Thought for the week

THIS week I entered a Zoom call on my computer to find that one of the participants was – quite literally – upside down.

You would have thought that after months of working from home we would have at least figured out which way up the webcam goes by now! But isn’t that just the metaphor we need for these times?

Every day we’re told that we’re in this ‘new normal’, but normal, under any definition, shouldn’t change shape every ten minutes. There’s so much change in our lives that we often just feel lucky just to have made it to the end of the day without being upside down, inside out, and back-to-front. Maybe at some point we should just say this is not normal. New or otherwise. It’s just rubbish.

Perhaps, if we could just look our world in the eye right now – without looking for somebody to blame, without conjuring up conspiracy theories, or writing angry Facebook posts – then we could just say together; ‘wow this really is quite rubbish, isn’t it?’ I think that would be the start of something really healthy.

Being honest and vulnerable in the face of adversity really draws people together – and as the old saying goes, we are better together. It says in the Bible that we should make every effort to maintain unity through the bond of peace. This means fighting to hold close to each other and face challenges as one people.

I really believe that we as a people can come out of all this nonsense the right way up if we make every honest effort to cling to each other and stay together, even when things are rubbish.