Looking Forwards

Looking forwards at the beginning of a New Year can be exciting, worrying, hopeful, sad and many other things. Often it's a confusing mixture of several emotions.

I write this as we empathise with the people of Cumbria and their ruined homes and businesses, and we are waiting to see what might develop from the Copenhagen Climate Summit. If there is one thing that we can be certain as we look forward into 2010 and the years following, it's that we will have to learn to live differently.

Our slowness in reacting to the clear and evident dangers of climate change (no - I think Climategate is feeble science!) shows how reluctant we are to learn to live differently. We are like a child playing in the evening and being called in to go to bed. We delay and delay - just one more go! - until it's too late and we are in trouble.

The problem is perhaps that the lifestyle (a word only coined in the 60s) we are used to is addictive. We have enjoyed the comfort, the travel, the gadgets and the personal freedom. More than one generation has grown up thinking that this is what the world is like.

Yet we don't need to know much of geography or history to see that this has been nothing more than a bubble, a brief flowering of leisure and excess. We will have to change.

Perhaps we will find it easier if we look at some of these things we will have to give up. A frenetic and debilitating lifestyle. A lack of community. A lurking sense of guilt at the inequality of the world. A lack of time for the things, and people, we really enjoy.

I think I could be willing to give up some of those things. How about you? And maybe it would be more fun if we all encouraged one another locally to a different way of life? Jesus said, 'I came that they might have life, and have it in all its fullness'. Perhaps we could try to live that life together?