Thought for the week

Time and tide wait for no man

THEY’RE busy dumping rocks in the sea at Old Colwyn, doing their best to protect against storms and rising sea levels. It’s an expensive future-proofing.

Further along they have just finished building a little pier in a nostalgic throw-back to a lost time. It’s pretty but the glory days of dancing and music are lost forever.

And in between them someone else is hard at work trying to stop rain seeping through the roof of the Porth Eirias buildings.

It strikes me that here you have a clear picture of what the human race spends so much of its resources doing: harping back to the past, attempting to shore up against the future and struggling to stop the drip, drip, drip of wear and tear in the present. Thus it always has been.

You can see why one of the writers in the Bible just shrugged his shoulders and said “this is all just chasing after the wind.” You can’t bring the past back. You can’t hold back time and tide. You can’t stop everything wearing out.

No surprise, then, that the Bible authors point us to God instead.

The same writer who described human life like chasing the wind concludes that finding God, respecting him and keeping his commandments is the most secure way to live. Elsewhere in the Bible King David composes a poem to God whom he calls “my rock and my saviour.”

So I continue my daily walks along the prom, appreciating the workmen hard at it, but quietly praying to God as I stroll because that is where my real security lies.