Lent Blog

We have always lived in a market based economy, and there are always commodities that people want to buy and sell.  However, through history, one of the most invidious things that we have sold is each other.  While we may like to think that human trafficking was abolished here in the days of William Wilberforce, sadly this is far from the truth. 

Why do I say all this?  Well, today’s action is to find out about human trafficking.  One of the main organisations that is campaigning on this issue today is Stop the Traffik (www.stopthetraffik.org).  They are working in the areas of education, advocacy and fundraising. 

• Education: Spreading the message, creating awareness and understanding of people trafficking.  
• Advocacy: When people act things change. Engaging with those who have the power to minimise the trafficking of people. 
• Fundraising: Financing anti-trafficking work around the world working with those vulnerable to and those who have been trafficked

 They have organised an on-line petition, they are getting celebrity endorsements, they are selling ‘freedom keys’ and chocolate.  All of these are tangible things that they are doing to try to highlight the plight of those who are trafficked and to help to stamp out this trade.  As with so many things, if we all try to work together then we can achieve so much more than we can individually………

One of the increasing ways that we have been able to make a difference over the past few years has been to be able to buy Fairtrade products.  So, as today’s action is to buy a fair-trade product, this is one that I do on a fairly frequent basis. 

Fairtrade is about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world.  By requiring companies to pay sustainable prices (which must never fall lower than the market price), Fairtrade addresses the injustices of conventional trade, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest producers.  It enables them to improve their position and have more control over their lives. 

There are lots of Fairtrade products these days and it is amazing how many different things we can buy.  According to the Fairtrade foundation (www.fairtrade.org.uk) there are over 3,000 products that they have licensed.  The other good thing is how many of them can be bought locally, indeed it is one of the major aspects of the current advertising campaign by the Co-operative. 

So what did I buy?  Well, I am hosting a meeting at work tomorrow and we have a policy of not providing biscuits with teas and coffees.  So I have bought a couple of packets of biscuits so that we can just be that little bit more civilised.  Buying Fairtrade is something we don’t have to go out of our way to do – to make a difference every day………

Now this one was always going to be a difficult one to achieve!  The action was that ‘half the world lives on less than £1.40 a day – can you?’  It depends what you mean by £1.40 of course?  Is that the entire amount of money that everything costs in the day?  Or is that just the amount of disposable income to spend in a day? 

Now, if it was the total amount of money, then there is no way that I can get anywhere near this.  The cost of the mortgage, electricity, gas, council tax etc, etc, etc, far outweighs this by a huge factor.  If it is the amount of disposable money left, then £1.40 is hardly anything these days – about the cost of a cup of coffee. 

So, £1.40 then – how did I do?  Well, I failed miserably before 9am.  How did I do this?  The answer was petrol as I needed to fill the car to drive down to Huntingdon with work.  At over a pound a litre, I wouldn’t have got anywhere near home if I had used all my money up!  Adding into this the cost of the toast for breakfast, the lunch and dinner and suddenly I have spent days and days worth of £1.40s. 

Of course there is the fact that our cost of living is so much higher and that the equivalent of £1.40 in the local context is entirely different to spending that amount here.  But, how much do we spend everyday that we don’t have to that could make that much difference somewhere else in the world………

I’m moving a couple of the actions around this week as circumstances do not really let me follow strictly the actions in the Love Life Live Lent series.  What I should be doing is eating or cooking food from a cuisine I haven’t tried before.  However, I am going to do this at the weekend when I have some real time to plan and cook. 

What we have done is to take Saturday’s action to ‘take a bag of clothes to a charity shop’ instead.  Not only that, but we have also taken a couple of bags of old clothes that were not fit to be reused, to be shredded.  Where once we might have just put these out in the bin, it is good that we can now get them recycled. 

Of course, the wardrobes don’t seem that much emptier.  What we have done is mostly to sort out our children’s clothes and to get rid of the things that the youngest has grown out of, together with some that have worn out.  So for now, the clothes are all in the right wardrobes and drawers – until we start to wear them again………

As we are now moving into the fifth week of the Love Life Live Lent series, the thoughts and actions turn from national ones into global ones.  Today’s action is to ‘pray for countries in conflict with each other’.  I think back to my blog from last Wednesday and remember again the situation in South America involving Ecuador, Columbia and Venezuela and hold all of these countries, their leaders and the ordinary folk who live in them in my prayers again today. 

Life is, to misquote Jimmy Greaves, a funny old game.  I was thinking this today when I was in church and contemplating not just my Lent action for today, but also the service we were having and life in general.  It seems so easy to get hooked into the realities of life close to home and to lose sight of the bigger picture. 

Today’s service was a family service around the resurrection of Lazarus.  Both of his sisters – Mary and Martha – had to be reminded of the big picture by Jesus when they said that if only he had been there, then their brother would not have died.  In the same way I feel that we sometimes need a nudge to remind us that there is a world outside our usual orbit – I know that I do! 

When the most difficult thing I had to manage today was a bowling birthday party for 8 girls, I reflected that actually life for me here in Lincoln is a fairly easy one.  Driving a few children to Washingborough and then coming back to make pizza is in no way comparable to the hardships and conflicts that so much of the world seems to be embroiled in.  I didn’t have to worry about being blown up just by going to do my food shopping as is the case in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. 

So today I not only think of those countries in conflict, but I also give thanks for the fact that we do not feel in daily peril, but that actually we are not physically at war in that sense.  Perspective is a marvellous thing to have, it is just so often at the back of the mind………

Before I start blogging about today’s action, I have to go back to yesterday’s one.  Having admitted that my allegiances were to St. Andrew rather than St. George, what I did not talk about was the rugby.  There was only ever expected to be one side that won the Calcutta Cup match today and that was England. 

Having been a Scotland supporter for as long as I have understood national sporting sides, it has been a difficult journey to say the least.  Defeat so often snatched from the jaws of victory has been so often the case that even the most die hard Scottish supporter (in any sport) almost despairs at taking an early lead – as it will so often evaporate before the end of the game.  The obvious difference to this is, of course, elephant polo, where Scotland are the reigning world champions!   

So to watch the rugby match today and to see the flags of St. Andrew flying high in the unexpected victory, was marvellous for me.  There will be one or two people that I will just have to ‘bump into’ on Monday at work! 

All of this leads on to today’s action in the Love Life Live Lent series which is to ‘plan a UK-based holiday or short break’.  So we have booked some time away for us as a family in that most obvious of holiday destinations – Reading! 

Why Reading you may say?  Well, there is another reason other than just a holiday that we have chosen and that is to go to my niece’s christening.  So we have gone through the game of choosing a hotel on the internet (there are too many of us with four girls to go to my sister in law’s house) and are hopefully all now booked up.  As with all holidays, we are now on the countdown to it and it gives us something really nice to look forward to………

Today’s action is to ‘find out about your national patron saint’.  Now this would be fairly straightforward for most people in Lincolnshire as it would be St. George.  Although I was born in Lincoln and have lived here for most of my life, St. George is not the patron saint that I would consider my own. 

My parents are both Scottish and my father particularly brought me up to be, and feel, Scottish.  So for me, my national patron saint has always been St. Andrew.  However, I’ve never really know who he was or what he did.  So I have looked this up on the internet tonight.   

Among other things I have learnt that Saint Andrew was a ‘networker’ - a fisherman but also the one who brought the Gentiles (non-Jews) to Jesus and preached about him as far as the Black Sea. The saltire cross is a multiplication sign - reminding us that it was Saint Andrew who brought the little boy and his loaves and fishes to Jesus. Perhaps Saint Andrew was good at shaming those who had hidden their food to share it with the 5,000 others? 

I’ve also learnt that St. Andrew is also the patron saint of Greece and Russia.  One of the sites that I have looked at which was very informative was on the BBC at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/saints/andrew.shtml 

So, it is good to learn about someone I thought I knew, and also good to understand and celebrate those that we have as our national patron saints.  Come November 30^th, I will understand more about St. Andrew………

The media seems to be full of the stories of how dangerous a place Britain is these days. It seems like hardly a day goes by without some really awful story of brutal attacks or even murders having happened.  All of this slowly sinks in to the collective psyche and we seem to get more and more frightened to even walk the streets.  In the Daily Telegraph today, there was a major piece about how one of the times a crime is most likely to be committed is 3.30pm.  Why 3.30?  That is the time when the schools come out and is the prime time for mobile phones and i-pods to be stolen apparently. 

I was travelling back to Lincoln on the train yesterday evening, and a couple (about 18 or 19 years old) got on to the train and sat in front of me.  It may well just have been bravado, and the boy trying to show off to the girl, but  their conversation was littered with his abusive threats of violence to a list of people who had caused him real, or imagined offence.  I made sure that they got off the train at Lincoln before me and that I could always see where they were, until they had left the station.  Was I worried?  Yes, I was – for the seeming sheer indifference of the talk about acts of violence was actually scary. 

This brings me around to today’s action – which is to ‘find out about volunteering in a prison or about supporting prisoners’ families’.  You might wonder why on earth you would want to do this given the story I recounted above.  Well, to me, the story above is the end of a long line of issues that that youth must have had.  Christ’s teachings were full of compassion and love for sinners, and today, our works should be flavoured just the same I think. 

So, having a look round, there are many ways that we can try to help in a Christian way.  A couple of organisations that are helpful in this way are Prison Fellowship UK (www.prisonfellowship.org.uk) and the Churches’ Criminal Justice Forum (www.ccjf.org).  Maybe if we can all reach out, then we can help those who have need to hear about God’s grace………

The theme of ‘nation’ for this week, is widening out a bit today with the action to ‘use a newspaper to reflect and pray about world issues’.  As we live in an ever shrinking world, news gets to us from all over the world in an instant.  Reading the paper this morning, there were two international(ish) items, that caught my attention. 

The first is not really international, but it isn’t mainland Britain.  It was the news that Ian Paisley has decided to stand down as the First Minister of Northern Ireland and also as the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party.  It is really breathtaking to think back a few years and to compare the situation in Northern Ireland then and now.   

To be in a position where violence has been renounced and a government of the DUP and Sinn Fein would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.  It is something to give real thanks for and to pray for continued peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland.  The progress that has been made shows just how implacable foes can come together for the good of all. 

The really international item of news that I have been praying for today, is the developing situation between Columbia, Ecuador and Venezuela.  Without commenting on the rights or wrongs of the tensions that currently exist, what I have been praying for is that cool heads and restraint will carry the day.  I will keep this in my prayers over the coming days as well…………

It is so easy to notice when something doesn’t go right, and so easy to complain these days, that it is so easy to also miss when things go well.  Today’s action has tested me to think about this as it is to ‘write to your MP about something they are doing right’.  It is not something that I would have thought to do before this series of actions – writing to an MP to tell them they are doing their job well. 

I have never actually written to my MP before, although I have met him (he is Edward Leigh) when a colleague and I were trying to stop a site closure at one of my previous employers and we got him (together with Gillian Merron and Austin Mitchell) together for us all to lobby a government minister.  Unfortunately we lost, but we were complemented by the minister on having built a lobbying committee that spanned the entire political spectrum! 

Edward Leigh seems very visible these days.  As the chairman of the very influential Public Accounts Committee, hardly a week goes by without him commenting nationally on a report that is coming out of that committee.  So that is what I have written to thank him for, he is exercising stewardship over that role as chairman of that scrutiny committee, and he is often echoing the concerns of the general population.  So for that, I thank you………