Rambling thoughts on Christian Summer Festivals

I am going to Soul Survivor tomorrow. I am taking a group of young people who are all immensely looking forward to it. I suspect I will forget things, but I think I'm looking forward to it as well (bar the tiredness and the rain).

However, I can't help feeling Soul Survivor festivals are about a fix, a high on the Spirit of God (not always on his Spirit I suppose) which sometimes changes lives for the better, and is helpful. But what about those who go and find this amazing and wonderful God but who have no one to invest in them back home? No one to challenge them healthily? These are the people we should be reaching. This is the kind of people the Eden Project works with, and is so effective with. Long may it continue.

I also feel that these festivals can be a bit false, people so happy to be in the presence of God, but not telling him how annoyed they are with him for their troubles in the year, because they don't want others to consider them unholy. Why do we feel we cannot moan at him when he does not help us?

Jeremiah gives us some good examples of rants at God, at laments and tears. For as the tears fall noiselessly, the heart despairs and we must ask ourselves, where is God now? If we do not, how can he answer?

Across the Street

Across the street
Screams are plain
Missiles blast
Infants in pain

The soldiers yell
The people flee
Guns firing
‘Victory!’

Across the street
A lone man shivers
The winter arrives
His body still quivers

The shoppers pass by
Smiles on faces
Eyes not looking
To the poorer places

Across the street
Starvation reigns
Famine cares not
for the lives it stains

Orphans and widows
Left by its grip
Weaker now
To death they slip

Across the street
People flee
Civil wars
Poor refugee

Turned to prostitution
By the ‘great’ and the ‘good’
Ignored in the country
Celebrating Robin Hood

Across the street
We walk on by
Hardly noticing
The poor people die

Across the street
We condemn the men
Who murder others
Yet we’re just like them

Ignoring the pain
Ignoring the cold
Ignoring the hunger
Ignoring the sold

In our own little bubble
In our own little world
We're righteous people
In a darkened world.