February 2025 – Glenn Myers

Ambition, its evolution and fulfilment

Still the great prize

Recently the church calendar shone its spotlight on the Presentation of Christ at the temple, and our attention was drawn to those two old codgers, Simeon and Anna, who had been separately hanging around the temple, for, like forever, waiting for the Consolation of Israel.

Then one day along come Mary and Joseph with the early-childhood Jewish routine of presenting the child at the temple. Surely Mary was a little anxious about her eight-day-old being circumcised, like nowadays when your kids have their first jabs. What if he cried? What if he didn’t stop bleeding? What if they got it wrong with the knife?

Anyhow, presumably before any knives are wielded, up jumps Simeon, followed closely by Anna, and starts prophesying. All my life I’ve been waiting for this, says Simeon. Indeed that was my life. And now I’ve seen this baby. He’s the one. I’m done here.

Which raised the question, what am I waiting for? What am I hoping for? What is yet unfulfilled? This is a question you can ask periodically through your life, with, perhaps, different answers along the way. In my case: I’ve worked as a writer all my life. I fell in love with a girl and thirty and more years later she still brightens and fills my days. We raised two wonderful children. We paid for our house and saved up, some, for our retirement. I didn’t die along the way. What more could I want?

It turns out that the more that I want is craftsmanship. I think that, and not dying yet, are my remaining ambitions. OK, those and loving people and hanging out with my wife and family and continuing to be a disciple of Jesus.

Craftsmanship: doing things beautifully and well. For better or worse, I live behind a keyboard. I inhabit a world of books and words and ideas and images. I don’t smell, like some men do, of engine oil or rural pursuits. Flakes of sawdust don’t fall from my hair. Craftsmanship for me is writing beautifully and well. And it’s still a bright shining, guiding (and maybe distant) light.

What, I wonder, about you?

Appealing against the Second Law

I’d like to protest the passing of time.

It’s a humane feature of earthly laws that you can appeal.

The law I’d really like to appeal against, though, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is roughly, everything gets old, wears out dies.

I’ve had it with seeing what Time and the Second Law do to people. What is this force that takes good people, drains them into a wizened hulk, then tosses them aside? How can that be right? I wish to appeal on behalf of the spry 85-year-olds I know who any time soon will hardly be able to climb onto their perch, and a little later, will have fallen completely off it. Good, strong people. Old age so isn’t fair.

Can you appeal? A lot of people, most of us, try to defy the Second Law or hold it back. It doesn’t really work, of course. But can you actually appeal? Since we are dealing with the created order here, we would have to appeal directly to the Creator. And we have a clue in our favour, namely the life, death and resurrection of God the Son, Jesus Christ.

So our appeal. Best to bring the issue to the One God and ask him to think about it in the light of his total Godness. That is, just be God, God. In all your total love, justice and mercy, faced with these things that you created, namely (1) the Second Law, and (2) people made in your image, made in your love, just be totally yourself.

If one can so speak.

And when you do that, what results? I don’t think we really can know. But I’m thinking, if the appeal is granted, and I can see how it might be, the eternal state that results isn’t just about halting time’s flow. I would quite to have my twenty-three year-old body back (halting time in that sense) but I’d quite like to hang onto my much older head, please. And when I think about it, the pattern of childhood, youth, midlife, old age, each with their attendant joys, are all lovely and I wouldn’t like to miss any of them. I wonder if Eternity will be still be roiled by the slowly passing seasons? I kinda hope so.

But it that’s the case, and if you appeal to God against the Second Law, asking God to be totally God in all of this, what does a successful appeal look like? I think it looks like hope, new birth, regeneration.

The really bitter thing about the Second Law is not really the ageing, or the weakening, or the becoming erratic and vulnerable. All that can be covered by love, at the end of life, just as it is covered by love at the beginning of life. No, the really bitter thing is when people fall away into a dark pit of hopelessness. So that I will never see them again. I will never know them again. I will never enjoy them again. We will never talk together again. Never again.

But if the wizened elderly were in fact seeds ready for a new planting, ready for a new life, still the essential them, but re-made for a new dawning world, all the losses on this side of things would be OK.

Slowness and labour-saving devices

There is an argument that commitment to going about things slowly means should shouldn’t surround yourself with timesaving kit. I mostly don’t agree. As well as the standard stuff that everyone has had for years, we’ve also introduced a breadmaker and then a robot vaccuum cleaner to our managerie.

They mean you can choose your slowness. Making bread with a breadmaker is huge fun, a world away from the chore of having to make it like my grandparents knew.

I was thinking the other day about pre-dishwasher days. They mostly coincided with my not-being-married days, and quite often with being invited for Sunday lunch. As a young guy and recent Christian I ate a lot of other people’s Sunday lunches, usually a roast, and typically followed up by a walk or a chat and then a tea. Along with others, I have gratefully tackled piles of washing-up, enjoying the conversation and the shared work. I found various species of washers-up over the years, all now sadly ghosts of history.

The perfectionist. This was someone who basically took charge of the sink and made sure every dish came out spotless and gleaming. They were not quick, and their fellows on the cleanup crew had to stand and wait.
The drier-up who gleefully, even maliciously, returned washing up to the sink, requiring it to be redone.
The drier-up who assumed if you pick it off with tea-towel, that’s just fine.
The enthusiast who splashed around like a toddler in a bath, soaking everything, washing up with speed but not always with the highest quality.
The mono-tasker who, if you asked him a question, would stop even drying up a plate while he thought about the answer.
The contrarian, who washed the dirtiest things first, using prodigious amounts of water and time.

On that spectrum I was definitely, as a washer-up, the enthusiast, and as a drier, the picker-off-with-the-teatowel, unless I really didn’t like the person washing up, in which case I returned every plate I could find.

So much is lost with the demise of the Sunday wash up. Psychological assessment. Control. Submission. Dominance. Mentoring. Shared endeavour. Friendship.

Still, though.

Community can heal

I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:

As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.

At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.

With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.

I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.