' what he opens no one can shut and what he shuts no one can open' Isiah 22:22

We live in a world of mysterious paradoxes of things that shouldn't be. Take the birth of Jesus no power, no money, no rank, all the things that people associate with durability and yet his teachings grew into an unstoppable force and literally the world was changed. When people say to me show me Gods work I always reply ' open your eyes and look it is all around you ‘.The divine is often at its clearest when we experience things which are outside the norm which seem at first to be strange and counter intuitive until we realize that we have been living in a blinkered hall of mirrors.

The strong and the powerful do thrive for a time but in the end they carry the seed of their own destruction they always become undermined and fail the door remains shut. Likewise something such as the call for the abolition of slavery or the end of communism had at their beginnings had no power or support and yet  became unstoppable. So much that is good in our world seems to have come about  in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Just as in our own lives we so often don't take heed of the wind of God and grasp inevitable disappointment and failure.

Nothing to me represents this more clearly than the sermon on the mount its teachings  at first reading appears nonsensical until you realize that they represent the doors that are open and far from being a list of weaknesses they represent an unstoppable strength and are indeed the rock on which our faith is built.

Fraser Hill