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| Ted Baker Shirt |
I often get leaflets and magazines through my door for humanitarian aid and wonderful organisations that are doing things for suffering people all over the world. I wish I could work for them but my CV is no good. I would like to work for them because I am distressed with the people they are looking after and I recognize their hunger and need and identify with their weakness, their powerlessness. Today I was in Ted Baker shop in Canary Wharf and looked at a simple short sleeved button shirt - the price tag was £75! I hope that that is shocking to you. If it is not, know this... for the price of 2 Ted Baker shirts your money could keep 4 young girls from being trafficked in Laos through
TEARFUND
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| TEARFUND |
Who is the most influential person you know? Could it be David Cameron, Barrack Obama, Bill Gates? Most of us know OF these people and have heard a bit about them, but what would it be like to actually KNOW them, like a friend? Imagine you could, as a friend of Barrack Obama, through him persuade the change in US foreign policy that would affect the protection of thousands of children in South Sudan! That must be a really amazing position to be in. Powerful. Secure. Purposeful. A while back I ran an April Fools Day image that I photoshopped to look like Prince William walked with me on the Isle of Dogs outside Café Forever ... as if - I did manage to trick a number of people.
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| 'Genuine' image |
I think it must be amazing to work alongside such movers and shakers, but I don't see them as having ultimate authority. As I read the bible I see more and more of little, insignificant people being really important to God. These insignificant types become, through a relationship with God, more and more significant and their lives more and more purposeful. For example, a few names - Gideon, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Esther, Ruth, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. In fact almost all of them began insignificant in the eyes of men - just look at how Moses started out and what Pharoah thought of the Jews when he was born!
I recognized the power of God when I turned 30. At that time I was working for Sky News and earning a lot of money and then blowing it regularly on alcohol, drugs, holidays, and preening my feathers. It was a purposeless existence. I was however aware of an imbalance between rich and poor, between races and classes of people, and a rapid decline in the state of our world in general, and it bothered me. I saw the problem but I couldn't see a solution. Love always seemed like something you fell into with a girl. Love was a very strange concept to me - I needed it and thought I had the ability to give it, but looking back I know that all I could give was pain.
I am now, I believe, through my time I spend with people on the Isle of Dogs, in church, and in the community, converting people from an ideology of selfishness to selflessness - to learn to love people properly. I am not in anyway qualified to do this having been a selfish man all of my life. I do however know somebody who does know absolutely every aspect of love. Hopefully those I spend time with will in turn learn to love their neighbour as themselves. I guess I am, in some way, working to relieving the suffering of people in other parts of the world too. God doesn't need movers and shakers, he needs obedient servants.
