Richard Littledale
Richard Littledale
radio microphone
BBC Radio 2Janice Long Show
Alex Lester Show
Pause for Thought
Richard Littledale: Series 1, Number 2
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Tuesday 16 October 2007

Its good to be green, and I guess a lot of us are doing our best. For some it's a case of cutting back on the foreign flights and for others it means switching off an extra light here or there, walking more often, or recycling whatever we can. At home we try to recycle all those endless unsolicited letters by cutting them up and using them as paper by the phone. I don't know where we'll be when we stop getting letters from the kids' schools and colleges. Perhaps we'll have to write on the table by the phone instead - and that certainly won't be green.

The scheme's not perfect, though. Because these bits of paper are already on their second outing they tend to get binned as soon as they've had a message written on them, no matter how small. After all, we've already recycled them once. That's how I ended up crumpling up a little bit of paper with a single phone number on it because I thought it was no longer needed. But for someone's quick-wittedness we would have been left unable to contact a loved one far away. Ooops!

It's when the important things land up at the bottom of the pile that life gets seriously messed up. When things that are rubbish get treated as precious, and when precious things get treated as rubbish, then we're really in a mess. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he said that we should put God's kingdom first and let other things worry about themselves.

I should probably write that down before I lose it, but I'll have to pick the right bit of paper!

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© BBC 2007
This talk by Richard Littledale was first broadcast as BBC Radio 2's night time "Pause for Thought"
at 01:30 during the Janice Long show and at 03:30 during the Alex Lester show.
It is reproduced here by permission of the BBC.