“I have indeed seen the misery of my people… I have heard them crying out.” Exodus 3:7
A brief introduction
Several of my recent articles have been circling around a concern that has become increasingly urgent for me. As a nation, and indeed as a world, we face some of the greatest challenges of our time. Climate change, economic insecurity, widening inequalities, political instability and the pressures created by rapid technological change are reshaping the world in which we live.
The biblical prophets were not afraid to speak into times of upheaval. They warned where existing choices and ways of living were leading, but they did more than warn. They helped people to see differently. They challenged assumptions that had come to seem inevitable, called for a change of direction and dared to imagine another future. At a time when that kind of moral and spiritual imagination seems particularly necessary, I find myself wondering whether the Church needs to recover something of that prophetic vocation.
I make no claim to speak with the authority of those ancient prophets. But I have lived long enough to feel that there are questions we urgently need to be asking together. My recent writing about freedom, the restoration of conscience and the fierce love of Jesus has seemed to me part of that exploration. This article draws some of those threads together. It is not an attempt to predict the future, still less to add another voice of alarm. It asks instead whether, in the midst of everything that troubles us, God might already be helping us to see another way of living—and whether some of what we need may be closer than we think.
A Cry God Hears
Many people are tired. Not merely busy, but tired of trying to make life work. The mortgage or rent has to be paid. Food costs more. Energy costs more. The car has to be kept on the road because work or family depends upon it. Something breaks down. A birthday comes along. We desperately need a holiday but cannot really afford one. And however carefully we organise the figures, there never seems quite enough. Lived month after month, year after year, life can begin to feel mundane and oppressive. The question is no longer simply, “How are we going to manage?” but, “When is this ever going to get better?” For many younger people especially, the future that ought to beckon with possibility and adventure can instead look like decades of work, debt and struggle simply to keep going.
Before the God of Exodus says anything about what needs to change, God says: “I have seen. I have heard.”
There is, of course, a difference between learning that we already have enough and living in circumstances where there genuinely is not enough. Jesus never romanticised poverty. The good news is not that people unable to pay the rent, heat their homes or feed their families should simply become more content with deprivation. A society in which some accumulate far beyond any conceivable need while others cannot secure the necessities of life is itself part of the darkness we need to learn to see. “Enough” must never become a spiritual excuse for leaving people with too little.
Knowing that God sees this brings some relief. Because the last thing people struggling to keep their heads above water need is another voice telling them that they are the problem.
So we do what human beings have always done. We get on with life. The shops are open. Aircraft cross the skies. Parcels arrive at our doors. Markets rise and fall. We go to work, take the children to school, take elderly relatives to hospital appointments, plan meals, meet friends, watch a bit of television when we can find the time and occasionally manage a few days away. Churches meet on Sundays, sing their hymns, preach their sermons and plan next month’s activities.
Life carries on.
And, at one level, it all feels surprisingly normal.
Perhaps it has to. Normality is one of the ways human beings cope. We cannot live every waking moment contemplating climate change, economic instability, war, political upheaval and everything else that might go wrong. There is washing to do. Someone needs feeding. Tomorrow morning the alarm will go off.
But there is a danger in normality too.
We can become so absorbed in coping with life as it is that we stop asking where the life we have created is taking us.
And beneath the routines of everyday life, enormous changes are taking place.
The climate is changing. This summer alone has given many of us a glimpse of what that may increasingly mean. Heatwaves, drought, wildfires and violent storms are no longer distant possibilities belonging to some imagined future. Around the world, people are already living with their consequences.
At the same time, extraordinary wealth is becoming concentrated in remarkably few hands. Technologies are transforming our societies faster than we can understand their consequences. Political life increasingly rewards short-term promises and instant reactions, while some of the greatest challenges facing humanity require patience, sacrifice and strategic thinking across generations.
This is not principally a criticism of individual politicians. The problem is deeper than that. Our political systems continually pull those who govern us towards the next election, the latest opinion poll, tomorrow’s headlines and the immediate concerns of voters. Yet climate change, technological disruption, demographic change, growing indebtedness and the increasing concentration of wealth cannot sensibly be addressed on a four- or five-year horizon. We seem extraordinarily well equipped to manage the immediate and strangely ill-equipped to take responsibility for the future. Some of the people who will live longest with the consequences of today’s decisions are not yet old enough to vote.
And behind many of these questions lies another assumption that is rarely seriously challenged: whatever happens, the economy must keep growing. Governments of almost every political persuasion depend upon it. Jobs, pensions, public services, investment and living standards have all become tied, in different ways, to the expectation of continued economic expansion. So even when we recognise the need for profound change, the great economic engine must somehow keep turning. And keeping it turning requires continual ingenuity.
We have even managed to reverse the dependable old proverb. Necessity was once the mother of invention; increasingly, invention has become the mother of necessity.
New products create new desires; yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s expectation and tomorrow’s necessity. More must be produced, more must be sold and more must be consumed. Investments must produce greater returns. Economies must grow because so much of what we have built now depends upon their continuing to do so.
None of this should make us suppose that everything is getting worse. Far from it. Human ingenuity is extraordinary. Around the world, scientists, engineers, charities, communities, governments and countless ordinary people are working imaginatively to address climate change, poverty, disease and injustice. Renewable energy is expanding. Technologies are being developed that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. There is much that deserves gratitude and hope.
But beneath all these efforts lies a question we seem strangely reluctant to ask:
Where are we going with all this?
Look where this road leads
The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures were not principally people who gazed into the future and described events that had already been decided. They looked at what was happening around them and saw where it was leading. They recognised patterns that others had learned to regard as normal. They saw injustice becoming embedded, wealth accumulating, power being abused, the vulnerable being forgotten, religious observance continuing while its heart was being lost.
And they said, in effect:
Look. Look at what we are becoming. Look where this road leads.
That is very different from making a prediction, spelling out an unavoidable future. The whole point of “seeing” is that the future we dread need not happen. There is still time to stop, to see, to think again, to change direction.
The biblical word for such a turning is metanoia: a transformation of mind, perception and direction. Jesus places it at the heart of his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing particularly mysterious about the human capacity involved. We already know how to look at something familiar and imagine that it could be different. We do it whenever necessity, creativity or opportunity requires it.
Metanoia, I believe, is the prophetic word we most need at the moment.
Not another angry voice telling us how dreadful everybody else is. We have no shortage of those. We have newspapers, television programmes and an entire social-media economy built around indignation. Almost anybody can identify someone to blame: politicians, billionaires, migrants, environmentalists, conservatives, progressives, corporations, churches, secularists, previous generations or the generation coming after us.
Yet for all the angry voices shouting, we seem extraordinarily powerless when it comes to achieving substantial change, or even slowing the momentum of what is already happening. Much of the rhetoric is incendiary: highly effective at spreading anger, fear and division, remarkably ineffective at producing constructive change. Outrage can give us the satisfying sense that we have taken a stand, while leaving almost everything exactly where it was.
But prophecy is not criticism with the volume turned up.
The prophet holds up a mirror. And sooner or later we discover our own face in it.
The burden of never enough
There is a strange contradiction at the heart of modern prosperity.
Many of us possess comforts and conveniences our grandparents could scarcely have imagined. We live in heated homes, travel considerable distances with ease, communicate instantly across the world and have access to food, entertainment, information and technology on a scale that would have astonished previous generations.
Yet increasing numbers of people feel anything but prosperous. Housing absorbs an enormous proportion of household income. Rents rise. Mortgages have to be paid. Food, energy and transport cost more. The car that may look like a luxury from the outside can be absolutely essential for getting to work or taking children where they need to go. One unexpected repair, a family celebration or the desperate need for a few days away can throw an already stretched budget into difficulty.
Debt fills the gap.
And so people who appear, by historical standards, to possess an extraordinary amount can nevertheless live with a constant background anxiety that there will not be enough.
We have created an economic culture that continually promises abundance while producing enormous anxiety about scarcity.
That should trouble us.
So when I ask, “How much is enough?”, I am not asking why ordinary people cannot simply tighten their belts and learn to live with less. Many are already doing exactly that.
There is nothing greedy about wanting a secure home. There is nothing extravagant about wanting enough money to pay the bills without fear, to celebrate a birthday, take an occasional holiday, replace something that has broken, or give our children opportunities we ourselves have enjoyed. Wanting beauty, pleasure, rest and adventure in our lives is not a moral failure.
These things can be part of being fully alive.
Into all this striving and anxiety comes one of the most beautiful invitations Jesus ever gave: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)
Those words sound very different when we hear them as words addressed to people carrying burdens that life has made too heavy. Jesus does not begin by asking exhausted people to try harder. He offers rest.
This relentless striving is not God’s vision of abundant life. And here, as in the story of Exodus with which we began, God has heard the cry of people labouring under burdens they can no longer easily carry. The question is not simply how we can become better at carrying them. It is whether some of those burdens need to be put down.
That takes us to the deeper question. Why have societies possessing wealth beyond anything previous generations could have imagined left so many people feeling permanently insecure, while others accumulate wealth on a scale no individual human being could possibly need?
Part of the answer lies in an economy that itself seems unable to say “enough.”
More production. More consumption. More extraction. More borrowing. More investment. More return. More growth.
A successful year is one in which the economy is larger than it was the year before, and next year it must grow again. But we live on a finite planet. Sooner or later a question that sounds almost childishly simple becomes impossible to avoid:
How much is enough?
A crisis of moral imagination
Greed is certainly part of the picture. There are extremes of personal wealth and corporate accumulation that are difficult to reconcile with the poverty and insecurity experienced by so many others. The Hebrew prophets had plenty to say about those who accumulated wealth while their neighbours went without. But I suspect most of those people will not be reading this article.
It would be too easy for the rest of us to nod in agreement and conclude that the problem therefore belongs entirely to somebody else.
Most people I know are not lying awake at night wondering how they can become richer. They are wondering how they can keep going. We are increasingly ensnared within ways of organising life that none of us individually created and from which few of us can simply walk away. We need homes, incomes, food, energy and transport; insurance against risks we cannot afford to bear ourselves; pensions and savings for an uncertain future. Parents understandably want security and opportunity for their children.
None of this is wrong. Yet the economic system within which we pursue these perfectly reasonable things depends upon something a finite planet cannot indefinitely provide: continual expansion. One of our deeper difficulties is that we struggle to imagine prosperity without growth, security without accumulation, or a good life without continually increasing consumption.
And yet human beings do not lack imagination. Quite the opposite. An entrepreneur looks at something everybody else takes for granted and asks, Why does it have to be done that way? A scientist asks, What if our assumption is wrong? An inventor asks, Could this work differently? An artist sees possibilities other people have not seen.
We can imagine greener cars, greener aviation, greener industry, greener investment and greener economic growth. All may be important and urgently needed.
The prophet exercises the same human capacity, but directs it towards a different end. Business asks, quite legitimately: What could we do differently in order to succeed? The prophet asks: What could we do differently in order to live? And Jesus asks something deeper still: What might human life look like if love, expressed through kindness and generosity, rather than acquisition, became its organising principle?
Our crisis, then, is not a shortage of imagination but a crisis of moral imagination. We have become extraordinarily inventive at imagining new ways to keep the existing economic engine moving, while finding it much harder to imagine human flourishing no longer measured primarily by how much we produce, consume and possess.
Climate change confronts us with that question with particular urgency. We possess extraordinary scientific knowledge and technological ingenuity. We know a great deal about what needs to change. But beneath the practical questions lies a deeper one:
Can we imagine wanting something different? And can we want it enough to reorder our lives around different values?
This is the imagination we encounter in the prophets. They do not merely denounce the world they see; they imagine the world otherwise. Swords become ploughshares. Deserts blossom. People sit beneath their vines and fig trees without fear. Justice flows like water. Prophetic imagination exposes what is wrong partly by enabling us to glimpse what might take its place.
For a brief and extraordinary period during the COVID pandemic, we discovered that some of what we had assumed was immovable could, in fact, change almost overnight. Aircraft were grounded. Roads emptied. People worked differently. Governments found resources and made interventions that previously would have seemed unimaginable.
None of this is to romanticise that terrible period. People died, businesses were destroyed, children lost education, families were separated and isolation caused immense suffering.
But COVID revealed something we might otherwise never have discovered:
Business as usual is not a law of nature.
Our economic arrangements are not tectonic plates. We made them. And what human beings have made, human beings can rethink.
The question is whether we can do so before a new crisis makes the decisions for us.
Old ways of thinking do not disappear overnight
There is something strangely familiar here in the story of Exodus. Pharaoh did not merely rule Egypt. He presided over an entire way of organising life: production, accumulation, hierarchy and power. The Israelites knew that the system was crushing them. They cried out under its demands.
Yet even after they had escaped from Egypt, Egypt had not entirely escaped from them.
Freedom proved harder than leaving.
Again and again in the wilderness, when the future became frightening, they wanted to go back. Slavery was terrible, but at least it was familiar. The unknown possibilities of freedom could sometimes seem more frightening than the bondage they already understood.
That is one reason genuine change is so difficult for us too.
And these questions about power, possession and human flourishing have a much darker dimension. Around us, wars continue in which territorial ambition, national interest, ideology and struggles for power can take precedence over the value of human life. From Ukraine to Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Iran, we have watched civilians killed and displaced, communities devastated, and fundamental human rights violated. These conflicts have complex histories that cannot responsibly be reduced to a sentence or two. But the suffering they cause cannot be allowed to become merely part of the background noise of our lives.
No land, wealth, ideology or ambition can make another human life expendable.
The same need to question what we have come to regard as inevitable confronts us in the way we organise our economic lives. We know that endless economic expansion on a finite planet cannot be a limitless project. We know that climate change is already exacting a terrible cost. We know that extreme concentrations of wealth sit uneasily beside growing insecurity. And we know that great wealth brings with it extraordinary power: the power to influence investment, employment, technology, media and politics, while those struggling simply to meet their ordinary needs are left feeling powerless over the forces shaping their lives.
We return to what we know: like someone struggling up an icy path, we gain a little ground and then find ourselves sliding backwards. Growth must resume. Consumption must increase. Confidence must return. Markets must recover. People must start spending again. The alternative can seem almost impossible to imagine. Like Israel remembering Egypt, we find ourselves imagining that the only possible future is some improved version of the world we already know.
An ancient wisdom about enough
It would be tempting for Christians to look at our present predicament and say, “If only we had listened to God in the first place.” There is certainly an extraordinary wisdom about limits woven through the Hebrew Scriptures.
Sabbath, when observed, interrupts production.
Gleaning prevents every last corner of the field being harvested solely for the owner’s benefit.
The land itself must rest.
The charging of interest on loans to those in need is forbidden.
Debts are not allowed to determine people’s futures indefinitely.
And the astonishing vision of Jubilee imagines accumulated economic inequalities being interrupted rather than simply allowed to continue from generation to generation.
These ancient provisions cannot simply be transplanted into a modern global economy. Nor should we romanticise the ancient world from which they came. But the imagination behind them is profoundly challenging.
Economic arrangements exist to serve life. Human life was never meant to serve the endless accumulation of wealth.
Again and again, God seems to write one small but revolutionary word across the human appetite for endless accumulation: Enough.
I believe these ancient commandments understood something about human beings that we have forgotten: unless we deliberately create limits, more has no natural stopping point.
Sabbath says there must be a limit to work.
Gleaning says there must be a limit to what ownership may claim for itself.
The prohibition of interest says there must be a limit to our ability to profit from another person’s need.
Debt release says there must be a limit to how long yesterday’s obligations may determine tomorrow’s possibilities.
Even the earth must be given time to recover.
Nothing is permitted an unlimited claim upon life.
But “I told you so” is not the voice we hear when Israel cries out from Egypt.
God hears. God has compassion. And God begins to lead people out.
Which brings us back to where we began. Our cry too has been heard. The question is whether we are willing to trust God enough to be led somewhere different.
That requires more than recognising what has gone wrong. It requires a response of faith: opening ourselves to God, asking for another way to be shown to us, and being willing to change when it is.
We have participated collectively in creating ways of living that are exhausting us, damaging the earth and weakening many of the relationships upon which human flourishing depends. There is no simple road back, and nostalgia will not save us.
Nor should it.
Previous generations lived with poverty, disease, discrimination and restrictions that we have rightly worked to overcome. The answer is not to recreate an earlier world.
We need God’s patient and merciful Spirit to redirect our extraordinary powers of imagination towards ways of living that serve life.
The abundance Jesus offers
This is where the Way of Christ has something distinctive to offer. Not because Jesus gives us an economic blueprint which everybody else has overlooked. He does not. Nor because those who have followed him have somehow remained uncontaminated by the culture of acquisition. We plainly have not. But at the heart of this Way stands Jesus, whose understanding of abundance is radically different.
Jesus seems extraordinarily unencumbered by possessions. Yet nobody reading the Gospels could describe his life as impoverished. He ate and drank. He went to weddings and dinners. He enjoyed friendship. He noticed flowers and birds. He welcomed children and received hospitality. When he sent his disciples out, he taught them to travel lightly and depend upon the hospitality of others. He created abundance around tables. He spoke of joy, treasure, feasting and life.
And yet he said: “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)
We have tended to hear those words principally as a warning against greed.
More to the point, they are an invitation to imagine abundance differently.
Jesus says those words before telling the story of a man whose land has produced so much that he has nowhere left to store the harvest. This is not someone wondering how he will pay the rent or put food on the table. He has the opposite problem.
His solution is revealing: “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.” (Luke 12:18) More requires more. More produce requires more storage. More possessions require more protection. Greater accumulation creates the need for still greater capacity to accumulate. His thinking is a vivid picture of our modern world.
Yet looking back, we can see that the man’s tragedy is not that he enjoys good things. It is that his imagination has become dominated by accumulation. Faced with abundance, he can imagine only possessing more of it. Nobody else enters the picture. He can no longer imagine what else abundance might be for. His answer to abundance is bigger barns. And by the standards of our own world, that seems perfectly reasonable. His enterprise has prospered; surely expanding his capacity is simply good management?
That is what makes Jesus’ story so unsettling. The man scarcely notices that accumulation has become the organising principle of his life. And neither, perhaps, have we.
Jesus’ answer is a bigger life.
It is important to see how that distinction matters, because the Christian alternative to consumerism cannot be a dreary religion of deprivation. We have tried versions of that Christianity before, as though holiness were measured by how much pleasure we could renounce and how little of life we allowed ourselves to enjoy. Jesus does not call us to become less alive. The Kingdom he announces is repeatedly pictured as a feast. He turns water into wine. He feeds hungry crowds until there is more than enough. He speaks of treasure, harvest, weddings, banquets, birds, flowers and fields. This is not a vision of a minimalist’s life stripped down to the bare essentials.
It is a different understanding of riches.
Our problem is not that we desire abundance too much. We have not learned to recognise all the ways in which our lives are already abundant.
The hidden wealth of time
One of those neglected forms of abundance is time that has not already been spoken for. We live in a culture offering extraordinary opportunities for enjoyment, yet even leisure can become exhausting. We fill our weekends with activities. Holidays acquire itineraries. When we are not working overtime, our evenings can disappear into entertainment. There are always more places to visit, restaurants to try, programmes to watch and experiences to collect.
We can become so accustomed to filling time that an empty afternoon begins to feel like a problem requiring a solution.
Sabbath offers something profoundly different. It was never intended simply as an exchange of tasks—six days filled with ordinary responsibilities, followed by a day filled with religious ones. Sabbath recognises something fundamental about being human: we need to stop. We need time in which we are not required to produce anything at all.
We do not always have to produce, improve, acquire, travel, experience or consume. An afternoon with a book is not wasted. Neither is sitting in the garden, listening to music, taking an aimless walk, sharing a meal that lasts because nobody is in a hurry, or simply enjoying someone’s company.
A vicar friend of mine once told me how his wife found him at two o’clock on a Sunday morning still preparing the sermon he had not found time to write during the week. She asked him one devastatingly simple question: “Dave, can you tell me, when DOES the day actually end?” He told this self-deprecating story with great humour. Sadly, it eventually took a serious heart attack to make him change his way of life.
There has to be a point at which the day ends. There has to be a point at which we can say: I have done enough.
Surely one of the freedoms we most need to recover is the freedom to do nothing very much—and discover that life is still happening.
Christians are not necessarily very good at this. We may notionally set aside Sunday as “the Lord’s Day”, only to exchange the demands of work and home for another crowded programme of church activities. We may have stopped working for our employer without ever learning how to stop.
Sabbath means something more than changing the kind of activity that fills the day. It draws a boundary around all the claims upon our time and reminds us that none of them is entitled to everything we have. Work matters. Family matters. Service matters. But so do rest, silence and simply being alive.
Sabbath is an invitation to discover that neither God nor the world depends upon our constant usefulness.
For this moment, this is enough.
And within that protected space, something else becomes possible. We become available again.
Available first simply to be—to notice our own tiredness, our delight, our grief, the world around us. Available to God, not because God has been absent, but because the noise has become quiet enough for us to notice the Presence in which we already live. Jesus himself repeatedly withdrew from the crowds to pray.
And from that stillness we may become available to other people too. Solitude and neighbourliness are not competing demands upon our time. At their best, one makes the other possible. Silence helps us see again. A life with some space in it has room for interruption, conversation, friendship and care.
We cannot share lives for which we have no time.
But there is an obvious difficulty. Not everybody is free to draw these boundaries. Many people work long hours because without them the bills will not be paid. Parents combine employment with childcare and the demands of running a home. For them, an invitation to “slow down” can sound like one more burden.
And here we find ourselves back in Egypt.
Pharaoh’s slaves could not solve their exhaustion by developing healthier attitudes towards work. They needed liberation from a system that kept demanding more. When Pharaoh withdrew the straw but maintained the quota of bricks, there was no personal wellbeing strategy capable of solving the problem.
Sometimes exhaustion is not a failure of self-care. It is evidence that something is profoundly wrong with the way life has been structured.
That is why Sabbath is more than a private spiritual discipline. It is a declaration that human life requires boundaries around what may legitimately be demanded of it.
And that leaves our economic culture with an uncomfortable question:
How much of a human life may an economy legitimately consume?
Enough among us
Our culture teaches us to ask: What do I have? Do I have enough money, savings, space and security to protect myself against whatever the future might bring?
More subtly, modern life is increasingly organised around the assumption that each of us should be independently equipped for life. Our homes, work, technology and transport all reinforce a pattern in which each person or household needs its own resources in order to function. Much of this is enormously convenient and sometimes unavoidable. But independence can gradually come to feel not merely useful, but necessary.
The prophetic imagination introduces another question:
What do we already have among us?
That changes the arithmetic. One person has time. Another has practical skills. Someone can cook. Someone has a car. Someone can listen. Someone who depends heavily upon others may nevertheless become a source of wisdom, encouragement, prayer and love. No one person needs to possess everything, because no one person is everything. Together, we may discover that God has already placed among us far more than we realised.
This was one of the discoveries of the earliest Christians. Their new life together expressed itself not merely in shared beliefs but in hospitality, generosity, shared meals and practical care. Needs became visible because lives became connected.
We do not need to recreate some idealised Christian commune, nor surrender privacy or family life. What we need is a spirit of community that travels with us wherever life takes us: a willingness to become a little less isolated and a little more open to giving and receiving.
Jesus did not tell us to love an ideal. He told us to love our neighbour.
But this cannot be imposed. Part of the joy of community is discovering that what I have to offer is not the same as what you have to offer. Each person matters; each brings something uniquely their own. Scarcity breeds competition. Abundance releases us from it. When we begin to see one another in that way, there is less need for comparison or rivalry. Instead, each of us can listen to God and discover what has been entrusted to us, what we can freely share, and where we ourselves need to receive. Our differences cease to be something we measure against one another and become part of the abundance we share.
Then “How much is enough?” begins to become a different question. Not only Do I possess enough? but What has God already placed among us—and are we willing to share it?
This is not another demand upon those who are already struggling. It is an invitation to all of us to notice what becomes possible when burdens no longer have to be carried alone.
The answer may be: far more than we realised.
The things institutions cannot do
None of this diminishes the importance of public provision.
The development of the welfare state was one of the great social achievements of the last century. Needs that had remained hidden for generations were finally recognised as responsibilities belonging to society as a whole. Healthcare, education and protection against destitution should never depend merely upon whether someone happens to have generous neighbours.
Churches could not possibly meet all those needs, nor should they be expected to. But institutional care inevitably brings institutions with it. Public money requires accountability. Vulnerable people need safeguarding. Services need trained staff, assessment, insurance, regulation, oversight and administration. Much of this is necessary. But it also means that meeting human need can require an increasingly elaborate and expensive machinery simply to ensure that care is delivered properly and fairly.
And there could be another unintended consequence. The more accustomed we become to needs being met by professional services, the easier it is to imagine that caring itself belongs principally to professionals. Someone else should do it. Someone qualified, employed and paid to do it.
When someone is lonely, elderly, struggling or overwhelmed, our first thought can easily become: Which service should be helping them? We may forget to ask a much simpler question: Is there something I could do?
I remember a man who used to come and help me voluntarily with some of my work. He had been unable to work for several years and had received a great deal of professional support. He once told me that the time we spent together did something for him that all the hours of professional help he had received could not. I had no comparable therapeutic expertise, nor had he come to me for therapy. And I would never have imagined that friendship could replace the professional help he needed. But I think I understood what he meant.
He had come to help me. He would spend an afternoon doing useful work, at his own pace, and somewhere along the way we would stop for a cup of tea and a chat. Our relationship was not organised around what was wrong with him or what somebody could do for him. He had something to contribute too. He was not primarily a patient or a problem to be assessed. He was a friend. His contribution mattered. He was appreciated and needed.
What I could offer him was not treatment, but something treatment alone could never provide: ordinary human relationship, purpose and belonging.
Of course there are many things a neighbour cannot and should not attempt to do. Serious illness needs healthcare. Complex needs require expertise. Vulnerable people sometimes need professional protection and support. The answer cannot be to dismantle the welfare state and expect churches, families or neighbours somehow to replace it.
But neither can the welfare state replace neighbourhood. We need both.
Institutions can provide services. They cannot manufacture belonging.
A professional service may provide treatment, assessment, financial assistance or practical care, all of which may be invaluable. But the neighbour can say: “Come round for supper.”
Both matter. But they are not interchangeable.
Becoming like the God we worship
Psalm 112 contains a remarkable description of people whose lives have become shaped by the God they worship. They are gracious and compassionate because God is gracious and compassionate. They are generous. They share what they have. They are not paralysed by fear when bad news comes. And then comes the phrase that has been hovering over this whole article: “Even in darkness light dawns…” (Psalm 112:4)
This is surely part of our vocation as followers of Jesus: not primarily to tell the world what ought to change, but to become communities in which something different can already be seen. There are already communities in which this kind of life is being practised. Many churches quietly create networks of friendship and care around older people, children and families, refugees, those who are lonely, and people facing illness or hardship. Other faith communities, voluntary groups and countless individuals do the same. These are not perfect communities, but they are signs that another way of living is already possible.
The Church can be one of the places where we learn how to live differently before circumstances force us to. Not by withdrawing from society, pretending economics does not matter, or congratulating ourselves on possessing answers everybody else has missed. But by practising another understanding of what makes human life rich.
One of the simplest signs of that different way of living is a table with room for another person. Throughout Scripture, meals become places of liberation, encounter and belonging: Passover eaten on the threshold of freedom; Jesus sitting with those characters whom respectable religion preferred to avoid; hungry crowds being fed; the risen Christ recognised in the breaking of bread. The question at such a table is no longer, “How much can I keep for myself?” but “Is there enough for everyone—and who is still missing?”
Whether we call it Eucharist, hospitality or simply sharing a meal, making a place at the table is one of the most ordinary ways in which the Kingdom becomes visible. Around such tables we rediscover friendship, generosity, conversation, laughter, beauty and the extraordinary wealth of simply being present to one another.
Human beings often rediscover these things instinctively in a crisis. Floods, wars, pandemics and other disasters can suddenly turn strangers into neighbours. But why should we wait for catastrophe to rediscover that we need one another?
This is part of what it means to follow Jesus together: to begin living now the future for which we hope.
We may need help
There is, however, one final illusion we need to surrender. We cannot simply decide to do all this. Our lives, our expectations, our habits and our economic arrangements have become so tightly woven together that there is no simple switch we can throw. We need more than good intentions. We need imagination we do not yet possess.
And that brings us back to where we began.
The Israelites did not begin their liberation with a strategic plan for escaping Egypt.
They cried out. And God said: “I have heard their cry.”
That is where our liberation begins too.
Not with another programme. Not with another furious denunciation of politicians, billionaires, corporations or everybody else we think responsible for the mess we are in. And certainly not by asking God to destroy this terrible world and rescue us from it.
Our prayer is much simpler: Lord, help us see.
Show us what we have mistaken for life.
Show us what we have neglected along the way.
Teach us what enough might look like.
Give us courage to loosen our grip upon whatever is consuming us.
Help us recover the time to notice one another.
Give us imagination to recognise the abundance already growing between us.
And lead us towards forms of life we have not yet learned how to imagine.
The Holy Spirit does not shame us for losing our way. The Spirit leads. Patiently. Mercifully. Sometimes slowly. Just as the people who left Egypt had to learn how to live as free people, we too have to learn freedoms we have almost forgotten.
The freedom to stop.
The freedom to say enough.
The freedom to enjoy without possessing.
The freedom to give.
The freedom to receive.
The freedom to need one another.
The freedom to discover that our lives may become richer not when we finally possess everything we want, but when we recognise how much we already have to share.
Lift up your eyes
And this is why I remain hopeful.
The prophetic voice does not exist merely to warn us that disaster lies ahead. There is no shortage of voices telling us that in today’s world. The prophets did something more: they dared to imagine what could lie beyond the world they knew.
Swords could become ploughshares. People could sit beneath their own vines and fig trees without fear. Justice could flow like water. The desert could blossom.
These were not predictions designed to satisfy curiosity about the future. They were invitations to imagine it differently.
But there comes a point when imagining differently requires us to look in a different direction.
Metanoia means a change of mind, a turning around. And that includes changing the way we look. We can spend our lives looking down into the darkness, listening to the cacophony of anger, fear and despair, rehearsing everything that is going wrong. Much of it is real. This article has hardly ignored it. But the darkness is not the source of our hope.
The Psalmist makes a deliberate choice: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” (Psalm 121:1)
And then comes the answer: “My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.” (Psalm 121:2)
This is not an escape from reality. It is a decision about where, in the midst of reality, we will place our trust. And when we look up, God does not invite us to remain looking upwards. The Spirit sends us back into the world.
Jesus announces the Kingdom of God and then looks at ordinary people like us and says: “You are the light of the world.”
That changes the question. We are not merely waiting for light to dawn in the darkness. By the Spirit of God, we are invited to become part of its dawning.
And that is why the small things matter. A meal. A conversation. An afternoon in which nothing much happens. A door opened. Something lent. Help asked for. Help received. A neighbour noticed. A frightened person discovering they do not have to face tomorrow alone.
None of these will make tomorrow’s headlines. But they are signs of a different way of living from the one we have felt compelled to maintain. They quietly challenge two of the most powerful illusions by which we live: the illusion of scarcity, which tells us there will never be enough, and the illusion of separation, which tells us that ultimately we are on our own.
The Gospel tells another story. We live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28). We are not alone. And God’s abundance is already present among us—in the earth, in one another, in the gifts we have been given, in what we can give and what we can receive. Scarcity breeds competition. Abundance releases us from it.
This does not mean pretending that real scarcity does not exist. People genuinely lack food, homes, money and security, and love requires us to take that seriously. But we need not organise our whole understanding of life around the fear that there will never be enough and that each of us must therefore secure ourselves alone.
The mustard seed won’t make tomorrow’s headlines either (Matthew 13:31–32).
The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, begins like that. Something small is planted. It lives. It grows. Jesus also called his followers the salt of the earth: it does not take much salt to change the flavour of the whole dish. One act of courage makes another imaginable. Generosity awakens generosity. Hope gives someone else permission to hope. Communities discover possibilities they had forgotten. The Spirit moves through willing human lives, and what began almost unnoticed gathers strength.
And for many who read this, none of this will be new. You have been living it for years. You have cared for people, prayed, served, welcomed, given, listened, encouraged and remained faithful, often without recognising how much those ordinary acts matter within the purposes of God. The Kingdom has always had a way of beginning unnoticed.
So look again. The light is already dawning. And now we can hear Jesus’ words afresh: “You are the light of the world.” What you have been quietly living matters more than you may ever have realised. Place that light on the lampstand. Let it shine.
We do not know what lies ahead. We cannot know whether the changes our world needs will come easily, painfully or only after circumstances have forced upon us choices we would rather not make. But we do know where to look.
And when God asks who will carry this light into the darkness, there is an ancient answer still waiting to become our own: “Here am I. Send me.”
Not because everything depends upon us. It never did.
Enough is not deprivation after all. Enough is freedom. And as we learn that freedom together, we may discover that what Jesus has been offering us all along is not a smaller life stripped of the things we enjoy.
It is a larger life. A life in which there is room for God, room for the earth, room for one another, and room at last to breathe.
A life worth living.
And Jesus is still leading the way.
Jeremy Marks, 3rd September 2026