Muxworthy's Musings

On the day the Queen passed away my wife made a very pointed observation that evening when we were sitting watching events unfold in front the TV. It was by now late evening and getting dark and we saw the crowds milling around outside Buckingham Palace and Penny turned to me and said, ‘They are wandering around seemingly lost and hopeless like that verse in the Bible.’ It was in verse thirty-six of Matthew chapter nine where it says: When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. I imagine a lot of us have seen or even been in that state where we have experienced a loss or ending of something in our lives, and we are left wandering about asking ‘What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?’ For most of us reading this we have known no other monarch other than Elizabeth II and we have now seen that she like the rest of us was mortal after all. The work...

When I was employed in the building industry, we were made very aware of the dangers of asbestos in buildings. Whenever it was discovered, it had to be removed by licenced contractors using specialist equipment. The alarming thing was that in its day it was hailed as a ‘wonder material’ and can be found in fireproofing, artex, fuse-boards, brake pads and even toilet cisterns. As I said it was hailed as a wonder material from its introduction in the 1870’s and with its dangers being noticed in the early 1900’s but only finally being banned in the UK in 1999. I have heard stories from people who were working on building sites in the 50’s and 60’s of it being sprayed onto steel beams without any protection for anyone on the site and it wasn’t uncommon to see workers throwing it at each other in snowball fights. All the time unaware to the danger of the tiny particles they were breathing in, slowly shredding the inside of their lungs, causing cancer and death by asbestosis many years lat...

We seem to now live in a world where everyone is distracted in some way shape or form. How many of us have laughed at seeing a person walk into something whilst absorbed by their phone screen – the irony being that we have more than likely viewed it on our phone screen! There is also a dark side to this when we hear of ‘Distraction Crimes’ where a smooth-talking con-artist keeps somebody at the front door whilst their associate gets into the house and helps themselves. When I began my training as a train driver one of the first things we were warned about was the danger of distractions. The importance of this was brought home to me in the summer of 2017 when there was a derailment at Waterloo. I was bringing a train into Waterloo, and we had been delayed and only had a vague idea of what might have happened. You can imagine my surprise when the sight of a train leaning to one side loomed into view on the line immediately to my right and milling around it were a small army of orange c...

2 Corinthians 1 v3-11: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might...

The conversation went like this:  Customer:  ‘Can you help me; do you have any cantaloupe melons?’ Assistant:  ‘I’ll just check our stock to see if we have any.’ The assistant checked their electronic handset. ‘I’m sorry but we won’t have any until tomorrow morning.’  The reaction from the customer was not what the assistant expected. In fact the reaction was on a par with receiving news that a loved one had died. It wasn’t as though there weren’t any other varieties of melon available (there were several to say the least). No, it had to be cantaloupe and it had to be available now!  Yes, I was that assistant and other than the usual customer service bit; there was little else I could do. This left my mind to wander (not a good thing at the best of times). Were their family being held at gunpoint with the kidnappers demanding provision of a myriad of exotic fruit of which this melon was just one, in exchange for their liberty? Were they going to suffer unspeakab...

Proverbs 13 v12:  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. I have just finished reading a book entitled The History of the Jews, it’s quite big book as it spans from Abram to the establishment of the state of Israel in the late 1940’s. One of the points the author makes early on is that outside of the Old Testament, Apocrypha and certain Jewish historians there is very little written history when compared with what we have for other civilisations of antiquity. The reason for this being the fact that because of the stateless nature of the Jews up until the 1940’s, added to the fact that because of persecution and being driven from various countries most history was learned orally with only the scriptures being written down. For me though the thing that comes through in this book is the fact that there have been many false messiahs in Jewish history, both before and after Jesus. This led me to consider the fact that when we look at the trial ...