After both finding ourselves out of work in late 2009/early 2010 we had a choice: carry on with things as they were – me an accountant, Kate working in education – or do something we really wanted to do. It felt like we were at one of those crossroads people always talk about, and the direction we chose would define whether we continued to exist or broke free and stepped into life. Sounds dramatic, but it proved to be so.

The issue was that we didn’t actually know what we wanted to do, but we did know what we wanted to achieve: balance, with the room in our lives for our souls to be fully alive in the pursuit of all God has sown into them.

What we tried to construct was a lifestyle that covered our outgoings and left us with a surplus: a surplus of time rather than cash, so that we could re-engage with all the things that had enlivened our should back in the mid-2000s. What we actually constructed was a big mess, with no income and no time.

It was only when I had descended into a pit of despair, feeling dead inside at what seemed like the only way out of the disaster in which we found ourselves – to go back into the world of accountancy – and gave up trying to push for the solution, that I left enough God room to move. And move he did, with a speed and an outcome that neither of us could ever have imagined.

As I sit here this morning typing this, my first entry in the best part of two years, and reflect on the path we have travelled, I am overwhelmed by God’s goodness; reminded of all the lessons we have learned, and that we have many more to learn; and humbled in the knowledge that all we did to create the situation in which we now reside was to give up. Paul was right when he said that in our weakness God’s strength would be revealed.

The challenge for us now is to stay behind God. Our situation has moved from one of a desolate landscape with seemingly no opportunities, to a landscape with such an abundance of opportunities that we are having to turn paying work away and exercise real discretion when and to what we should say “Yes”. And therein lies the real challenge.

With a personality type like mine, “No” is not a word that comes easily, but God is sharpening my focus and one way and another proving that “No” is a word I need to learn. And learn it I am, sometimes painfully and sometimes easily.

Key to making good decisions in these situations is having a very clear personal vision, and I am reigniting my blog with a series on just that subject that will run over the next however long.

‘The early bird catches the worm’ is a generally accepted truism, but the early bird was in the right place at the right time.  The birds who got there after him were in the right place, but their timing was out; and the same is true of the bird who go there before the worm woke up: right place, wrong time.  Of course, this isn’t always the case, and sometimes our timing is perfect but our direction is off: right time, wrong place.

As the storms of recent times began to subside, and the skies began to clear, I began to realise that the last few years have see far too much of me and not enough of God.  I’ve been travelling with such velocity that I’ve had to keep glancing back to check that God was still with me; it shouldn’t be like that.  In my determination, or maybe it was more desperation, to seize the dream he sowed in my soul I pushed ahead.

When speed is required, speed is right, but when it’s not needed, it’s not right.  Sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But it seems to me that achieving speed is much easier than arresting it.  I’m not a physicist, so if that’s fact or fiction is not something I’m qualified to say, but I have lived at high velocity for years, and I know that coming to a stop was a lot harder than hitting top speed.

As the speed propelled me along my path I felt I was making good progress – I felt like I was getting somewhere. I felt like I was going somewhere because I was; I just wasn’t going where I should have been: I’d passed right on through where I should have been and disappeared off down the track.  The place I was homing in on wasn’t ready yet – it wasn’t ready for me, nor I for it – only I was travelling too fast to see the signposts warning me that I was leaving solid ground and entering a construction zone.

God, in his infinite grace, followed me onto the craggy path and hauled me out of the ditch I fell into. And as I sat there licking my wounds – more dented pride and ego than dented bones, if I’m honest – he let me stew. On one level, I felt like the child sent to his room to think about what he’d done, and on another, oh so much deeper level, I felt like I’d been rescued.

In our journey through life, I don’t think it’s as much about whether we are on the right road as whether we are travelling at the right speed; When we travel too slow we sometimes miss the worm altogether; when we travel too fast, we sometimes arrive before the worm and by the time the worm arrives, we’ve given up and moved on, disillusioned and disappointed but when we travel at the right speed, we don’t miss the signposts and we arrive safely, invigorated, in the right place at the right time.

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.

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.<img title=”More…” src=”http://www.testbuilder.dev/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif” alt=”" />

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.

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.