Medway Messenger, 3rd December 2004

The onset of autumn has been a cause of much delight to our toddler. She has learned the joys of scrunching through fallen leaves and the twinkle-eyed mischief of splashing in puddles.

Nowhere has been better for this than Capstone Valley Country Park . We have often taken her for a walk around the lake, and then warmed ourselves up with a cheese toastie or egg and chips at the Lakeside Café.

But now these simple pleasures have been hit by the arsonists who set light to the café. It is more serious than that for the staff who worked there.

So how shall we explain these thugs? Shall we call them mindless? Sick? Or shall we say it must all be down to poverty?

Well, I don’t buy any of those explanations. Are they mindless, as if more education would prevent this? No way. Too many football hooligans are highly qualified professionals for me to believe that.

Are they sick? No, I don’t accept that, either. It’s a get-out clause whereby we can avoid personal responsibility for our actions and blame it all on some unspecified illness.

How about poverty? I can understand this to a point. Having created a society where the worship of God has been replaced by devotion to material possessions it’s no surprise if those who haven’t accumulated wealth take extreme measures.

But I’m still deeply reluctant to accept the poverty argument. It insults people who suffered great deprivation in past generations where the crime rate was far lower. Not only that, the rich have their own ways of devising evil, but they usually have the law on their side.

Isn’t it about time we went back to ancient wisdom and used the old word ‘sin’? Sin isn’t merely the sort of infamy that generates a headline in the News Of The World. Nor is it a word reserved for the most shocking of crimes. It’s wider than that.

There is an old saying that is a little word with ‘I’ in the middle. Sin is when ‘I’ come first. It is when my pleasures matter more than anything else. It is when ‘I’ am on the throne of the universe, and not God. It includes us all.

Rather than ‘I’ in the middle we need another old saying, J-O-Y: first Jesus, then Others, lastly Yourself.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.