Personal Blogs

Sounds from Heaven: A Book Review

Sounds from Heaven reads like a doorway into a moment when an entire community found itself swept into prayer, surrender, and unexpected awakening. Colin and Mary Peckham don’t treat the Lewis revival as a distant historical curiosity; they let the reader hear the heartbeat beneath it. The book draws together the voices of those who lived through those years, and through their stories the island feels alive with a kind of spiritual electricity; ordinary people suddenly caught up in something far larger than themselves. I am reading it for the second time.

Chapter twelve lingers most strongly for me; how central prayer was to everything that unfolded. Again, and again the testimonies return to kitchens, barns, and small gatherings where a handful of believers prayed with a depth that carried both desperation and confidence. There was the memorable young man who would swear at the sheep and sheep dog and then felt an overwhelming sense of guilt and the need to repent.

Their prayers were not polished or formal; they were cries of people who felt the weight of their communities and believed God still listened. It's a feeling that is sweeping across Europe amidst Christians wondering where society is heading. 

The authors of Sounds from Heaven show how this persistent intercession became the quiet engine behind the movement. Meetings didn’t begin with strategy or spectacle; they rose out of worn knees and burdened hearts. In many ways, the revival began long before the first sermon, born in the hidden places where people grappled with God for their neighbours.

Through these accounts, the island itself becomes almost a character. People speak of walking across the moor or through a village and feeling an inescapable awareness of God, an atmosphere thick with conviction, hope, and a strange sense of expectancy. The revival seemed to seep into daily life: crofters praying while mending tools, young people weeping on roadsides, families awakened in the night with an irresistible urge to seek God. The effect was communal rather than individualistic. The transformation wasn’t simply a list of conversions; it was a shared reawakening, reshaping how neighbours spoke to one another, how churches worked together, and how people understood their own lives.

The authors don’t pretend the story was simple. They acknowledge resistance, misunderstandings, and the unevenness that always accompanies powerful movements. But they let the testimonies speak with a sincerity that gives the book its weight. There is something strikingly honest about hearing elderly islanders describe, decades later, the moment they felt the presence of God break into their ordinary routines. These voices give the book its warmth and its authority; they make it clear that this was not a manufactured phenomenon but an encounter that left permanent marks on real lives.

What makes the book memorable for me  is not only the events themselves but the longing they stir. It leaves me with a sense that revival is not a relic but a possibility, something that grows wherever prayer is taken seriously and humility replaces self-reliance. The story of Lewis is not framed as a formula to copy but as a reminder that God moves in places that feel forgotten and among people who simply refuse to stop seeking Him.

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Always Asking

I have often wondered why some people seem to slip so naturally into prayer, as if it were the most effortless thing in the world. Eric Liddell, it is said, prayed an hour a day without fail. My wife is much the same, steady, and devoted, quietly faithful. She moves toward prayer as naturally as breath. I admire it, and yet when I try to follow the same path, I find myself stumbling. My thoughts scatter, and I come away wondering why something so simple can feel so hard to sustain.

What I return to repeatedly is the act of asking. Perhaps because I need it so often. Perhaps because asking is woven into the human condition, into my condition. I think of the psalmists, especially David, bold in request, unashamed in petition, sometimes desperate, sometimes confident, always honest before God. There is comfort in knowing that even a king cried out for help. There is a kind of fellowship in those ancient words.

Yet not all the psalms are pleas. Some are nothing but praise, pure and overflowing with wonder. They leave no room for petitions because the psalmist has been caught up in something larger than need. C. S. Lewis once wrote that “praise is inner health made audible.” That has stayed with me, because it suggests that praise is not forced speech but a rising up from within, something the soul naturally does when it sees clearly.

Last night, on the west coast of Scotland, I saw a sunset that felt like a calling. The sky burned softly, gold fading into rose, then into the deep blue of coming night. To the left hung a crisp crescent moon, sharp and delicate against the dimming horizon. In that moment, it felt like an invitation.

People who witness a solar eclipses or the Northern Lights often describe the same thing, a feeling they cannot explain. A hush. A tremor of awe. A sense that something immense has brushed close. This is God whispering what creation has always whispered: Come and praise me.

“Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised,” says the psalmist in Psalm 145:3. I have read those words many times, but sometimes it takes a moment of beauty to understand them. Perhaps praise begins not with discipline but with noticing, with letting the world open our eyes. Praise is not something I must manufacture but something I can allow.

I still struggle. Prayer does not come easily to me. But I am learning to watch more closely, to listen for the invitations stitched into the quiet and the colour of the world. Always asking, yes, and occasionally touched by praise that rises like light on the horizon, the single flame that steadies the rest of the day.

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Writing Childhood: Galloway Street; Seeing Through a Child’s Eyes

I read John Boyle’s Galloway Street some fifteen years ago and back then, I realised it stands as a rare kind of memoir; one that doesn’t simply recall childhood but manages to enter it again. Rather than filtering memory through the polished distance of adulthood, Boyle writes as though he has stepped back into the cramped tenement rooms, the rough play, the Catholic rituals, the smells of the street, and the half-understood adult dramas with a child’s unguarded immediacy. The power of the book lies in that return: the vantage of a boy who sees the world not yet as a system, but as a collection of vivid, puzzling, often hilarious fragments.

Writing from a child’s viewpoint is deceptively difficult. An adult mind is trained to interpret, to contextualize, to moralize. A child’s mind simply encounters. Boyle’s achievement is his ability to resist the urge to explain his younger self, allowing the reader to feel the uncertainty, wonder, and sometimes the fear of a boy standing exactly where he once stood. Moments aren’t framed as lessons; they are lived. Humour isn’t crafted; it bubbles up naturally from innocence and misunderstanding. Pain isn’t magnified; it simply exists at the edge of the frame, the way a child experiences hardship without yet possessing the vocabulary for it.

This perspective gives the memoir its tenderness. The adult writer knows what the child did not—about poverty, about sectarian tension, about the fragility of the adults in his life—but he never forces that hindsight onto the narrative. Instead, he lets the past breathe, allowing the reader to witness the world forming itself around the boy, brick by brick, story by story. In doing so, Boyle not only recreates a childhood; he honours it.

The emotional truth of this approach becomes especially striking when the book resonates with those who lived fragments of that same childhood. When I met an old school friend after fifty years, I gave him a copy and his immediate response—“That’s you and me when we were boys”—acted as a quiet confirmation of Boyle’s authenticity and the fact that it reflected our childhood in nearby Govan, just a few miles from Boyle’s Ferguslie Park, Paisley,  where the book was set.  It wasn’t that the memoir was a perfect factual mirror of your experiences; rather, it captured something deeper: the texture of boys growing up in a world that was often hard but always alive, always shared. You recognized yourselves not in the specific details, but in the spirit—the mischief, the limitations, the loyalties, the unspoken understanding that childhood friendships are forged from closeness rather than words.

My friend’s remark also reveals something essential about memoir itself. A good memoir doesn’t just present a life; it awakens the lives of others. Boyle’s child-viewpoint writing opens a door that my friend and I could both walk through, back into the noise of the street, the sting of the weather, the small victories, and the bewildering adult world just beyond your reach. In this way, Galloway Street becomes more than one man’s story; it becomes a shared landscape, a place where the memories of many readers find familiar footing.

Seen from the perspective of craft, Boyle’s method demonstrates how writing through a child’s eyes can preserve not only events, but the emotional truth underneath them. Seen from the personal angle you experienced, that same method has the power to bridge years, revive companionship, and remind us gently of who we once were.

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“He Has Left This World”

Last night I heard someone use a simple expression in everyday conversation: “He has left this world.” At first it sounds casual, a softened way to share news of a loss. Yet the more one listens, the more depth the phrase carries. It quietly invites reflection on questions that have followed humanity since the beginning. Within those few words is a network of philosophical, emotional, and spiritual meanings that help us face something that is often hard to speak aloud.

At its core, the phrase reshapes death as a departure rather than an end. Instead of describing life as something that stops suddenly and completely, it presents death as movement, a going from one place to another. Even those who do not hold firm beliefs about what lies beyond can sense in this language the idea of continuation. One cannot “leave” unless there is somewhere to go, even if that destination is unknown. The phrase leaves room for possibility without insisting on any conclusion. It gives grief space to breathe.

The expression also recognizes the world as a place where a person truly lived. To say someone “left this world” suggests that during their time here they took part in the shared human story. They loved, worked, hoped, struggled, and shaped the lives of others. Their presence mattered. This is why ancient people left handprints on cave walls and why others performed acts meant to say, “I was here, and this is the proof.”

The phrase also reflects the limits of our understanding. None of us knows with certainty what happens beyond death, so our language leans toward images and metaphors. To say someone has “left this world” is not to describe an event we can measure.

There is also a relational side to this way of speaking. The phrase draws a boundary between the living and the dead, yet it does so gently. The person is not gone into nothingness. They are simply elsewhere. This soft separation can bring comfort. We remain here, and they have gone ahead. The image is quiet but steadying. It holds grief without sinking into despair and encourages remembrance without holding too tightly.

Finally, the expression connects us to an old human instinct to see life as a journey. Across cultures and eras, people have described life as a path with beginnings, wandering, choices, and finally an end. Within this understanding, death becomes a destination, a moment when the traveller steps beyond the threshold into whatever comes next. The ordinary phrase we hear in conversation continues this ancient way of thinking. It suggests that life has meaning and direction and that death, though painful, belongs to the same story.

In the end, “he has left this world” shows the quiet strength of simple language. It gives us a way to speak about death that is neither harsh nor evasive. It allows space for tenderness, faith, uncertainty, and wonder. It invites us to think about what it means not only to die, but also to live, to be present in this world for a time before passing beyond it.

As a Christian, I believe there is life after death. In John 5:28–29 we read:

 “If this sounds amazing to you, what is even more amazing is that when the time comes, those buried long ago will hear His voice through all the rocks, sod, and soil and step out of decay into resurrection. When this hour arrives, those who did good will be resurrected to life, and those who did evil will be resurrected to judgment.” John 5:28–29 (The Voice):
I believe this not only because Scripture says it, but because of the evidence I have seen in my own relationship with the Lord and in the ways He has worked in my life. But please do not take my word for this read the following,

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).

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

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"He whispers through what we often overlook"

Jack Frost Making Mischief Again 

I woke this morning to the sound of neighbours scraping frost from their car windscreens. With –3° showing on my temperature gauge, my thoughts drifted back to childhood mornings in Govan, when my mother would gently rouse me and announce that “Jack Frost was out.” Through my childhood lens, these expressions felt strange even odd. But it coloured everyday life in a Northern town.

Only years later, while studying Children’s Literature, did I discover just how many “Jacks” inhabit our stories: Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack-o’-Lantern, Jack-in-the-box. In folklore, the name often stood for the ordinary man—an archetype, a familiar figure who could slip easily into any tale.

Jack Frost, though, carried a character all his own: a personification of winter, playful at times, mischievous at others. Parents in places like Glasgow often used him to make sense of the frozen patterns on windows or to bring a little wonder into dark winter mornings. Through these stories, the cold world outside felt somehow alive, touched by imagination.

Historically, the name “Jack Frost” appears in English poetry in the 19th century, including a well-known poem attributed to James Whitcomb Riley in the 1880s, though its authorship remains debated.

For much of my life I imagined frost as a mostly northern or mountainous phenomenon, but when I began reading the Bible, I found frost woven quietly into Scripture. When God speaks to Job, He asks:

“From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost of heaven?”
—Job 38:29–30

Even the coldest, smallest details of creation are shown to be shaped by His hand.

And in Exodus 16:14, when God provides manna in the wilderness, it appears “as a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground.” Something delicate, fleeting, yet faithfully renewed each morning.

It’s striking how often frost—so fragile it vanishes at a touch—carries meaning in both memory and Scripture. And perhaps that is its quiet gift: a reminder that God is present in the smallest corners of creation. Even in something as thin and temporary as a frost-flake, He speaks. He whispers through what we often overlook, inviting us to notice the ordinary with fresh eyes—and to find wonder waiting there.

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On Writing: What Makes a Good Prologue? 

t’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m meant to be resting this cold and fired up throat, but my mind keeps circling the same question: what makes a good prologue? I want one for my book because this project isn’t just a collection of essays. It’s an attempt to gather the elements that make a person—biography, spirituality, wonder, culture, travel, and the quiet weight of moral responsibility. All the things that shape a human life before God.

A prologue feels like the small doorway one slips through before entering a larger house. It’s not there to explain. It’s there to set a feeling in the reader’s chest, the kind that leans them forward before the official beginning even arrives. When it’s done well, it colours everything that follows, like adding a particular light source to a room.

It isn’t meant to be a stray “chapter zero.” A real prologue stands slightly apart, offering what the first chapter cannot. Sometimes it anchors the reader in a memory that can’t be placed anywhere else. Sometimes it casts a mood that the main text will only deepen. Sometimes it simply offers a truth that needs to be felt before it can be understood.

Think of Rebecca. The opening isn’t about plot at all. It’s a memory, carried like a scent. You’re inside the narrator’s dream before you ever meet her properly. Or Tolkien, whose prologue feels like picking up a weathered manuscript from a long-vanished world. Once you begin chapter one, you’re already steeped in the history he wants you to breathe.

What these writers do is simple: the prologue gives something the story can’t easily give later. It opens a door from a different angle.

So when I began shaping mine, I tried to ask the same question. What can be said here that can only be said here? A prologue doesn’t need to be large. A single image can carry a whole book. A single moment can hold a feeling the reader remembers hundreds of pages later. Clarity matters, but mystery matters too. The goal isn’t to teach; it’s to invite.

Used well, a prologue plants a seed whose meaning might stay hidden until the right moment. Then suddenly the reader realizes it’s been growing quietly since the first page. It becomes part of the pleasure of the whole.

Toni Morrison knew this. The opening of Beloved isn’t backstory. It’s atmosphere, grief, and truth distilled into a few sentences. The first chapter could never do what that opening does. It needs the key first, and the prologue is the key.

With all that in mind, I found myself returning to one memory from childhood, something I’ve carried for years. It stayed with me because it held wonder, simplicity, and that ache of human connection that makes life feel fuller than we can put into words. So I made it my prologue, just as it is.

“It must have been late summer, 1962, Telstar by the Tornados played regularly on the radio. I had spent the whole summer to autumn season on the Isle of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. We had a simple wooden hut with no water or electricity.
Each day I walked to the communal well with an older person with containers to collect water. Cows watched with wary eyes; the calves edging forward, curious, and timid.
At dusk, we lit paraffin lamps. My father read to us — Heidi, Tales from 1001 Nights, Chinese Folk Tales — his voice a thread that carried us into other worlds. We ate freshly baked pancakes with homemade jam and washed down with sweet stout in small glasses.
The lamp hissed softly, its light flickering sleep into our eyes. When it finally dimmed, so did we.
Lying in bed, I watched stars pour through the window; all of them. And I wondered if the Chinese farmer boys or the Bedouin shepherd boys or the milkmaids in the Swiss mountains were seeing and feeling the way I felt as the universe stepped gently into the room?”

That memory holds everything I hope the book will explore wonder, the dignity of simple things, the connectedness of human experience, and the sense that the world—wide as it is—is also somehow intimate.

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Inside the Mind of the Toxic Soul

There is a certain kind of person who walks into a room and subtly dims the light. They may not shout, they may not threaten, but something in their presence unsettles the air; an undercurrent of bitterness that clings like smoke. These individuals often carry a misery so heavy that they try, deliberately or instinctively, to hand pieces of it to others. Their spirit corrodes rather than comforts. Their words drain rather than nourish. And behind their sharpness almost always lies a private suffering they refuse to face. After all, no one can be happy if they manufacture evil from their heart.

To understand such people requires acknowledging a truth we often forget: cruelty is seldom born from strength. It is far more often the offspring of insecurity. As the novelist Leo Tolstoy once observed, “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women,” a reminder that the company we keep, and the company we choose to be, shapes the world around us. Toxic individuals cannot bear uplifting environments because they are threatened by what they cannot emulate. Their inner misery makes kindness feel foreign, joy feel suspicious, and peace feel undeserved. 

Children’s stories capture this dynamic with remarkable clarity. The villains of childhood are rarely complex—they reflect emotional truths in simple, symbolic form. Take the character of the ogre or troll who lurks under a bridge, snarling at any traveller who dares to pass. Such figures often live alone, driven into shadows by their own fear, resentment, or loneliness. Their aggression is simply the language their pain has learned to speak.

Or consider the character of Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Beneath his flamboyant cruelty lies a lingering terror of the ticking crocodile—time itself—always reminding him that life is slipping through his fingers. Insecure, aging, and anxious, he lashes out at youth and innocence because they remind him of everything he feels he has lost. In this sense, he mirrors many real adults who sabotage happiness in others because they believe joy has abandoned them.

Even the wolf in The Three Little Pigs can be read as a symbolic version of toxicity: he huffs and puffs, not merely to destroy, but because he cannot bear the sturdy peace of the brick house he cannot enter. He destroys what he envies. And so do many people.

In daily life, toxic behaviour often appears in smaller, more subtle forms. The co-workers who spreads whispers to undermine someone else’s success. The friend who never celebrates another’s good news. The family member whose criticism is constant, no matter how much good stands before them. Their negativity is not about the person they target—it is about the emptiness they feel within. When someone tries to poison your joy, it is often a sign they have lost the ability to taste joy themselves.

Scripture speaks honestly about such people—not with condemnation, but with clarity and compassion. Proverbs 26:24-26 warns that malice can hide behind flattering lips, reminding us to be discerning. The Bible acknowledges both realities: that some people damage the souls of those around them, and that Christians are called to respond with a blend of wisdom and grace.

Jesus Himself taught that bitterness comes from within: “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45). A heart full of jealousy will speak envy. A heart full of fear will speak control. A heart full of pain will speak poison.

But Scripture also offers a gentler lens. The Apostle Paul writes, “Bear with one another and forgive one another” (Colossians 3:13). Forgiveness does not mean subjecting oneself to cruelty; it means recognizing that toxic behaviour often emerges from spiritual hunger—a hunger so deep that people attempt to fill it with control, manipulation, or emotional harm.

C.S. Lewis captured this paradox of brokenness and cruelty when he wrote, “Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst,” suggesting that those who feel powerless or unloved will sometimes weaponize even virtues. A toxic person often believes their actions are justified. They imagine themselves victims, warriors, or truth-tellers, when in reality they are spreading the very pain they refuse to confront.

Healthy boundaries are therefore essential. They are not walls of pride but walls of protection. They prevent us from being drawn into battles that are not ours, arguments we did not start, and emotions that were never meant to be ours to carry. Setting boundaries is not an act of rejection—it is an act of stewardship over one’s own heart. Proverbs 4:23 reminds us, “Guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.”

When we resist the pull of toxic behaviour, we quietly declare that another person’s storm does not have the right to drown our peace. We choose, instead, to cultivate compassion without allowing ourselves to be consumed. We choose to see the woundedness beneath the cruelty without letting it define us. And in doing so, we become something much more powerful: people of calm, people of truth, people of hope.

Ultimately, the antidote to those who create misery is not retaliation—it is resilience. It is the steady, unwavering choice to rise above the shadows others cast. It is the decision to let God’s love shape our reactions rather than someone else’s despair. And it is the commitment to be, in a world full of bitterness, a gentle and radiant presence that refuses to dim.

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The Warmth of Unknown Faces

We may have met. Perhaps on the West Highland Way, or was it that day in Dubrovnik, maybe Warsaw or Berlin or the Govan we grew up in. Or perhaps we may never have met. What’s the chances? I was pondering this as I wandered through Glasgow yesterday. All these people—some bright with a ready smile, some carrying their burdens like invisible luggage. The woman silently debating which Christmas jumper to buy for her husband or was it her dad. The man in the wheelchair asking gently for a few coins. The fellow in Waterstones buying six books, moving with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what he seeks. I caught myself wondering about him: gifts, or indulgence? A well-read soul, either way. And there it was again—that restless longing the Portuguese call saudade de conhecer o mundo, that aching desire to know the world and its people.

As the city opened around me, it felt like moving through a tapestry woven from unspoken stories. Each person I passed was a quiet universe, complete, complicated, immeasurably rich. Yet all I glimpsed were small fragments: a glance, a gesture, the turn of a shoulder as they slipped past. It’s astonishing, really, how many lives we brush against without ever stopping long enough to feel the contours of their humanity.

Still, something in me thrills at these brief proximities. I find myself imagining the paths that brought each stranger to that precise moment beside me on Buchanan Street. Were they running late? Were they thinking of someone they love? Were they wrestling with a decision or relishing a secret joy? There’s a gentle magic in the not-knowing, a kind of soft wonder that asks nothing more than attention.

I suppose that’s the heart of it: the warmth I feel doesn’t come from conversation but from possibility. The possibility that any one of these unknown faces could have been a friend, a confidant, a companion for a few miles or a few years. We pass through each other’s stories like shadows—yet the passing leaves an imprint, however faint. It reminds me that the world is wide, and full of people I have yet to meet, people who might change the colour of my days.

As I walked, this thought settled into me with surprising tenderness: even in a crowd, we are not alone. We share the pavement, the weather, the swirl of November lights, the faint smell of German bratwurst as I drift past the stall in St Enoch’s. We share the silent promise that life is happening around us, constantly, vibrantly, and that we are part of it whether we speak a word or not.

Maybe this is why I’m drawn to strangers in the first place. They represent the untold, the unfamiliar, the chapters unwritten. They remind me that the world is not exhausted, that there are still stories waiting beyond the curve of the road. And in that sense, every unknown face carries its own kind of warmth, a glow of potential, fragile but unmistakable.

By the time I reached the end of my walk, dusk had begun to gather over the rooftops. The city lights flickered alive, scattering gold into the evening air. People hurried past, bags swinging, scarves tucked tight against the cold. I watched them for a moment, feeling that gentle ache again, not loneliness, but a yearning toward connection, however fleeting.

Perhaps we have crossed paths somewhere. Or perhaps our worlds will never quite collide. But the thought of you—another unknown face, another story moving through its own landscape—brings a quiet comfort. In the grand weave of things, we’re all wanderers, drawn toward one another by the faint, persistent warmth of simply being human.

And then another thought rose, soft but steady: Wasn’t it that author, Gwendolyn Brooks in Maud Martha who once wrote about all this life and what shall we do with it? But, the warmth toward unknown faces is not only for this world. This echoes something deeper—a recognition that, in the long light of eternity, many of these unknown faces may one day be familiar. After all, life does not end with our brief crossings on a winter street. With eternity in view, there will be more than enough time to meet all those whose names are held in God’s Book of Life. Time without hurry, time without loss, time to finally see each other as we were meant to be.

Many Christians understand the great promise of Scripture as having both a present and a future glow—a hope we taste now, and a fullness still to come. Paul spoke of the hidden wisdom of God, the things no eye has seen, and no mind could yet imagine, made known in Christ. Throughout Scripture the same thread runs: God preparing something new, something whole—a restored world free from sorrow, death, and decay.

If that is so, then every stranger I pass may be someone I’ll one day greet with recognition instead of curiosity. The woman with the jumper. The man in the wheelchair. The fellow with six books tucked under his arm. And countless others whose paths brushed mine for a breath and then were gone.

We move through this world surrounded by lives known only to God. But the day is coming when loss will have no place, when separation will be no more, and when the warmth of unknown faces will become the joy of known ones—beloved, redeemed, gathered into the same forever.

Most likely we have never met. At least not yet. But in the hope set before us, there is always the promise that someday, in the renewed creation God is shaping even now, we will have all the life we need to meet, to know, and to rejoice together in the great story He has written.

“No eye has seen,

no ear has heard,

no heart has imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

I Corinthians 2:9 (BSB).

“Christianity is not just a series of truths in the plural, but Truth spelled with a capital ‘T’—truth about total reality, not just about religious things.

  — Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There

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The God Who is There

I was just entering my teens when the hippie movement swept into town. I began to hear strange new phrases — “Make love, not war,” “Back to the land,” “Free love.” I didn’t yet have the understanding to grasp what was really happening, but I sensed that the world was shifting, and beneath the colour and music, I felt a quiet despair. People were reaching for something, freedom, meaning, transcendence, yet finding only confusion in their search.

It was into this restless period, before and beyond that world that Francis Schaeffer spoke. When he first published The God Who Is There in 1968, the cultural ground was already trembling with revolt, doubt, and disillusionment — the aftermath of two world wars, the rise of existentialism, and the dawning of a post-Christian West. I was still in school when it appeared and I am just reading the book now, and though its language was aimed at the intellectuals of its time, its message has proven strikingly prophetic. Schaeffer’s book has not simply survived the passing decades; it has continued to interpret them. His analysis of truth, meaning, and the human condition speaks with a relevance that modern readers cannot easily ignore.

At the heart of Schaeffer’s argument lies a concern that Western civilization has crossed what he famously called the “line of despair.” By this he meant that modern thought had abandoned the idea of absolute truth; truth that exists independently of our opinions and emotions. Beginning with philosophers like Hegel and Kierkegaard, Schaeffer traces a slow but decisive shift: reason and revelation were separated, faith became detached from fact, and knowledge itself became fragmented. What was once a unified worldview rooted in the reality of a personal God had broken apart into pieces. For Schaeffer, this wasn’t a purely intellectual tragedy; it was a human one. The denial of truth leads inevitably to despair, because without a foundation, meaning and morality collapse. People may still talk about love, purpose, or beauty, but those words lose their coherence when detached from the reality of a Creator who defines them.

To make this change visible, Schaeffer introduced his memorable image of the two-story universe. In the lower story, modern people retain what can be evaluated by science — the realm of facts and reason. In the upper story, they place things like faith, morals, and meaning — matters that, they claim, cannot be known but only “believed.” This division, Schaeffer argued, results in an incoherent existence. Faith becomes a blind leap into the dark, not an encounter with reality. In such a divided world, people live paradoxical  lives: rational in one area, irrational in another. Schaeffer saw this not only in philosophy but in art, music, and literature. Picasso’s distorted figures, Beckett’s absurd plays, and Sartre’s existential novels all testify to the same loss — the abandonment of unity and purpose. Culture, for Schaeffer, is the mirror of philosophy. It reveals what a society genuinely believes about the world and about itself.

What makes The God Who Is There prophetic is not only its diagnosis but its accuracy. Schaeffer wrote before the full flowering of postmodernism, yet he foresaw its contours with remarkable precision. Today, when truth is often treated as personal preference and moral boundaries are considered oppressive, his warnings seem almost clairvoyant. He understood that the denial of truth would not produce freedom but fragmentation, not enlightenment, but loneliness. Schaeffer’s analysis anticipated a time when people would feel alienated not only from God but from themselves as they sojourned as restless wanderers in a world stripped of meaning. In this sense, The God Who Is There is not merely a book of apologetics but a work of cultural prophecy.

Despite his intellectual rigor, Schaeffer’s tone is never cold. His critique of modern thought is driven by compassion. He writes as one who has looked into the abyss of meaninglessness and found, not despair, but the steady presence of the living God. “He is there,” Schaeffer insists, “and He is not silent.” This simple affirmation grounds his entire worldview. God has spoken — in creation, in Scripture, and ultimately in Jesus Christ. Truth is not an abstract concept but a Person who entered history. Because God is both real and communicative, knowledge is possible. Meaning is possible. Love is possible. Christianity, for Schaeffer, is not a blind leap but a coherent and comprehensive explanation of reality — the only one that fits the world as it actually is.

Reading The God Who Is There today, feels like hearing an echo that has grown louder with the years. The cultural fragmentation Schaeffer described has deepened, but so too has the hunger for what he proclaimed: a truth that unites heart and mind, a faith that makes sense of both the cosmos and the soul. His invitation is as relevant now as it was then — to cross back over the line of despair and rediscover the God who is not silent. Schaeffer’s book stands, therefore, not only as a defence of Christianity but as a call to intellectual and spiritual integrity. It reminds us that reality has structure, that truth is not a relic of the past, and that hope is grounded in something more solid than shifting opinion. It is, in every sense, a prophetic voice still calling out in the wilderness of modern doubt.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”

                                                               Isaiah 5:20 (ESV)

Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968).

Aura Farming and the Hollow Self

They mistook the applause of men for the whisper of God.

I see that an innovative word has entered the Colins dictionary. Or to be more precise, a compound phrase. We live in an age where the shimmer of image often outshines substance. “Aura farming”—the careful cultivation of a distinctive, enviable persona—has become a kind of social currency. The aura farmer curates every gesture, outfit, word, and post to project an illusion of depth or power, often detached from the truth of who they are. On the surface, such a person appears confident, admired, even magnetic. Yet beneath that polish lies a fragile tension, one that rarely leads to peace but instead to narcissism, low self-worth, and quiet isolation.

We recognize these figures across literature and life. Clarissa Dalloway arranging her day like a performance, Estella from Great Expectaions gleaming coldly behind the mask of beauty, Cleopatra turning her very existence into theatre. Even Hamlet “farms” aura when he feigns madness—controlling perception to conceal deeper wounds. We see their reflections in our own time: the man who fabricates hardship for sympathy, the person  who dresses in the language of status but not of soul. They are everywhere, and sometimes, they are us.

In the real life, the Bible offers its own piercing portrait in the story of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11). They sold a piece of land and laid part of the proceeds at the apostles’ feet, pretending it was the full sum. They sought the glow of holiness without bearing its cost. Their act was not a failure of generosity but of authenticity, they wanted the aura of sanctity, not the surrender that sanctity demands. Like actors before a divine audience, they mistook the applause of others for the approval of God. Their story stands as a solemn warning: the Spirit cannot be deceived by the glitter of the self-made halo.

At its core, aura farming is a performance; a dance before mirrors. One studies the traits that command admiration—confidence, mystery, originality—and imitates them until they appear natural. Yet in doing so, the person begins to draw their sense of worth from reflection rather than truth. They become like a candle trapped behind glass: glowing but starved of air. The illusion that once empowered them becomes their cage.

Over time, this hunger for validation deepens into a fragile form of narcissism. Every compliment becomes a sip of survival, every moment of indifference, a small death. Relationships grow brittle because the aura farmer cannot risk being truly known authenticity threatens the performance. They long for love yet fear the gaze that might pierce the mask. The more they polish their image, the more their soul fades into the background, unseen and unattended.

This condition mirrors the spiritual sickness of our age. In a world obsessed with image and branding, authenticity feels almost subversive. We live as if God Himself scrolls through our highlight reels. But while aura may dazzle, it cannot nourish. Like Ananias and Sapphira, those who live by appearance eventually find that the light they project does not save them—it exposes them.

True wholeness begins where the performance ends. It is found not in the curated glow of being admired, but in the steady light of being known. To be genuine in an age of spectacle is to lay down the mask and let the breath of truth in—to trade the mirror for the window of the soul.

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Scripture quotations [marked NIV] taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of Biblica UK trademark number 1448790.

“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

 Helen Keller

Learning to Walk in Another’s Shoes

I was driving my wife to work this morning when I saw a child and her father waiting at the traffic lights. The girl stood quietly, her small hands clasped together as if in prayer. More likely, she was cold. Yet, in that simple posture, there was something sacred; a child’s instinctive response to life’s chill.

On my way home, I saw them again, walking along the pavement. The little girl’s legs worked hard against the distance, her father walking patiently beside her, adjusting his stride to hers. She could not have been more than five. The scene touched me deeply, stirring memories of a winter long ago.

I grew up in Govan, Glasgow, where the Atlantic wind from the west could cut through any coat. I remember The Big Freeze of 1962–63, when temperatures fell to -22°C in parts of Scotland and the ground stayed iron-hard for weeks whilst the Elder Park pond became a skater's paradise. My mother would rise before dawn to light the coal fire, the smell of smoke and porridge filling our small kitchen. She would pull a balaclava over my head, wrap a scarf tight around it, and send me off to school with a kiss and hug. 

Perhaps it was those winters that kindled empathy in me, for genuine empathy is not born in comfort but in shared struggle. It is, as the Bible says, the ability to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15). The Greek word used in the New Testament, sumpatheo, means to “suffer with.” It suggests more than pity; it is an entering into another’s experience with the heart.

In truth, empathy, or entering another's experience is also cultivated through stories. Reading has been one of the surest ways we learn walk in another’s shoes. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry showed me what it felt like to be a young Black girl navigating prejudice in the American South. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot revealed the quiet agony of being too tender-hearted in a harsh world and I feel the aching of the writer's soul.  Dickens taught me that justice is not a cold principle but a human pulse beating beneath the grime of industrial London. And Othello exposed the pain of being victimized by envy and deceit, the terrible loneliness of being misunderstood. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov also taught me the challenges of being a believer and facing existential paradoxes.

Each story, like a window opened on a frosted morning, lets in warmth from another life. To read is to thaw the ice around one’s own heart. Empathy, then, is not merely an emotion but a light that burns through coldness—the kind a father carries as he slows his steps for his child on a winter’s morning.

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

Books That Teach Us Human Values

Before my father died, he left me something more enduring than possessions; an awareness that life itself rests on moral ground. He often said, “Every story has a moral heartbeat, even if it’s faint.” It was one of those sayings that lingered. Years later, I’ve come to see how right he was.

Every good story, he believed, reaches a moral reckoning: the wicked fall, the just prevail, or at least, we sense what should have happened if justice had its way. When stories fail to do that, we feel cheated, as though the universe has bent out of shape. But why? If, as Richard Dawkins insists, we are merely “dancing to our DNA” in a purposeless cosmos, why do we care about fairness at all? Yet we do — instinctively, universally.

Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My father, though not a philosopher, lived as if that were true. He saw in every narrative, every act of conscience, the reflection of a moral order that runs deeper than human opinion.

I grew up in Govan, a shipyard town on the edge of Glasgow. A place of stories. The air was thick with shipyard noise, but also with imagination. You could hear stories being told in pubs, at bus stops, or around the kitchen table. My father loved that world of words. He’d bring home books — sometimes borrowed, sometimes rescued from the dust of second-hand shops and leave them lying about.

When I was ten, I wandered into The Modern Book Shop, a cramped little cave of used books that smelled of paper, dust, and rain. Among the shelves, I found a small volume whose cover showed a wooden puppet with wild eyes. I opened it and read the first line:

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

That was my first encounter with The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Pinocchio fascinated me. He was mischievous, stubborn, and foolish, yet achingly human. Beneath the fantasy lay a truth I somehow recognised: to become “real,” he had to learn honesty, courage, and love. These weren’t arbitrary virtues. They were the warp and weft of what it means to live meaningfully. Even as a child, I sensed that Collodi’s tale was more than a fable; it was a mirror.

As I grew older, I began to see how that story echoed our own. We are all, in one way or another, wooden creatures longing for life. We stumble through temptation, wrestle with conscience, and yearn for transformation. The journey toward becoming “real” — authentic, upright, whole — is the human story itself.

That’s why I’ve never believed morality to be a mere social invention. If it were, why would the same moral chords resonate across cultures and centuries? Why do we root for justice, even in fiction? It’s because something within us — perhaps the image of God — knows that goodness, beauty, and truth are not imagined; they are discovered.

My father never spoke of theology. He didn’t need to. He simply pointed to stories. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, Aslan’s resurrection in Narnia — to him, these weren’t just plots; they were echoes of a greater narrative, the one written before time began: light overcoming darkness, love outlasting death.

Now that he’s gone, I see how profoundly his quiet faith shaped mine. His books still line my shelves, their pages bearing traces of his thumbprints. When I open them, I hear his voice, steady and sure, reminding me that life has meaning, and that our choices matter.

Like Pinocchio, I am still learning to become “real” — still stumbling, still finding my way toward courage and integrity. But the moral compass he gave me keeps its bearing.

In the end, the stories we cherish are never just about heroes and villains. They’re about us — about the moral universe we inhabit and the justice we intuit. My father believed that light, no matter how faint, will always find a way to shine. And I believe him still.

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