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!