It’s humiliating when we wake up to the fact that the world has moved on and we are left behind. Once we built the best ships in the world in our Clydeside yards. Then other countries took the laurel. Once we vied with France for the Blue Riband on the north Atlantic run. Then we found that all the passengers had abandoned sea-trips in favour of flight. We thought we were kings at cricket – and then came India.
At a personal level we find that a rising generation is at home with computers and similar devices in a way we older ones shall never be. We have to ask them how we can disentangle ourselves. If we are that way inclined, we shall soon be facing the fact that our acquaintance with internal combustion engines has, overnight it seems, become obsolete; electric cars need experts of a different hue to look under the bonnet.
One of the saddest sentences in the Bible is what the chronicler wrote about Samson. His strength, you remember, lay in his hair. The wily Delilah knew this and in her arms and in his sleep she had his head shaven. When he woke up, he announced his intention to take on the Philistines as he had always done. But, we are told in the antique terms of the KJV: ‘he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.’
Now, given that these were different says and different ways, we can hardly put ourselves in his place. But strange as it may seem, this story is true to or experience – not because of the Philistines or Delilah, not because they had fashions in coiffure in those days just as we do today but because this is the way human nature works. Samson is susceptible Samson is complacent, Samson is weak as much as strong.
If we can’t make the best of changing times; if we rely on old skills and past achievements, we have only ourselves to blame if things go wrong. We Christians sometimes claim more than we ought of adaptability and adjustment. Human nature has changed very little since Samson had his hair cut and somebody put his story together.
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