You are most welcome to my very own website. I’ve never had one before and this is its very first letter. I write to you about something that has caused me a fair deal of thought recently.

A few nights ago I had a unique experience. I was invited to speak at a Debate in the Great Hall at Queen’s University in Belfast at a Ruby Jubilee for the classes of 1967-70. The motion was ‘That this House believes that the next forty years couldn’t possibly be as good as the last forty.’ Ed Curran, the Editor- in- Chief of the Belfast Telegraph, Brendan Keenan, Group Business Editor at Independent Newspapers, Barney Turkington the lawyer and I spoke on the motion and speakers also took part from the floor, including, I am glad to say, some of my students from John Brown University to whom I have the privilege of teaching an English Literature Course at the moment. It was particularly great to debate with Brendan Keenan again because in the seventies at some incredible debates at Queen’s, we used to spar. He is, in my opinion, one of this island’s greatest orators.

The last forty years? They have brought, amongst other things, cordless tools, the international robot, the communication satellite, unmanned arial vehicles, polio vaccine, the three point seatbelt, the air bag, the music synthesizer, high yield rice, the smoke dector, In-Viro -Fertilization, the Sony walkman, MRI, DNA fingerprinting, the MP3 player, fibre optics, the Internet and of course incredible advances in medicine for which I am at this time deeply grateful in my leukemia storm. The last four decades have been astonishing and I am sure that research and invention, God willing, will continue for another forty years to bring equally astonishing things. But in my opinion, there will be something missing.
 
I look around me and what do I see? People sitting texting everywhere. I find I sit down with folk to have a coffee or a meal and what happens? The meeting is constantly interrupted by mobile phone calls. It is almost as if to say, I have nothing against you, Derick, but the truth is that I am so busy and have such important things afoot (most of them to do with making money) that I couldn’t possibly put them on hold to talk with you for half an hour. Forty years ago as students in Northern Ireland we used to debate face to face the great issues of the day. We came from many corners of the island of Ireland. Goodness, I even studied English Literature with J.M. Synge’s grandson. But now there is not even a Debating Society at Queen’s, students wouldn’t take the time to attend such a thing, they are too busy on My Space. Now in almost every conversation (and, sadly, mine too) a word has sprung into prominence. Here someone is trying to explain something to you and once the major point is made it seems they dare not give you more detail in case you might be bored. They cover the detail with the word ‘blah’, only they repeat it three times, I note, namely ‘blah, blah, blah’!

The truth is that the next forty years will see huge development of the three-minute culture. Watch TV and the advertisement segment will try to sell you a new car, perfume, soap powder, insurance and a holiday all in three minutes. Listen to any radio programme interviewing people and when things are just getting interesting the interviewer will cut across the person being interviewed, state their name and then dismiss them with the endless phrase ‘we are, I’m afraid, running out of time’!   Afraid, indeed!

Time is everything; nothing must be in any way ponderous; huge complex questions must be whittled down to a sound bite. This generation, according to Michael Ignatieff, has the attention span of a flea. Every thing is speeding up and we are losing our communication skills, in writing, speaking. Our language, so rich, is being dumbed down. All this speed is eating into the very heart of our culture.  

Take architecture. You can, for example, identify buildings as Georgian or Edwardian or Victorian. But now? Now because of the speed we are going at you’d be hard pushed to identify a recent era of architecture because we do not give it time to settle down before we are on to something else. We are hauling down what has only recently been built. It is the same in music culture. Remember ‘New Kids on the Block’? They were very, very soon ‘Old Kids on the Block’ in terms of staying power. How long does a phase in music last nowadays? Weeks, even? When Next changed the shop front on the High Street they were copied so quickly everything on the High Street soon looked like Next. With great art one needs to sit down and contemplate it for awhile to let it speak; now art gets a glance or two and we must be off. I propose that the next forty years couldn’t possibly be as good as the last forty on the grounds that people will be so busy they will have very little time to enjoy the good things that will come! A fellow will no longer get to gaze into a girl’s eyes and vice versa. Why? Because they will be too busy Twittering!!

When we come to the church, the mind boggles at the speed at which it is changing. My friend Os Guinness once wrote a book called The Gravedigger’s File. He was arguing that local churches often dig their own graves from the inside. He argued that people would soon turn up for a service, somebody would hold up a symbol of Christianity and then we would all go off for coffee and that would be it. I thought it was over the top when I read it first but now I see how accurate it was: increasingly less time is being given to contemplative worship and  in-depth Bible teaching and prayer. We are forgetting that we are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our minds. It also seems that we would never be found being ‘lost in wonder love and praise.’ That would never do; there is no time for it, there is another committee meeting to attend, another whatever. 
 
At the close of Billy Graham’s first London Crusade a clergyman said that Billy had set Christianity back 100 years. Billy on hearing this said ‘ I am disappointed. I hope to set it back 2,000 years.’ What would we do with Paul’s holding discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus daily for two years ‘so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.’ At the lecture hall of Tyrannus, in the hottest hours of the day, every day for two years, for any sakes! Where did he ever get the time!? And what of Paul speaking to the people at Troas, and because he was leaving the next day kept on talking until midnight. A fellow called Eutychus sitting in a window, fell asleep during the discourse and fell to the ground from the third storey. Paul went down and found him still alive, then went back upstairs, had something to eat and ‘talked a long while, even till break of day’ and then departed. Goodness, today Paul would be international news as an insufferable bore and hounded as being callous to boot. I reckon he would be invited by few churches to address them again!  The truth is, though, he and his colleagues turned the world upside down for the Lord Jesus. 

John Wesley rode his horse through the kingdom, taking time to communicate the Gospel to multitudes. Thousands came to faith. Nowadays in the Western world we have jet planes and cars and Blackberries and have global communication within seconds but the church often sleeps and relatively few find Christ. Thank God there are glorious exceptions to all this but you get my drift. 
 
We need to be still and know that God is God. We need to slow down and remember Malachi’s word ‘Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of rembrance was written in His presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honoured his name.’ I understand the Hebrew means He bent down his ear to listen to them. We need to take time with each other to talk about our Lord together and honour His name.

A little family in a church in Northern Ireland that is one of those glorious exceptions to all that I have been writing about wrote to me last week. They assured me that they were praying for me and for Margaret who cares for and supports me at this difficult time of illness. They passed on a verse from Zephaniah to me. Zephaniah? Of course! It is chapter 3/17: “The Lord is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing’. What a mind-boggling truth! As a mother takes her fretting, crying, distressed child and quiets it in her arms with love and sings over it, so the one who created massive nebula and galaxies (see NASA’s Pillars of Creation) moves to quiet us, to slow us down, to listen to His heartbeat and truth.

‘Our supreme exemplar is our Lord Jesus himself,’ writes John Stott in New Issues Facing Christians Today (Zondervan). ‘It is often said that He was always available to people. This is not true. He was not. There were times when He sent the crowds away. He refused to allow the urgent to displace the important. Regularly he withdrew from the pressures and the glare of His public ministry, in order to seek his Father in solitude and replenish His reserve of strength. Then, when it came to the end, He and his apostles faced the final test together.’ The fact is that the apostles fled at the vital moment. Why? Was it not because they slept while He prayed? So let’s come out of the fast lane this week and slow down and spend time in prayer and meditation. Slowly but surely we will hear God singing over us. Go on, try it.

Derick