Finance and Faith

I’m writing this in response to a specific conversation on Twitter, but I think it’s worth sharing.

When you are poor, your life revolves around money. Even if you’re a hardened leftist it is impossible to escape the reality of having to eat and keep a roof over your head. You can’t escape that, if you need or want something even slightly expensive, you will have to endure hardship to make it happen.

That would be an ecumenical matter.

I’ve decided to expand on my one-line bio on Facebook, and I think it’s worth reposting here too, as I imagine there may be church people who wonder where I’ve gone…

Who Would Jesus Employ?

The BBC News website is carrying an article entitled “Churches fear Equality Bill will conflict with faith“. I don’t know the degree of accuracy, but it alleges that bishops (it doesn’t say which bishops) are concerned that they might be forced to employ gay people, and are preparing for a fight in the House of Lords.

Why going back to church is hard

It’s no secret that we’ve hardly been to church for the last year or so. There have been a whole succession of reasons for this, there’s no one single cause. For instance, our car has decided to object to the cold weather. But even if it didn’t, Sally seems to be working most Sundays and it can take both of us to deal with E at church sometimes. And this period of absence began with both of us suffering health problems, which are not yet resolved. When we have been able to join in worship, it’s not always been at our own church, which means that we’ve seen very little of our Christian family.

Intentionally Selfish

Today, and not for the first time, we have found somebody else’s waste outside our front door. We have a driveway. We have a front garden. This is not a case of somebody slinging things over our fence as they run past. They have made a deliberate effort to carry it up our drive and put it by our door. They can see our bins are full to overflowing already, as like so many others we didn’t have a refuse collection last week. They’ve made a decision that they are going to choose to exacerbate our problem rather than deal with their own.