Inspiration Strikes

After dithering for a bit (and doing other things like the newsletter) I finally started the first draft of the Christmas drama yesterday, and shocked myself by finishing it in a couple of hours. Someone must have been praying…

The theme of the story is “Good news”, “Hope for the hopeless”. It proved hard getting a story together which fitted this without being trite. Finally I settled on three possibilities, a fun comedy, a middle of the road comedy with serious bits, or a punchy dark piece, and asked the team to vote on the Xpresso blog. (there is quite a lively discussion going on there at the moment...)

The piece I’ve just written is in the middle, fun, but serious. (I know it’s not me writing this stuff, but honestly, saying “God wrote this through me” makes it sound like I’m claiming some kind of spiritual infallibility, so let’s just accept that when I say “I wrote this” it means “I scribbled out as best I can what I think God told me to write, but probably with all sorts of errors and my own ideas thrown in”. Thanks.) Anyway: the story is that a widowed mum with three children and no income is straddled with debt and the bank manager wants to repossess her house. Then the new owner of the bank turns up and announces a jubilee, all debts cancelled (and the bank manager is fired into the bargain)

The point of course being that we can’t save ourselves, and the good news being that we don’t have to- it’s all been taken care of. Of course the idea of a bank cancelling debt is very silly, but then the idea of God cancelling our debt messes up the spiritual economy in a big way, especially of you like religion and "salvation by works".

But there is a more disturbing thought: If a bank really did this? say the bank on the high street announced that all debts incurred before the beginning of the 2007 financial year would be cancelled, written off, void. The borrowers would be happy but the shareholders and us savers would be less than impressed. After all, our interest comes from loan repayments of other people- some of whom are struggling to make ends meet. I'm taking from my neighbours, locally and globally.