Has your phone been stolen, your wallet taken, your home broken into? victimised by slander? As a parent, have your adult children lost their respect for you—maybe they never call, or perhaps you haven’t heard from them for years?

Go back and read Jesus’ conversation with that young man who simply wanted to be better.

Then ask the paradoxical question:

Why would governments, lawmakers, and the public ever want to oppose the very people who cherish these commands—people who long to live by laws that forbid murder, theft, adultery, lies, and dishonour?

Scripture courtesy of The Voice Bible

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

 Image by Copilot