Johnny Cash famously once said

“If you continue to search for the truth you will eventually end up with Jesus”

It is a line that did little more than bemuse me for many years, but now that I am approaching the later stages of life I seem to have reached the point of “eventually”.

At 60 I have found the most reflective part of my life. The kids are reared, work, although still busy, has reached a point of stability and is no longer a stepping stone to something greater and many of the things that consumed my attention in my early years have lost their control over me now. For perhaps the first time in a busy lifetime I can observe the world from a more remote viewpoint rather than being so immersed in it, I can’t see anything at all.

And when I look, what do I see?

I see very little that makes sense.

I see a world at war. I see previously stable countries divided like they have never been before.                                                                                                                                                   I see school shootings, human trafficking, climatic disasters and a world where you can buy a watch for a million dollars, but yet many of its people are still abandoned to famine and poverty.

The images of the war in Ukraine have barely changed since ones I am familiar with from the last major war in Europe in the 1940’s. Just about every other facet of our society has advanced incredibly in that 80 years but the depravity of war has not progressed from reducing entire cities to rubble with tanks and bombs.

I see a terribly divided America on a whole range of issues apart from the essential ones. Mans love for his fellow man and the first principle of what any civilized society should be, that we all need to get along. I see a whole cohort of people who firmly believe that the solution to a gun problem is more guns.

I see wars and extreme violence in Yemen, Nigeria, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and many more places that no longer even makes the news. I see homeless people. I see sick people. I see poor people. I see people whose entire lives are journeys of difficulty, and indeed, misery.