Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

Early this year I changed job and went to work for a company based here in Europe.  In fact, I will be living with Karen and the girls in The Netherlands while Jack, our oldest, goes to college in the US.  It is only a minute ago it seems I held Jack in the moments after his birth.  Now he is getting close to eighteen.  I am getting old.

Changing jobs seemed like a good idea but when I was thinking about moving I wasn’t thinking that the world would be dealing with the largest economic contraction since the great depression.  Well, here we are.  New job, new country, new world order.  But same old faith, thankfully. 

It’s easy to see what is happening around us as a calamity thrust upon us by bankers.  That’s the story line that seems to have gained most traction.  In the UK Sir Fred Goodwin is being vilified in the press for walking away from a bank, the centuries old Royal Bank of Scotland of which he was CEO, with a $1 million per year pension for life.  Hard to justify that given the circumstances.  Look a bit deeper though and the trail of shame leads from banks to governments.  The UK government’s lack of adequate regulation of financial markets and the US governments aggressive push to create home owners who basically could not afford to own a home has saddled us all with the fallout of the bad debts as defaults mount. 

Stopping there would be certainly be good for our collective conscious.  Blaming big business or big government is convenient but alas I think there is one other group at the heart of this fiasco and that is us.  The metaphor I offer you is a something I thought for a long term was uniquely American and, indeed, a pretty good thing, “Public Storage”.   http://www.publicstorage.com/Corporateinformation/CorpAbout.aspx  The first time I saw a Public Storage location I asked what people stored there.  As the person explained to me what people would use the storage unit for I could only wonder that America was a country of such abundance that its citizens needed space to store the stuff they basically didn’t need but still had.  Awesome!  This first sighting was 20 years ago and over the years I have used the presence of Public Storage as a proxy of growing prosperity.  A few years ago I started noticing them around London, and then recently I noticed one in my home town in Glasgow.  The definition of having a lot is that you need special spaces to store the stuff you don’t really need and so “having a lot” had come to Glasgow.  Having a lot has also come to The Netherlands as Public Storage even has a few locations here too. 

With some apologies to Public Storage as a company - I am sure they provide a fine service -  in the current economic climate doesn’t this seem to have transformed from a metaphor of prosperity to a metaphor for something else much darker?  Somewhere along the line we stepped over the line of enough and wandered into the country of excess.  Like the prodigal the son we took the inheritance early and spent it on stuff we didn’t need.  We thought we were living and alive but we wake up one day and we realise we are in the pig trough.  (Luke 15:13 ff)

This is a pretty gloomy post but perhaps we should remember how the story of the prodigal ends.  The wayward son comes to his senses and while he is still far off his father runs to greet him, welcoming him back into the family home.  (Luke 15:20 ff) Many of us over these next couple of years will be happy to turn back towards a father and a family that doesn’t really care how much we have and in fact has riches itself beyond our comprehension.