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From A Distance ……..
Have you heard the latest story about the latest gardening idea? To combat Japanese knot weed they now propose introducing the native beetle from Japan which attacks this gardening pest. Originally you see some botanical genius brought this ‘flower' here because they thought it looked rather pretty and would do well here. They failed to realise that it had no natural enemies outside Japan and that it would overpower all of our natural floribunda!
Wait a minute, are we looking at this properly? If the knot weed has no natural enemies here how well will our native insects do against the Japanese beetle? When you analyse or review some of the projects that we have undertaken you realise that too often we do not see the ‘bigger picture'.
Through episodes in our history we can see where those special projects have turned around and not just bitten us but deflected our direction for generations. Conditions in the Great Lakes of the USA became so polluted that certain chemicals to combat the effects of the pollution. The chemicals destroyed all wild life in the water; these waters are now totally inert.
After World War One identity cards were introduced on main land Europe to help the authorities to understand where people had settled after the war. This had enormous benefits for organising and planning the new Europe, it helped plan for food needs, health care, education and pension planning. At a later date it helped provide the national authorities with a means of finding, isolating, and confining certain unwanted individuals.
These unwanted individuals by the way looked no different to the rest of the individuals amongst whom they worked and lived, this happened only a few years ago in Rwanda.
After WW2 we disentangled ourselves as quickly as possible from countries which, in some cases, did not wish to be released. This was done with a great deal of undue haste, called the wind of change. In hindsight perhaps some but not all countries thus set free achieved some benefits from this freedom perhaps a little more consideration for the people rather than a political agenda might have helped humanity.
Food, during that war, was for Britain a desperate commodity and control came under the remit of the Ministry of Food. Food production from this point on became an industry, and the close link between the consumer and producer has vanished. Can someone tell me why various chemicals and preservatives are still added to frozen food when it is sold frozen and will only be used when removed from our freezers?
There have of course been many other things that have arisen which appear to have more than mere humanity involved. The observation of mould on pieces of bread in a Petri dish created a tool for medicine which has provided us with a certainty that we can survive ailments which before we could not. It seems a shame then that we inject enormous amounts of anti-biotic into our cattle to ‘improve' the colour and reduce the efficacy of these drugs in the long term.
Take for example the movement led by William Wilberforce fighting slavery against all the vested interests he changed our Parliament and society. Because of him we in Britain became the first regime in the world to ban the slave trade in any part of what was then our empire. Eventually replicated across most of the world, but started here by William Wilberforce and a small number of committed dedicated friends. They declared that these people not inferior creatures but were in fact our brothers and sisters.
Before Wilberforce a chap called Saul thought he would attempt to remove certain religious zealots from a troublesome corner of his own country. What he never seemed to realise that what he did actually achieve was the dispersal of those people he was trying to remove. That disruption and movement of individuals almost guaranteed the survival of this fledgling religion which could after all have simply withered on the vine in this region if he had not attacked them so vehemently.
I challenge you in your lives today to correct what is really wrong to the best of your ability. You will be on your own, you will be criticised by those who know better, and it will of course be more complicated than you could be aware. Even more criticism will be added if the proposed change comes from a Christian perspective. Most criticism would come not from people who are not Christian but from the apologists in our own Christian ranks who do not wish to offend anyone.
As in the words of the last British song which actually reached a decent position in the European Song Contest, ‘From a distance God is watching you, yes he is watching you….from a distance.'
My question for you, the reader, is quite simple, what does God see when he watches you?
Adrian Chase
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