Thursday 10 June 2010

When you've been out shopping on a busy day, I don't suppose paying your car park fee is the highlight of your day really, is it? I have to admit that the description of it as a "pay on foot" scheme always amuses me - as if you are going to grasp a fiver between your toes and insert it into the machine.

On this particular occasion the shopping experience had not really been one to treasure. The shops were crowded, the queues were long, and frankly I was just being a grumpy bloke who wanted to get home. There was even a queue to pay at the machine, for goodness sake. But when I got to the head of the queue, a smile crept across my sour face. In bright letters the LCD display on the ticket machine pronounced that "change is possible"

Did this mean that I might get chang ... but then again I might not, so inserting a fiver for a £2 fee was my look out? Did it mean that change was available on some days, but not necessarily on others? Given that this happened when that air was thick with politics, had a political party sponsored the machine's message with some dodgy political pledge? Who knows! I decided not to risk the possibility of change, and instead inserted the right money and headed for home.

We're a sceptical lot, us Brits really. We have passed the "keep calm and carry on" mentality off as a virtue, shrugging our shoulders and accepting that nothing ever changes. All of us feel like giving in once in a while, but the Christian faith affirms that change is always possible, no matter what. There is no situation too desperate nor any person so lost that God can't do something about it.

In the Old Testament there is a story about a bit of a failed prophet called Jonah. He doesn't like the job he is given, makes a fool of himself, runs away from God, and ends up swallowed up by a whale. From the belly of the whale he cries out to God to give him a break. Somehow his plaintive little voice is heard from that dark and dingy place. The whale spits him out; he clambers up the beach, wrings himself out and gets on with his life.

You see change is always possible, although you'ld do better to take Jonah's word for it than believing a car park ticket machine in Staines!