Strikes
Dear Friends,
Strikes. That’s where I think I should start this month.
A contentious subject, I know. And one, you may well think, I should avoid – only fools, you’ll argue, will go rushing in on controversial issues such as this, where angels surely always fear to tread!
Perhaps. But issues are contentious for a reason, and sometimes it’s a cowardice which makes us deftly duck our heads far down behind the parapet and keep our non-committal silence. I hope that what I’ve got to say, however, far from being contentious or polemical, will serve to bring some clarity and offer a perspective on the issue which the headlines and the newscasts never give.
Strikes, then.
The first, and perhaps the most obvious thing to be said, is simply this, that no one, but no one, likes them.
‘Strikers’ themselves neither want them nor enjoy them: they involve loss of earnings, sometimes hardship and vitriol, and as often as not the discomfort and pain of being thrown on the horns of a difficult, dreadful dilemma.
Employers themselves have no greater liking for a workforce on strike than those themselves who are striking. Headaches more than hardship perhaps for employers; but loss for them as well, albeit loss of a different sort and on a different scale; and they, too, face the matador’s fate of being caught on the horns of their own rather different dilemma.
Governments, of course, have no less distaste for strikes than anyone else. Try as they might to keep out of such things (and we well understand why they’d want to), they’re tasked to run the country and strikes become their business too, ex officio as it were. Whether or not they like it. Which they patently don’t.
And the public at large – they also neither like nor enjoy any strikes. Their work can be inconvenienced. Their plans can be sadly torpedoed. Their lives can be hugely disrupted.
No one, but no one, likes strikes.
And precisely because that’s the case, the natural, default, instinctive response is recourse to the weapon of blame. If nobody likes them, nobody wants them, nobody ever enjoys them at all – then it must surely be somebody’s fault. Someone somewhere’s to blame. Which means they can easily and quickly become exceedingly bitter things.
Maybe, however, that search for the people to blame is not in the end the most helpful or valid approach. Pointing the finger and thereby trying to allocate the blame may look much the same as discerning the reasons for these strikes, dissecting what the problem really is and where its roots are found: but they’re actually very different and not to be confused.
And the reasons? Well, I don’t for a moment doubt that the reasons are complex and many. There are economic factors which come into play. Obviously. All manner of subtle, political streams flow into the tide of unrest. Certainly. Competing ideologies can be involved. A veritable host of different factors surely lie behind the current spate of bitter, widespread strikes. Brexit, Covid, Ukraine … – an endless list of decisions, diseases, disasters – are each of them, too, a part of the current, contemporary backdrop against which the strikes must be viewed. Strikes are always complicated things, for which the hoped-for resolution isn’t readily at hand.
There is, however, a spiritual dimension as well, I suggest – at least at this present time – and it’s that which I want to explore just a bit: for it’s that which I think, more than anything else, our society needs now to see. So let me explain.
There is, and has been, what could well be called a rash of strikes. Sometimes it’s seemed that just about everyone, everywhere, at some point of time or another, is out on the streets on strike. Strikes across the country. Strikes across the spectrum of society. Strikes across our calendars. Strikes which were, and are, and are to come. A rash of strikes.
Ever had a rash erupt across on your body? Maybe ‘chickenpox’ or ‘measles’: maybe ‘shingles’ or ‘scabies’. Who knows what? And yes, that’s the question. Who knows what it is? You want to know the answer, because the rash is but a symptom, not the real disease itself. And while you may well rush for the hydrocortisone cream (since the rash itself may well require some treatment), it’s the underlying illness that you need first to identify, and then of course to heal.
It isn’t any different in the ‘body politic’. When a rash of these ugly, uncomfortable strikes break out all over the body politic, the rash is but the symptom of a far more serious malaise. And it is, I suggest, of that grave malaise in our nation’s life which this rash of strikes is the symptom.
Are they really just all about money? Is it all just pure economics? No. Surely not. It’s a cluster of things. Salary, wages, income. Yes. Terms and conditions. For sure. And all the massive shortages of staff with all the massive stresses that creates.
I heard of a school where the staff of 70 strong has a list of 17 vacancies. That’s about a quarter of the workforce that’s required – not there. A ‘sinkhole’ in the staffroom of the school. A void. A pit. A vacuum which then sucks up all the energy and time of those now left, disrupts the regular heartbeat of the school, affects the education of a growing generation, and lays upon those working there a near intolerable stress.
Education. Putting it in stark (perhaps simplistic) terms – there simply aren’t the teachers to go round. And the same is true, it would seem, throughout the NHS. A shortage of doctors and nurses. And often a shortage of beds now as well – because there’s a shortage of staff in the care homes too; and a consequent shortage of places for those who’re now ready to exit their hospital bed but haven’t the next ‘bed’ to hand. And hence the long queues at the A & E door, and the long, long waits those poor paramedics must face before they can take their next call.
As if it were a morbid, widespread ‘game’ of musical chairs where too many chairs have been removed and the music now stops far too often. Another sort of ‘sinkhole’ in the system. Another wretched void. A vacuum, which sucks up the time and energy of those who work there – and slowly, surely, sadly wears them down.
Where are they all? The nurses, doctors, carers and those left to make the whole thing somehow work? There simply aren’t the people to go round. They’ve often gone elsewhere.
Education. Healthcare. Transport. All of them always vital to a nation’s truest health.
But if you can get more money elsewhere (and often with far less stress) then that’s where people will go. That’s the simple logic of a culture which has rid itself of God – and thereby, too, dispensed with those great values of His kingdom which for centuries have underpinned and buttressed our society.
Submission, sacrifice, service. Kingdom values. But disdained and dismissed by our secular state, which won’t have this King to rule over their lives, and scorn now the values He holds.
Submission? Goodness me, no! Do your own thing: be your own boss: pursue your own agenda. Let no one tell you how to live, or what to think, or who you are. You yourself are god!
Sacrifice? Certainly not! Look after number one. Grab what you can, get what you may, grasp and hold onto whatever you’ve presently got!
And service? Emphatically no! You’re the one who’s owed a living now. In one way or another you’re a victim who must fight your corner, stand up for your rights and cease to be subservient!
Things have moved on. The culture’s changed. The Kingdom’s been dismantled and been ditched. And as a result, our whole way of looking at life has now drastically shrunk. That vital dimension of God on the throne and eternity beckoning us all – that dimension has suddenly gone. Our 3-dimensional former life has been cruelly reduced to a bland, unsatisfying, 2-dimensional thing. Time and place.
The ‘here’ and the ‘now’ is everything. Here is all we have: the material world, the things we see around us, the things we can get hold of: that’s all we have. And now is all we’ve got: today and the present is all that there is, so you’d better make the most of it. Kingdom values have no place when the King has been dethroned.
A frightful epidemic of a shrinking and wasting malaise. And so the body politic comes out in a tell-tale rash. Do you see why that’s so?
Teaching was always, for centuries past, a vocation more than a job. In a similar way, the life of those entering the medical world was always just that – a life and a calling, far more than merely a job. That sense of a life that was lived in service to others gave meaning and purpose to all that their calling required and all that the daily demands of their work would entail. It still does, of course, for many.
People didn’t enter these professions for the money they would earn. The service they were giving was just as much a factor in their thinking as the salary they earned (not that they were not entitled to a recompense commensurate with the work they did).
Remove that component of service, however, dispense with the framework of those basic ‘Kingdom’ values, and there’s not the same incentive to embark on career paths such as these. They may be among the most needed, they may be major contributors to the welfare of society at large – but such spheres of work are not without their stresses (to say the least), and they bring their own demands (even at the best of times) – and if it is just money and comfort on which you are intent, then there probably are a host of other avenues where the stresses at work are much less and the rate of remuneration markedly more.
The end result of our ditching these Kingdom values? A dearth of individuals where they’re needed most. And maybe, just maybe, it is perhaps precisely that perspective which has slowly, subtly eased its way into the mindset of the church as well. It can happen, for sure.
Why, after all, are there now so relatively few embarking on a lifetime’s work of ministry within Christ’s church? Why this dearth of ministers throughout our land, this ‘sinkhole’ in the flow of those being called by God to minister His Word?
Has the sense of vocation diminished, as the lure of appealing vacations (on the back of a well-paid job) has greatly increased? Is it really because the Lord Himself no longer addresses that call? Or do His people now simply recoil from the call and choose a career path themselves? Have the values of the Kingdom somehow lost their edge? Has the ‘shrinking and wasting malaise’ of our society at large infected Christ’s church as well?
The death of Eric Alexander brought such questions into sharper, stark relief. Perhaps the last of that faithful band of brothers all those decades back, whose thorough-going obedience to the costly call of God occasioned rich and untold blessing on vast multitudes – he it was who once revealed, I think, that, back in the early 1950s, he and others had united in a concert of impassioned, burdened prayer that Christ would call a swathe of gospel preachers to proclaim the truths of Scripture to a needy, hungry land.
And I remember him solemnly telling us all in that gathered group, that he and those others who’d so constantly prayed, had desisted at last when they all were assured by the Lord that their prayers had been answered on high. That, he said, was in 1953. He looked around the gathering, with something of the majesty of Jesus in His eyes, and simply asked the question – How many of you were born in 1953?
Perhaps against the backdrop of this ‘rash’ upon the present body politic – perhaps we do well ourselves to pray now with an equal, fervent passion that the Lord would raise up in these days a fresh, emboldened generation of committed, consecrated gospel preachers as heralds of that Kingdom which endures through all eternity. Let’s strike like that while the iron is hot!
Yours in Christ Jesus our Lord
Jeremy Middleton