Category: Making things whole

Medicinal compound

Works every time

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

Imagine a bottle of special liquid. If you drink it regularly, it reduces your visits to A&E, improves your mental health, adds years to your life and makes you more likely to do well with chronic illness or trauma.

This same stuff, taken in group drinking sessions, speeds up development goals, getting people working together to address climate change, improve health and education, and provide decent work opportunities.

If two warring sides in a conflict both drink it, the prospects of peacemaking climb.

What is it? Hope. The UN declared a recent day (July 12) as ‘international day of hope’. They came up with a way of measuring hope. Then, having measured how much hope was in a person, they came up with what they claimed were research-backed findings on the effect of hope on all the things mentioned above. Their website offers some colourful graphs. I wasn’t myself greatly convinced by the graphs, but surely the direction is clear.

Here’s a further point though that, properly, the UN isn’t able to make: no-one is better at hope than the Christians. Because Christ is King, we hope for a transformed world to come when he returns; because Christ is king we expect, believe and work for a foretaste of the transformation here and now. (Otherwise why pray ‘Thy Kingdom come?’). We hope, and act, therefore, because Christ is King. It doesn’t matter that it’s slow. It matters that it’s in the right direction.

A superpower.

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Slow mission is taking a summer break and will be back in September. Thank you so much for reading.

If I get my act together, by September I will have moved the blog to Substack. This means my blog will be in company with others of its kind, –nice for it–and also opens options for me to add extra material, perhaps behind a paywall.

Because you’re a loyal subscriber I’ll stick you for free behind the paywall, so you won’t have to pay anything and you should continue to receive the blogs by email as you do now. Most of the blog will remain free to everyone, but I may put some extra stuff, perhaps my books or new books, behind the paywall.

I’m also launching a bookshop that contains all the books I’ve reviewed and loved over the years, all available outside the Amazon empire, and delivered to your house, usually at a discount to the retail price. A slice of the selling price goes to support independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

You can of course cancel, or indeed tell your friends to subscribe, any time you want.

I get more feedback from the blog than I’ve ever done from my books, and I’m really pleased if you find this stuff useful.

The title of the Substack will be ‘Patient Revolution’, but nothing much else will change.

See you in September!

Slaves of productivity

Ramses II was an enlightened employer compared with modern economics.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Economists worry that some things resist being made more productive.

This is a problem because increasing productivity is the bush everyone hides behind when we want a way of paying for more government services without charging more tax.

Some things are easy-ish to make more productive and all the fun things with AI and robotics may give this long trend a further nudge. So if you take a driverless car to a driverless train to get somewhere, you aren’t paying a taxi driver or an engine driver, so it’s cheaper. Productivity has gone up. Similarly if you build cars on a robotic production line rather than employing workers to fit panels and tweak nuts, you can do the same thing. With the money thus saved you, and the state, can do things that you couldn’t previously afford – more government spending, no increase in tax.

But some things resist being made more productive. And perhaps we are nearing the end of long experiment in proving this. For example, you privatise a cleaning contract. The new firm sacks the cleaners and rehires them at worse conditions. Productivity has gone up but actually all you’ve done is grind the faces of the poor and apart for being monstrous, this will bite you back, right where it hurts. Perhaps by paying people less, you have to pay more by way of supplements to the lowly paid, for example, or face greater absenteeism and ill-health.

Or maybe you can cut GP appointments from 11 minutes to 8 minutes. You see more patients. Productivity is up. But that ignores the research that says a good relationship with a family doctor improves health and decreases hospitalizations. Longer appointments, not shorter ones, may actually buy you greater productivity alongside greater human thriving.

Or you can replace teachers with computers but what you end up with is a bunch of kids who can do procedural maths, not the deeply learnt, flexible, adaptive maths education that everyone needs. Their turgid education lasts a lifetime at goodness knows what cost.

You can improve productivity (or at least people have tried) in the care sector by making visits shorter, but it doesn’t work. Lingering over a cup of tea with your client may actually produce more life and fewer of the deaths and diseases of loneliness than zipping in and out making sure they’ve taken their pills.

We are slaves of increased productivity. As a slave-driver, Ramses II was an amateur in comparison. What are we doing to ourselves? We ought instead to be slaves of human thriving. Some things can be speeded up, fair enough. Some things need to be slowed down, and done with love and creativity and passion.

Living in a story

That makes things a lot simpler

Photo by Genevieve Dallaire on Unsplash

We are living in a story.

If we realize this, it takes away a weight. We aren’t writing our own story.

In a story, characters have their own motivations and they follow them. But the whole architecture of the story, where it goes, how it ends, that’s in the hands of the story-teller.

In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son has motivation: to get out and have fun. The father has motivation: to love his son. Neither of them knows how the story will work out. They just follow that which drives them.

What drives you? Follow that. (If it’s a good thing.) What constrains you? Let that also steer your course. Then let the Storyteller do his stuff.

Disconcerted by babies

In a good way

Photo by Michal Bar Haim on Unsplash

Babies stare. It can be worrying when they weigh you up, especially given that babies hover in unstable equilibrium, a nudge away from either rewarding you with a gummy smile or bawling in huge gulps.

It’s worrying for us, though, when, unlike babies, we stop paying attention to people – a point made by the blogger Trevin Wax1 recently and worth repeating in part:

G. K. Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” Our age offers countless wonders. What’s missing is our wonder, especially our sense of awe at the glory of ordinary human beings—those we live with, eat with, work with, and worship with.

Simone Weil once described attention as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Amid endless digital distractions vying for our focus, perhaps our greatest temptation is stinginess—the failure to be generous with our time in truly attending to others. We become unable or unwilling to look beyond the dull and irritating aspects of human interactions until we erode our capacity to offer, and receive, grace and love.

As well as being in trouble with babies, I may get in trouble with my wife, from whom I am often accused of not paying attention. Also, it’s slightly creepy when a grown-up does fix their eyes on yours for too long. And staring at the wrong person, in the wrong way, is of course offensive. Leaving aside husbandly neglect and social improprieties, however, the point stands. Recently someone told me that she wanted visitors to leave her home with two things: (1) something of Jesus, and (2) a sense of having been heard.

Patience

Dialling ourselves down to the pace of God is hard. It would, perhaps, be harder still if God didn’t himself hold all the cards. When it comes to prayer, or matters of seeking justice, or applying hope, we don’t choose to wait. We would rather we didn’t wait. But waiting is thrust upon us.

God is a wait-er. Adding weight to this is the understanding that God is himself somehow a superposition of Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If one is Three, one of the Three might wish the other two would hurry up. Or one might want to hurry because of the sufferings of one of the other two. But no: the Three are perfect in patience as in all else and they are agree together so much that really they are One.

So what we call patience is actually learning to move with the pace and perspective of God. We pray and wait. We struggle and wait. We grow restive and… still wait. Our dinghy, blown by the wind of God, isn’t sailing very fast. But we set our sail and carry on at the pace supplied by the breeze, eyes on the destination.

The danger with all this waiting is that your love grows dulled or your hope withers. So we have to keep our eyes on the prize,renewing the reasons for hope, even while we contine to wait. But there’s more.

Paul E Miller in his excellent little book A Praying Life points out that waiting periods are not just the dead zones between things actually happening, but the realm of love: he writes, ‘the waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship.’ It is the place for trust, intimacy, thanksgiving and holding each other’s hands. It is the place where things come to their full flowering, or their heavy crop of fruit.

Waiting is also quiet. Those who wait are not put on stages, not admired for their achievements. To wait is to be obscure, to be chipped away at, to be refined and seasoned and mellowed and reshaped.

So it’s a gift. Like others of God’s gifts (singleness, endurance for example) it may not be what we would initially want. But it has the consequence, other things being equal, of making us what God wants, God-fashioned. Which is plenty worth it.

Creating beauty when ugly is all around

The restoration of Notre Dame cathedral, which opened in December 2024 after the fire in 2019, involved 2000 craftspeople, 250 companies and around US$900m.

Rebuilding the destroyed roof (which was nicknamed, The Forest) and was made of oak, involved a national call for oak trees. Many needed to be perfectly straight, 20m long and 50cm in diameter. A thousand trees were ultimately selected and harvested.

Then they needed 1300 cubic metres of limestone; and using ancient crafts, the structure was rebuilt (some restoration continues even after the cathedral was opened). As large projects go, it was a great success.

A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

“Each day we have 20 difficulties,” Philippe Jost, who headed the restoration task force, told me. “But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”

I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the pressure to finish on time, or one filled with quite the same quiet air of joy and certitude. When I quizzed one worker about what the job meant to her, she struggled to find words, then started to weep.

(quoted by Diana Butler Bass in her substack.)

Despite being a secular country, France rightly took pride in the restoration of this iconic building, the spritual heart of Paris. It may have contributed to winds of fresh interest blowing through Catholicism. Last Easter day (2025) 10,000 adult Catholics were baptised in France, twice the number of 2023 and the highest number since records began to be taken 20 years ago. Seven thousand teenagers were baptized, ten times the number in 2019.2.

‘Beauty makes everything easier’: fascinating.

When prayer changes history

Sometimes it happens

A high wall is cracked open by a growing tree
Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.

  • Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
  • The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
  • Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.

So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.

I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.

Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution3: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.

Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!

It’s stable because it’s complicated and dynamic

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash

It shouldn’t be a surprise that things are stable most of the time because they are

  1. Free to move about to a certain extent but also
  2. Interlinked.

In this way creation reflects the Trinity, the creator. An atom isn’t an immutable particle, as originally conceived, but a complicated nucleus with a probability-governed blur of electrons around it. Stars and galaxies, the other end of the scale, don’t generally exist on their own but in whirling communities and the interdependence of the universe means today’s stars are the recycled remains of older ones.

Life develops because of interdependence as much as through survival of the fittest; without both together the engine of evolution doesn’t work.

So it is no surprise that the Creator is himself a Trinity (yes, language is strained), a whirling interdependent dance of Father, Son and Spirit. The dance, not the individuals in the dance, is the deep reality.

All of which explains the limits of humans (or perhaps, nations) going solo, going me first, striking out on one’s own. Interdependence in everything is slow but essential. Hillary Clinton (remember her) was fond of what she understood to be an African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far [or I would say, last enduringly] go together.’

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #4

A final (for now…) post on the interesting shifts of culture and practice that might get state-supported health care and the church’s role at the heart of local communities finding common cause and networking together.

It could be a (quiet, slow) revolution in healthcare and it would not be the first time that church initiatives have altered the national landscape.

  1. The probation service was started by a pair of Anglican missionaries in the early twentieth century, and eventually nationalised.
  2. Educating the working classes was a job pioneered by the Christian churches, with both Catholic and Protestant examples. In the UK, Sunday Schools were teaching literacy and numeracy (and Bible literacy) to a quarter of the eligible British population of children by 1831. 4. (Schools until then were largely private, fee-paying and for the upper class and middle class boys.) In 1870 came the Education Act which made state education compulsory and a state responsibility.
  3. The hospice movement which had earlier (and largely Christian) precedents but in its modern form was established by the devout Christian Dame Cicely Saunders. So far the UK’s 220 or so hospices have escaped being swallowed by the NHS but at Dame Cicely’s death in 2005 were caring for 60,000 people in hospices and 120,000 people in their homes in the UK 5. Eight thousand other hospices followed her model around the world; part of the landscape for the dying. (Interestingly, Dame Cicely was a passionate opponent of assisted dying.)
  4. Possibly, hospitals themselves, invented early in the first millennium by St Basil and his fellow Cappadocian Fathers.