Change

What is change? My world is continuously changing. Different people, different problems, different challenges, life is full of change. Sometimes good, job promotion, new baby, new mobile phone with all the gadgets on it; sometimes bad, redundancy, family illness, my computer’s stopped working But that’s life!

But is that all there is to life?

I’d like to change the world for the better, feed all the starving people, bring relief to all the oppressed, abolish poverty at a stroke. We have the technology surely we can do it!

But it doesn’t happen. Why not? Is it too big a job? I might as well give up now.

The world can be changed, not by expansive and extravagant gestures but by changes in individuals. By people’s attitudes to each other, people seeking to help each other rather than seeking to get one over on each other, by individuals looking to each others needs rather than being blinkered by there own desires, by loving one another. By loving one another as God has loved us.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3 v 16)

That seems massive, that someone like Jesus would allow himself to be killed to show how much God loves us and that even our worst behaviour and actions can be forgiven. I couldn’t do anything like that. But the bible tells us we don’t need to.

“.. a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, though it is less than all the seeds that are on the earth, yet when it is sown, grows up, and becomes greater than all the herbs, and puts out great branches, so that the birds of the sky can lodge under its shadow." (Mark 4 v 31 -32)

All big changes start from a small beginning.

Pray to God to show you what small change you could make in your life, one that could lead to a mustard tree, whether you see the outcome or not. But be careful, ‘you might not get the answer that you wanted to’!