I read over the weekend about Orkney exploring an alignment to Norway rather than the UK, and a number of people sent me links to the article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-66066448
Ah well post-Brexit it might give me an opportunity to get a ‘passport of the Orkney kingdom’ and solve some of the issues with travel in Europe (though we have none as we are permanent residents of Spain and are about to leave for Italy by road this week). Though it would be smart to have a passport shared by only a few thousand people – and I need all the help I can get to be smart.
A number of years ago I prophesied, while in Orkney, that the council was going to be pulled into meetings with Scandinavian countries! One of those times when in my head it was ‘crazy… a small island and proper countries – not going to happen, Martin’ but hey-ho I spoke it out.
I have no idea where this all goes, but for a while I have been contemplating Paul’s little discourse in Athens:
From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us… Since we are God’s offspring… (Acts 17:26, 27, 29).
Quite a dense bridge-building apologetic in those few words. We are all one people and are ALL God’s offspring – estranged children perhaps might be appropriate, hence at a God – human level reconciliation has to be at the heart of the cross, not such motifs as payment nor punishment.
In the fumbling around there can be a certain amount of accidentally finding ‘him’ (so difficult to get the right pronouns for ‘God’ who is neither male nor female, but what we might term both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’)… so we do not need to take a hyper-oppositional stance to all religions and philosophies. And… back to Orkney in a kind of way…
The boundaries and times for the peoples so that… The boundaries have a purpose, so that there can be a God-search. What if many boundaries are really not the ones God intends? Then the God-search could well be obscured.
War has changed boundaries over and over again – witness currently in Ukraine or Sudan and a host of other places – and I doubt that most of the resulting boundaries are the ones God intends. So here is my thought that has been here for a while – we are going to see a number of boundary shifts and re-alignments. Not the re-alignments to give us back our sovereignty (sub-text: exclude people… even OT-wise with Israel boundaries were to include the alien, widow and orphan), but the re-alignment for human to human relating in well-being and for the ‘God-search’ to be under way. Where does it begin? As always for us who profess faith: prayer and alongside all who are of God’s offspring in relating across human-defined boundaries. Maybe we can’t quite get to Norway to exercise that… but I could look across the street; across the faith boundary I have set; across the ‘morally right’ border that keeps me clean.
To close a short sentence from a WhatsApp message I sent a few days ago to a prayer group:
I have little clarity… I know that Jesus did not promise that he was the way to God, but the way to the God that (seemingly) many people already know but not intimately (‘the way to the Father’), but beyond that I know there are paths we have not trodden nor understood.