More than Writers

I used to be desperate to be married, but to this day I remain single. Kind-hearted people would tell me 'God loves you'. They wanted me to know I was loved beyond measure by the God of the universe. My reaction was to think 'but He has to love me, He is God'. I wanted someone to choose to love me. I didn't see God's love as a choice somehow.  I wanted someone to choose to love me with all my heart. I instinctively knew it was not good to refuse the love of God 'because He has to love you'. I could never work out why I thought like that though. Why did I think a man would be better than God? Today it came to me. I wanted any love I received to be because of me. I wanted to have earned the love I received by who I was. I was living a salvation by works, even though outwardly I professed a salvation by faith. I wanted to find a man who would love me because I had earned his love. I wanted to control who loved me and how deeply they loved me by m...

Ben, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the monthly showcase. It is a pleasure to adve you join us. I’m going to start with the quick fire round, so buckle up and off we go. What’s your favourite Colour? Blue What’s your favourite food? Something with pasta. If you could have any car in the world what would it be? Straker’s car from UFO . Google it if the reference is unfamiliar. Have you met anyone famous? If so, in what context? Richard Dawkins. I was working somewhere with a videoconferencing suite which he used to give a lecture to New Zealand from Oxfordshire, and as this was a newsworthy event and I was the newsletter editor, I was Dawkins-wrangler for the day. If you could travel to just one country in the world, where would it be? New Zealand. Where is your favourite place to write? Where I am now – my writing corner at home where everything is set up to my satisfaction and the room is full of light from its large south f...

When I celebrated my birthday a few days ago, I got many cards and gifts that depicted butterflies. Even people who don’t know me very well, seem to have noticed that I like these insects. Butterflies put a smile on my face because they remind me that there is always hope, even when transformation and resurrection seem impossible. Here are some other lessons I have learned from butterflies: Don’t judge potential by unpromising beginnings. Someone who did not know about metamorphosis and was shown a caterpillar and a butterfly would probably laugh at us if we told them that the six-legged, wormlike and often unsightly creature that seems to do nothing more than gobble up its host plant and leave a trail of destruction is going to turn into an elegant, graceful winged creature that is not only a joy to look at, but also pollinates plants and so adds to life on planet earth. We too can be transformed from selfish takers into joyful givers. Embrace the messy middle. In the ...

Wild goats are a common sight in India. If, two thousand years hence, an archaeologist were to study buildings and cemeteries (as archaeologists do) in southern India, he/she would conclude that it was a Christian country.   Never, not even in the American Bible Belt, have I found a greater density of churches, particularly in central Kerala.   However, the archaeologist would be wrong, because 79% of Indians are Hindu [1] , compared with just 2.3% Christians. Having spent just two weeks in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, I do not pretend to be an expert, but this is what struck me: The caste system has not gone away.   All Indians must carry a caste certificate, but many from lower castes have changed their religion from Hindu to Islam, Buddhism and Christianity, as a way of escaping its worst aspects.   You can gloss over one’s caste by saying that you are a Christian, take any job, worship in any church and marry another Christian.   The vast maj...

There’s more than a whiff of self-indulgence about writing. Closeting ourselves away from all of our responsibilities and ‘ignoring’ our loved ones, we writer seem to think that the creation of some piece of writing is more important than the very real demands around us. Then when we are finished, the fruit of our labours doesn’t produce something that people can immediately and fully access, like visual art or some music; neither have we made something that people can immediately use. Anyone who wants to appreciate our art will have to work hard to do so. And what benefit do we gain for this self-focused isolation? We haven’t been indulging ourselves in some leisurely pass time. We haven’t kicked back and watched a favourite film, contently munching through some popcorn. We’ve been working hard! There seem to be a lot of reasons for us not to write, the world doesn’t want us to get on with the business of writing, it would rather distract us or have us doing something more ...