Crisis talk

There is a crisis!  In this age of 24 hour news coverage, it seems that the world is in constant turmoil.  We are bombarded with news of one crisis after another.  With hardly time for us to draw breath, the face of one news reporter is replaced by another with more urgent news to impart than the last.

Sometimes they are reporting real tragedies and crises, like the Asian Earthquake, or Hurricane Katrina and, perhaps, we do need to know about these events as soon as we can.

On other occasions, we are faced with 'crisis on the High Street' stories as some mega-retailer reports a drop in its multi-million pound profits of as little as one per cent, or we are faced with the 'political crisis' when one group fails to achieve its particular cherished objective.

Sometimes these crises are only speculative.  'If this happens and that happens then we may have a crisis on our hands', our intrepid reporters tell us.  The current bird flu 'crisis' comes to mind.

Crises and the talk of crises make us sit up and take notice.  They capture our attention and give us a kind of adrenalin rush - and there is a danger is that we start to fail to distinguish between the crises that are important and deserve our immediate attention and those that do not.

How should we, as Christians, discern the difference?

We need to ask ourselves to what extent do these 'crises' directly affect the well being of God's children and his creation so that they require us to respond with positive actions to stand up for righteousness and justice?  How far do these 'crises' demand from us a response to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the lonely.

When these sorts of responses are demanded of us, we can really call them crises, irrespective of how many people are involved.  But what we should not do is panic.

No matter what our circumstances, we are the children of God: ‘We are often troubled but not crushed; sometimes in doubt but never in despair; there are many enemies but we are never without a friend; and although badly hurt at times we are not destroyed.' (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)

by Graham Clarke.