All can fail, but equally all can change with God’s help, even if it is not always easy

I ONCE read a novel called Incompetence by Rob Grant. He imagines a world where it is illegal to deny somebody a job on the grounds of their inability to do it.

The result is a world of chaos and unpredictability: The stuff of fiction I thought until I read about a Norfolk Jobcentre.

Staff there refused to display a job advert which concluded with the line, “must be very reliable and hardworking” for fear that it would be seen as discriminating against unreliable workers!

Staff at the centre were quick to say this was an error but you can’t help wondering how it came to happen in the first place.

Should we really just accept that people are the way they are and that’s that? Is it unreasonable to expect that people can change?

Certainly, Jesus urged people to pursue growth and development. The woman caught in the act of adultery was not condemned. She was offered forgiveness but also the chance to take a different path in the future. “Go and do not sin again” were Jesus’ words of compassion to this woman who minutes earlier had been threatened with stoning by a self-righteous crowd.

Jesus it seems understands that we all fail. However, he then urges us to embrace the idea that change is not only necessary but possible: not by greater effort but through receiving God’s help.

It is not an easy path to follow. Even the great saints of history struggled to get it right. But through it all God calls us to a future that is different from what we now know and which is our destiny.

As a young Christian struggling to make sense of what my commitment to God would mean I was grateful for the words of a youth leader at a prayer meeting. One teenager had prayed, quite rightly, “Thank you God that you love us just the way we are”.

But the wise youth worker followed this up with his own prayer, “And thank you Lord that you love us too much to leave us the way we are”.