It was an off the cuff remark but it really stopped and made me think. Ben’s guitar teacher (Dan), who is also a Liverpool fan, was chatting to me about the coming Premiership season after a lesson and he commented how, in a time when people are losing jobs, homes and facing financial ruin, to spend £80 million on a player is obscene; especially when £80 million could, as he so rightly pointed out, save lives.

Up to that point I don’t think I had ever really stopped to think about the economy surrounding football, other than to bemoan the fact that I could ill-afford to attend games. I took a moment to take in what Dan had said, and a moment became a long pondering. My conclusion was this: while one person not attending matches or subscribing to Sky will change nothing – there will always be someone desperate to buy a Liverpool ticket – I really don’t want to be a part of an economy that is so seemingly immune to the pressures of the real world and seems to have such disregard for the very source of its wealth: you and me. But still I was drawn to the roar of the Kop.

And then today I was travelling to work listening, as I always do, to Radio Five Live, to learn that John Terry – ‘Mr Chelsea’ – the man who bleeds blue when you cut him – old ‘JT’ himself – is contemplating a move to Man City, the new wealthy kid on the block. Now to be fait to ol’ JT he is having to skimp on the niceties of life as Mr Abramovich will only stretch to one hundred and thirty grand a week, so when Sheik Al What’s-his-Name flashes a smile and offers two hundred and fifty grand a week to come and play for his wannabe outfit, who can blame him for not being tempted? £250 grand, or even £130 grand, a year, never mind a week would turn my head, so who can blame ol’ JT?

The thing is, though – and Mr Terry, Mr Gerrard, even that hateful Mr Ronaldo, are not to blame for this – these characters who kick a ball for a living earn more in a week than it would take most people a good many years to earn. And here’s the sickener: it’s the people who go out and graft long hours at jobs they don’t enjoy to barely earn enough to barely get by, who stretch themselves and go without so they can buy a ticket to go and watch these blokes kick a ball around a park for 90 minutes.

Two hundred and fifty grand a week. That kind of money is obscene. That kind of money is £13million a year. Say that slowly – t-h-i-r-t-e-e-n m-i-l-l-i-o-n quid! Unbelievable. Disgraceful. Funded by you and me – our Sky subscriptions that generate income and advertising revenue, our match tickets, our merchandise purchases – all of those things fuel an economy that brings wealthier and wealthier owners to the party. And as the wealth increases the greed increases, and as the greed increases the need for more wealth increases. And so it goes round.

So I made a decision: no more Anfield, no more Sky Sports. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss the buzz, the atmosphere, the adrenaline, and there is still a part of me that really wants to go again – it’s a bit like an addiction – but I won’t be a part of it. Every time I but I ticket, every time I buy a replica shirt, a scarf, or even a match-day programme, I fuel that economy and I help to grow that greed.

I am not naive – my stand will not change anything, but I choose to not participate in an economy that will only ever take from me and is so far removed from reality that it is hard to comprehend. Our choices may not make a difference, they may not change the world, but they always count for something, even if it’s only a sense of well-being deep within yourself.

Do what you believe to be right, even when it changes nothing.

In a previous post I wrote about the hope I cling to; but hope makes for an uncomfortable companion as, too often, lurking in the shadows cast by hope lies despair. I dream big dreams, I have a big passion and in pursuit of all of that I cling desperately to a big hope; but in that big hope I find big despair.

How can two things so far removed from each other, so seemingly mutually exclusive, appear to co-exist with such compatibility? Hope and despair are polar opposites, and yet one so often precedes the other, and at times they cohabit the same spirit, the same emotional space. In my experience it is despair that supplants hope; this may be through impatience, it may be through immaturity, or maybe it’s because hope is too fragile to withstand the voracious appetite of despair to consume all before it.

It always strikes me as odd that hope is so fragile. After all, without hope we have no future and without a future we lose a, even the, point to our existence. Maybe we have become so desensitised to the mediocre and the mundane – to merely existing where we were made to live – that we no longer hold to hope; in those in whom there is no hope there can be no despair. Hope and despair are like good and evil, or winning and losing – one cannot exist without the other.

Maybe as a species we have won our battle with despair by killing ourselves – our essence – by removing our hope of life in order to choke despair?

Despair is a sniper, lying hidden, stalking its prey until that fatal shot is can be taken. Despair approaches through stealth, and only when the trigger is pulled does it reveal itself; and as the bullet rips through the air towards its target there is a brief moment of awareness that despair is coming before it strikes, but in that awareness there is usually helplessness.

After the initial impact there seems to be recovery – a normalisation where the shock subsides and equilibrium is restored. But In reality despair, through its bullet, has caused a wound that becomes a cancer, eating us alive from the inside out. Its symptoms are often hidden, but its manifestation is destructive in the extreme; the damage it leaves behind can be irreparable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with despair is that we come to own it: it becomes an integral part of who we are and we speak of it as if it is a friend, almost lovingly. It’s not that we love to feel the way despair makes us feel, rather we forget that there is another way to feel; and so we have to love despair, otherwise we have nothing to cling to, nothing within which to frame our reality. The more comfortable we become in our relationship with despair, the less we fight against it and the more we embrace it; and with each embrace, with each caress, we die a little more as the cancer slowly, silently, invisibly consumes us.

It is unrealistic to believe that we can travel through life without encountering despair, but when we arrive in that place we must be sure we are merely sojourners, temporarily cohabiting the same space. We must recognise despair for what it is. We should not despise it for without the pain it brings we can never fully experience the wonder of hope; but we must never grow to welcome it, to long for it or even to accept it. Despair is an inevitable and necessary part of our journey, but we must be sure to cling to something greater, something deeper, something more transcendent, and yet infinitely more fragile than despair can ever be: hope.

Without experiencing the sting of defeat, the taste of victory is less sweet; without suffering rejection, acceptance can never be celebrated. Until we experience the bad things we will never fully appreciate the good things. And so it is with despair. And yet, that which comes to rob us, to silently suffocate our very essence, to make us dead to ourselves, is, ironically, the very thing that ensures that we can appreciate the glory of hope and live a life filled with expectancy and wonder in pursuit of the things of which we dare only to dream.

I accept despair because I must, but I hold onto hope because I can.

This book received a lot of hype, and for that reason I initially kicked against reading it; the Purpose Driven Church got a lot of hype, too, so I felt justified in my stance. But enough people whose judgement I trusted began to tell tales of how awesome the story of The Shack was that my resistance wilted and I picked up an audio version and began to listen. Unlike the Purpose Driven Church, in the case of The Shack all the hype was more than justified.

Written as a fictional novel influenced by the author’s own life experiences, The Shack is an engaging read that is ‘narrated’ by Willy, a friend of the main character, Mack, flowing easily from past to present and taking the reader through the twists and turns of the life of a man who has a history from which he hides, a present that tortures him and a future that is full of expectancy – after time spent at the shack.

The basic premise of the book is built around the disappearance of Mack’s daughter, Missy, on a family holiday. All the evidence points to a brutal murder, with the ‘ladybird killer’ a prime suspect, but no body had been found; a bloodstain in a mountain shack seemed to be all that was left of Missy.

Mack was a soul who could not rest; distant in his relationship with his wife and remaining daughter, Mack could not reconcile what had happened and, blaming himself, his past and God, he became a tortured and angry man. Then came an unexpected and unexplained letter from ‘Papa’, and with that letter begins a journey for the reader that leads into a mystical and disturbing yet enchanting story, which is underpinned by the full spectrum of human emotion.

While the direction of the story is largely predictable, it draws you into an intimate embrace, revealing God in a way few of us will confess to ever having considered. In particular, for me, the imagery used to communicate the Holy Spirit to the reader is mesmerising. Young demystified what I have found the hardest part of my faith to comprehend, and I found myself feeling as if he was someone I could reach out and touch.

The story itself is full of twists and turns: not so much at a plot level, but rather at an emotional level. It is, to some degree, a gradual revelation of the extent and depth of God’s grace, intertwined with an unfolding journey into the character of the Trinity. On another level, it is a novel about tragedy, redemption and healing. What The Shack does is bring theological concepts to life, leaving the reader with a deep sense of a living, breathing, tangible God, whose love knows no end and whose perseverance and patience cannot be exhausted.

What makes this book so good is the fact that it successfully bridges a gap between an overtly Christian publication and one which is aimed at the fiction market: it can be read as a novel, or it can be read as a revelation of the person of God. This is a book to enjoy whatever you believe; I suggest that this is what makes ‘The Shack’ one of the most powerful reads of its time.

This book blew my mind, challenged me on oh-so-many levels, and managed to both inspire me and flatten my spirit at the same time. The story of a couple with a heart to serve, an appetite for adventure and a willingness to embrace the unexpected, Reckless Faith provides the reader with an insight into just what can happen when you follow where the Spirit leads you.

This book is as challenging as it is touching, as uncomfortable as it is inviting, and it engages the reader afresh with every page turn. Unlike other books that chronicle a journey, Beth Guckenberger does not present a chronological unfolding of her story, but rather presents random, yet strangely ordered, insights into the pathways that she and her husband navigated. The book does not approach her adventure from any kind of practical stand-point, but chooses instead to offer moments – moments of great sadness, moments of great joy, moments of despair and moments of great triumph; every moment is a revelation of the things God did, and every moment presents a window into wonder.

The title of this book is quite apt, and yet is also something of an oxymoron in itself; and I think that the author is playing with us a little in calling the book what she did. She must have known that in our safe western paradigms the decisions she and her husband took would be categorised as reckless, but in a paradigm constructed on an abandoned faith recklessness doesn’t enter into it. It is that certainty that she has in her faith, and the playfulness that is released from within that faith that comes through in every high, in every low, in every tragedy and in every triumph. It is that certainty that threatens to crush the reader under a weight of challenge and discomfort, yet leaves them also inspired and enthuse at the same time.

At its core is the story of a comfortable, westernised couple from Ohio who embarked on an unlikely adventure to Mexico where they established an orphanage to care for the forgotten children: a vehicle through which their faith could become a living, breathing expression of Jesus. Through Isaiah God challenged – even compelled – his people to fight for the widow and the orphan, and this book is filled with humbling stories of one couple’s fight to live up to that challenge.

There is no sugar-coated pill in this book, no warm and fuzzy hollywood ending; it offers real-life with all its twists and turns, all its hard decisions and all its consequences. But beyond that it offers real-life examples of just what can happen when we let go of our safety blanket, when we release all the meaningless crap that we hold so dear and take a step into the unknown, following the cry of our soul as we pursue the scent of the one who is beckoning us into a world beyond our comprehension. Few of us will ever take that step – few of us will have the courage to stop finding excuses and just put that first foot outside the door of our comfortable existence – but for those of us who do, this book is living proof of what can, and most likely will, ensue.

A great read, available in paperback or on audio book, I highly recommend this to everyone, and especially to those of us who know that there has to be more to life than this. The challenge this book left with me was a simple one: so what are you going to do now?

How often have you come away from a conversation at work feeling like you think you know what is required, only to arrive back at your desk with a haze in your brain and unsure as to what was agreed? In fact, this can apply not just to work, but also to situations outside work: in relationships, casual meetings, social arrangements – in fact, pretty much at any time or in any scenario.

Obtaining clarity is particularly pertinent for me at the moment, hence deciding to share a few thoughts. The nature of the work my team does means that each assignment generally brings with it numerous strands and a variety of required outcomes; picking your way through that minefield to deliver what is required can be hazardous and often treacherous, to say the least.

A primary source of stress is confusion, and where you find confusion you will also find impeded productivity and inefficiency. When deadlines are missed and objectives aren’t met it is an easy response to blame the task-setter for not being clear, and often that is the case, but blame doesn’t make what has been produced right, more relevant, or on-time, so the consequences remain unchanged. In fact, blame simply increases stress and introduces despondency, as it brings with it a sense of helplessness.

There is a responsibility on those of us to whom assignments are given to take control of the situation. I am encouraging my team to ensure that they do not walk away from a meeting with a fresh piece of work without also taking with them a clearly defined, and agreed, set of outcomes – primary and secondary, and a clear deadline. While this doesn’t eliminate the task-setter deciding what has been produced is not what he or she wanted, it does ensure that the task-doer is able to deliver what the work-giver agreed he or she wanted.

One thing that obtaining clarity is not about is abdicating responsibility. Nor is it about being able to throw your hands in the air and say ‘well you said…’ in an attempt to cast blame. Of course, if both parties agree on the goal into which the ball is to be struck then it is not the fault of the task-doer if the task-setter then decides it was the wrong goal in the first place. However, having said that, the task doer can take steps to ensure that shooting into the ‘wrong goal’ is avoided; all this requires is a little pro-activity.

Obtaining clarity is not a one-off exercise – it is a process; it is about setting a route to a successful outcome. As well as achieving clarity in that first meeting, there is a requirement to proactively manage not only the task, but the person giving the task right up to the task deadline. Things can change – sometimes we need to see a draft of something to realise that what we asked for was not what we wanted – and so ongoing review is integral to clarity.

Obviously, each task needs to be assessed on its own merits, and the approach taken needs to be relevant to the scale and scope of the assignment: clearly a task requiring a couple of hours work will be tackled differently from one that will span days, weeks or months. But there are certain principles that apply across the board.

Firstly, do not leave that first meeting without knowing at least the primary objective, the deadline, the required outcome and the parties with an interest in the task. Where possible look to identify any secondary agendas and any dependencies. Dependencies are, unsurprisingly, things required to complete the task for which we depend upon others – for example data that we need to obtain from another team. Identifying dependencies is not about establishing a potential scapegoat, but rather about ensuring that the task-setter realises that the task may depend on input from other parties, and that there is, therefore, an inherent risk within the task that may or may not hinder delivery.

Secondly, set up review milestones. Whether the job is a couple of hours or a couple of months, build in review points. If, for example, a task is given to you at 11am with a deadline of 2pm, arrange to meet with the work-giver to review progress at say 12:30 (if sufficient progress will have been made by then). What this does is ensure that the originally set trajectory is still the right one, and avoids the 2pm deadline arriving and the provided ’solution’ being thrown out as not being what was required, even though it does meet the requirements as they were originally stated. If your task spans a longer period of time then set up regular review meetings – the shape and direction of a task can change as it develops, and timelines can be affected by factors internal to the project (dependencies, sickness etc) and external to the project (additional ‘urgent’ work arriving etc).

Finally, do not leave that meeting, or any subsequent review meetings, without agreement as to the way forward, including objectives, secondary objectives, outcomes and deadlines. Ensuring that every party with an interest in the task is in agreement goes a long way to achieving a good outcome. With one particular task-setter I often say three or four times and in three or four different ways what I believe we are looking to achieve, how we are looking to achieve it and by when; and, generally speaking, this is very effective in ensuring we both stay on the same page.

Ensuring clarity will not eliminate stress, nor will it guarantee a successful outcome – anything with a human factor is inherently fraught with danger in that respect – but it will help manage stress and deliver good quality outcomes that have a very good prospect of hitting the mark.

Relax Alarm Clock for iPhone comes in 2 versions: the ‘Lite’ option, which is cut down and cut price at £0.59, and the full option, which will set you back £2.99; both are available at the App Store.

As you may expect, the Lite version is, well, lightweight. That said, depending on your needs it still offers an excellent alarm clock. You can choose colours, fonts and one from 10 available sounds (including an acoustic guitar, bamboo chimes, birds, rain, wind and a piano) to rouse you from your slumber. You can also choose one of the tranquil options to fall asleep to, using the timer function to automatically stop the sound of the ocean, or a bubbling brook or whatever you choose from the available list of 10 after a time you determine (in increments of 1 minute). If you would prefer a different sound from those within the application you can record your own sounds using the ‘record’ function built into Relax Alarm Clock .

I started off with the Lite version, but it lacked a few features I wanted, which, needless to say, were available in the full version; who’d have thought it . As you’d expect, the full version includes all of the features in the Lite version and more.

The main feature that was lacking for me in the Lite version was a ’snooze’ function. This is included in the full version, and can be set to any length you desire, in increments of 1 minute. While I usually get up as soon as my alarm goes off, the option to snooze it ‘just-in-case’ I doze back off to sleep is a crutch I wasn’t prepared to throw away. The function is easy to set and even easier to operate: when the alarm goes off two large buttons appear – a red ’snooze’ option and a green ‘dismiss’ option. Both snooze and dismiss work faultlessly, as you’d expect.

Another great feature of the full version is the ability to tap the time display and have the app throw up all the settings, without the need to come out of the app to make changes through the main settings screens, as is required by the Lite version. You can change sounds, volumes, sleep times, fonts, colours and time format from within the applications options screens, which is very handy.

Nice touches in the full version include the ability to be able to slide your finger left to right across the screen to dim or brighten the display, which is a great if you like a dark room; another nicety is the range of sounds – a massive 64 tunes or noises ranging from the soporiphic (presumably to get you into sleep rather than get you out of it) and the in-your-face (for example white noise – guaranteed to get you into the here-and-now without compromise!) Personally I use the ‘Fiddle’ – irritating enough to force me out of bed but not so brash that it scares me into the day.

Both versions allow either landscape or portrait display; I tend to use portrait as I sit my iPhone in a dock by my bed. It is worth noting two things: first, as you would expect the app won’t run in the background and, therefore, needs to be running to work, which will drain your battery; so, secondly, it is worth making sure your phone is on a power supply if you are relying on this to get you to work on time and your iPhone to still have sufficient charge for the day ahead.

Since installing this app I have ditched my clock radio altogether, and often find myself flicking it on just to give me a clock if I am in hotel or some other place without the time on view. If you need/want a good clock and/or alarm, you could certainly do a lot worse than this app. £2.99 well spent, in my opinion.

I have hope: hope of a future that is good; hope of a world transformed; hope of a life that is extraordinary, in whatever shape that comes; hope of justice for the oppressed; hope of freedom for the prisoners; hope of healing for the sick. I have hope that in some way I will experience the Kingdom today, that the passion in my soul will not die, that my life will, in some way, count for something.

Sometimes it feels as if these hopes are held in vain: as if I am clutching at straws, clinging to an idea rather than a reality. When I look around me and see a world in crisis, people in despair and an overarching injustice oppressing the whole of creation, I wonder if this hope is real or imagined – something we followers of Jesus have latched onto in desperation for something that may make us feel better about the prospect of tomorrow. But if it is, then Jesus is a liar, and if he is a liar then what’s the point? Well, he isn’t a liar; despite everything, I believe that: not because I want to, but because I know it to be true. And so, if he isn’t a liar, then in the light of what he has promised, in spite of everything I see in the surrounding reality, I have hope.

Jesus said quite clearly that “A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so [you] can have real and eternal life, more and better life than [you] ever dreamed of.” (John 10:10). Real life. Eternal life. More and better life than I ever dreamed of! That is what he came to bring me, and he didn’t wrap it in a bunch of ‘if you do this, then I came so….’. No, it is there as a stand alone statement – ‘I came to give you this’.

The question is, do I want what he came to bring? The answer to that is a resounding ‘Yes!’. In fact, it is that promise, the hope of real life, eternal life, more and better life than I have ever dreamed of, that keeps me going every day. I say to myself ‘there has to be more than this’ – I say that to myself almost every day, and these days with increasing levels of desperation – and I know that there is more than this – more and better than I have ever dreamed of; I can dream pretty big, so I am filled with a big hope.

Jesus didn’t make out it would be easy, or that I could just jump on for the ride. He was pretty clear that I would have to knuckle down and show some intent – this will be no cake-walk, but it will be, and is, worth it – who wouldn’t want more and better life than they had ever dreamed of? If I thought it was ‘get saved – sit pretty’ then I was wrong. “The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.” says Jesus in Matthew 7:14.

OK, I think I get it: I have a hope for ‘more and better life than I have ever dreamed of’, but I need to take it – it isn’t forced on me, or simply there for me to pick up when I decided to follow Jesus. No, it’s there – free for me to have with no conditions attached, but to lay hold of it I need to be determined – I need to be vigorous and totally focused. “The kingdom is pressing forward vigorously, and the vigorous take it by force.” (Matthew 11:12). There’s nothing passive there.

This hope I have is a hope of a life in a kingdom – the Kingdom – that the vigorous take by force. It’s as if Jesus is standing on the field with a ball in his hand saying “You want it? Well come and get it!” And I don’t imagine him standing there with an almost threatening sneer; rather, I imagine him standing there with a twinkle in his eye and a cheeky grin, inviting me into a full-on, full-contact ball-game, so-to-speak.

In Jesus, life is freedom, truth and eternity; in Jesus, life is more and better than we could ever have dreamed. I know that to be true; I tell myself over and over and over again that I know that to be true, because when I look at the immediate and present reality I don’t see hope, I see despair. I see despair in my own life, and I see it in the lives of others. I see resignation, I see apathy, and I see existence.

Where is this life – this more and better life? I have focus and vigour in abundance, but if this life I live is that life in which I hope then something’s gone wrong somewhere. Maybe my focus is on the wrong things and my vigour is mis-directed? It wouldn’t surprise me and it wouldn’t be the first time; but I want the things Jesus wants – I want Isaiah 61, I want Isaiah 58, I want to fight for the widow and the orphan, so I am left confused, despondent and disillusioned.

I am left wondering if life would be simpler without this hope at all. And then I contemplate life without that hope and, while it may be simpler, I am gripped with a fear that confusion, despondency, disillusionment and a temporary sense of pointlessness would be cast aside, and in their place I would make pointlessness my permanent companion. I’ll take the hope of life over the reality of an enduring pointless existence any day, even if that hope leaves me despondent, confused and disillusioned; even if I feel my life to be a pointless existence in the present moment.

In hope we have the prospect of ‘just maybe…’, and when that hope has truth as its source I have to believe that vigour and focus will win the day. If I don’t believe that, what else is there?

And in the meantime I rail on God, I remind him of his promise, I ask him where this life of which he speaks is to be found; and he takes everything I throw at him. Silently.

I like my ’stuff’, and I’d be lying if I tried to convince you that I didn’t value it: I like my big shiny TV, my shiny cars and my nice shiny house; I love my Macs and my iPhone. But something that has dawned on me recently is that ’stuff’ is the enemy of revolution and the inhibitor of change. There is a direct correlation between the level of attachment we have to our nice shiny things and the level of our inertia when it comes to change and risk-taking.

Society feeds us a message that we should define ourselves by our car, our mobile phone, our clothes – the list goes on and on – and so we fall into a trap: eventually the point to our lives becomes the accumulation of ’stuff’, and with that as our goal we condemn society to a destructive future. If you doubt this, look around at the people of our time who changed the world – Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and not to mention the countless unsung missionaries (both social and religious) – and ask yourself whether their revolutions happened because they had the right phone, the right clothes or the right car.

As we accumulate ’stuff’ it begins to define us. The ’stuff’ of our lives – our professions, our material wealth, our social structures and our attitudes becomes the definition of what we are, and as our focus becomes the what we lose sight of who we are. Society places a greater emphasis on what we are than who we are, and over time we being to conform to that expectation, gradually burying who we are – our essence – under a relentless avalanche of ’stuff’.

In these uncertain times we need to take notice: we are being given an almost unique warning – a reprieve, albeit it temporary from our certain self-destruction. Tales of riches to rags are abundant in these times; we were warned in the thirtees and in the eightees, but we paid no heed, and now we are being warned again. If ever there was a time to reassess priorities it is now.

What we have we work hard to build, and steadily we construct an existence with ’stuff’ at its core; but every ounce of energy expended in that direction can be rendered pointless in a second – a redundancy notice, a repossession order, sickness – all that we have built can be stripped away in a second. And then with what are we left? Well, in the absence of ’stuff’ we are left with our essence – our spirit, our ’soul’ if you like – and no redundancy, repossession or illness can take that from us.

You know, I look at my existence and I am overwhelmed with a sense of pointlessness: the more stuff I have accumulated, the more pointless my existence has become. I work in a profession that sucks the life from my soul, I dig deep daily just to get through the grind and the fire that once burned in my soul is now barely an ember; this once passionate heart has grown cold. And for what? A nice house? A nice car? An iPhone?

And then I look at my kids and I am filled with horror at the prospect of what I am doing to them: what I model to them they will perpetuate, and I am modelling existence, not life; I am modelling societies expectations; I am modelling conformity not revolution. For all my words, to them it’s my actions that will speak loudest, and if I won’t take a risk, if I cling to ’stuff’, they will follow. From generation to generation we pass our behaviours and our attitudes, and if this world is to have hope, if our kids are to break the chains of existence and step into life, we need to pass an attitude of revolution; it is our responsibility and our cause as parents.

What use is equity in a house when, almost overnight, you can lose it to a falling housing market. What use is a nice shiny TV when there is nothing worth watching? Stuff becomes a sedative, taking the edge off, keeping us in-check. It’s like the freakin’ Matrix in real life, for crying out loud!

Conformity is a pathway to despair. So I have a choice: conform, sit tight, protect my interest and wait and see, hoping beyond hope that somehow I make it through this economic and social upheaval intact; or release my grip on the tangible and go on an adventure.

What would it be like to sell up, just liquidate everything, let go of all we have valued – what we are – and unleash who we are? What would it be like to just fly in the face of all that would be considered rational, to take whatever cash you could liquidate from letting go of your ’stuff’ and go and do something, to become a part of something, to become the revolution – to change the world.

One thing is for sure, as we cling tightly and relentlessly to all that society says we should value most highly, we will never ‘use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of our past.’ We’ll never ‘be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again’. We will never live Isaiah 58:12 unless we learn to let go of that which has distracted us from our God-given purpose – the purpose sown in our souls before we were even born.

Revolution is coming, whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, and it is a freight train that will stop for no-one. I stood on a stage in 2006 and used that exact phrase, but somewhere between then and now ’stuff’ happened and I conformed. The choice is simple, get on the train, or get out of the way. The question I ask myself is this: ‘have I got the balls?’ and right here, right now, I honestly don’t know, but I really hope have and that I find them in time.

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“I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known. Don’t know where it goes, but it’s home to me and I walk alone. I walk this empty street on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, where the city sleeps and I’m the only one, and I walk alone. My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me, my shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating. Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me; until then I walk alone”

Sometimes a song lyric captures how you feel: puts your life into words. Last year I went on a development centre as part of a 12 month leaders programme I am on at work, and one exercise required us to come up with 2 songs, the first of which had to capture where we saw ourselves at the present time. For me, Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ says it all.

Do you have something burning in your soul, eating you alive from within? Do you fight every day to suppress how you feel, to kill off your essence just so you can conform – conform to what society says is a good way to live, a right way to live, when deep inside you know it’s wrong? Are you holding your breath, just waiting to die? Do you walk alone, along a lonely road, longing for someone to just ‘get you’, desperate to break out of the chains holding you down and holding you back?

You know what, if you do then that lonely road is full of others like you; you can’t see us because we’ve learned to blend in, learned to keep our spirits in check and stifle our souls, matrixesque. But I believe – no, I know – a revolution is coming; and this time of economic and social turmoil is just the beginning – a wake-up call to the world, an alarm bell to raise the radicals – the world changers not the murderers – from their slumber.

No-one knows the hour, but we know it’s coming; maybe not in our lifetime, maybe not in our children’s lifetime, or maybe tomorrow. A day is coming when wealth, stability and conformity will count for nothing, and on that day, in those times, there will be revolution – not a revolution – there will be revolution; – a state of revolution, not an occasion of it. And then, those of us walking a lonely road will find we are not alone; and in those days your spirit will live and your soul will sing a new song.

Until then, don’t dig deep, dig out.

I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, but I don’t generally have time to sit and read a newspaper. TV and radio news is OK, but on occasion it’s good to go deeper and get some editorial comment. BBC Newsreader for iPhone is OK, and it is certainly much improved since its latest release, but the angle of stories on the BBC tends to be much more ’straight-bat’ than in a newspaper. And that’s where The Telegraph for iPhone comes in.

As a personal aside, I prefer comment that’s apolitical, but I’ll always take a broadsheet over a tabloid, and if I had to pick a broadsheet that had a bias it’d be The Daily Telegraph. So, in the absence of an iPhone app from The Independent, one from the Telegraph is the next best thing.

In fairness, the app gives you nothing you can’t get from the paper’s own website, but what it does do is offer you all of that content in a neat, quick, easy-to-navigate, pleasing-on-the-eye interface at a price-tag of £Free.

Whomever designed this app gave it some thought, and it has a genuine ‘Mac’ feel to it, and for that reason alone it deserves to be on every iPhone. Tap the icon, a tell-tale calligraphic ‘T’ on a blue background, and the app appears as a blue screen onto which the a larger version of the aforementioned black ‘T’ fades in and zooms into view, spinning as it does.

Once loaded, the app presents a menu that offers ‘News’, ‘Sport’, ‘Finance’, ‘Travel’, ‘Motoring’, ‘Technology’, and ‘Telegraph TV’. Tapping the main heading that you want will bring the spinning black ‘T’ on a blue background into view, and a counter that alerts you to the progress of the story downloads. Each section will load the last 51 (no idea why ‘51′) stories in that section.

Once your section is loaded, which is generally done pretty quickly, you are presented with a list of stories in chronological order, each with a heading, a thumbnail picture and a quick intro paragraph, all looking rather smart with white text on a black background. Tapping the ‘In Full’ button will load the full story, which is given to you in the more traditional back text on a white background.

A major advantage of this application is that it is not simply a neat portal into the Telegraph’s own website, but rather it is a stand-alone news-source, with stories being available from within the app itself, making it quicker and easier to use than some news readers. The flipside, however, is that you don’t get a breadth of opinion – you get the Telegraph’s view and that’s your lot.

I use this daily and find that it allows me to be targeted in my reading, keeping abreast of main headlines and going deeper into the stories that interest me without having to scan page after page of a newspaper. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in tracking a single news source.