Doubt

"To believe is human, to doubt divine." Peter Rollins

When we read through the psalms, we not only see psalms of thanksgiving and praise, hymns and liturgies, but far more commonly we come across psalms of lament. These are the psalms that Jews turned to, read and held on to when they doubted, despaired and felt alone and godforsaken. And it is to a psalm of lament that Jesus turned when he was dying on the cross, with the famous cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In uttering these words, Jesus was saying to everyone who listens, “When you despair, when you doubt, when you turn to these lamentations because you feel so far from God – I am right there in that place with you now.” But I think the reverse also applies – when we doubt, when we feel godforsaken, it is at that moment when we can turn to Jesus on the cross and repeat to him what he also said to us: “Jesus, even though I am only feeling a small fraction of what you must be feeling, I am right there in that place with you now.“

Below are the words of Psalm 13, a psalm of lament. As we read the psalm, can we speak out loud the cry from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” at the end of each verse? In repeating Jesus’ words, let’s remember that whenever we doubt, whenever we feel forsaken by God, it is at that moment when we can become closest to God and God closest to us.

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;

My foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I leave you with these words from a philosopher:

“When I, as a human being, experience myself as cut off from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ.” Slavoj Zizek

Praise

If you look up at night, you just might glimpse the stars in these overcast November skies. We only see tiny pinpricks of light, yet each star is a flaming ball of gas, a nuclear reactor a million miles in diameter, whose light has traveled across vast regions of space just to reach our eyes. Reality is so much more than what we can see.

"Can you bind the chains of the pleiades?" Job 38:31

No matter what we look at in this universe, there is always so much hidden from our gaze, like how an iceberg on the surface of the ocean has the depths of its beauty concealed beneath the waves. There’s always far more to a phenomena than we can ever possibly hope to understand. But we still find that whatever we can grasp of God’s creation is beautiful and amazing. That’s why we try to capture it in any way we can, through painting, sculpture, photography, video or even computer simulation. We want to contain and hold and cherish what we can understand, yet perhaps when we look upon these pieces of the world we’ve held in chains, maybe we should begin to think about what lies beyond merely what we can hear, see, smell, taste and touch.

Let’s praise God for the hidden, the unknown and the unknowable in his creation. So take a moment today to look through some photographs, watch a video, browse some art and think about the wonder of God’s creation that they don’t capture. If you’re stuck for an idea, watch this demo and see this beautiful attempt at envisioning creation within 64 kilobytes of computer code:

Develop Liverpool 2009

On Thursday I got to speak at the inaugural Develop Liverpool, an offshoot of the popular UK games development conference held every summer in Brighton. Obviously they decided it was about time that the north-west got some love and gave us a piece of the action!

Sadly there were only two programming talks, one from Sony which was pretty much a repeat of the one given at Brighton earlier in the year, and ours, A Bizarre Way to do Real-Time Lighting, which myself and Ste Tovey split between us. I kicked it off by dealing with the GPU side of things, my specialty, before Ste took over to speak about the PS3, his favourite topic. Embarrassingly, more than half the audience were from Bizarre, which probably shows that there weren’t many programmers at the conference. So come on other north-west developers, contribute next time, let’s help each other out!

Despite the dearth of programming talks, I did see some interesting ones on production and mobile phone games. Stuart Dredge gave an insightful talk on Five App Stores Under the Microscope, though it’ll probably be most relevant to me when deciding what mobile phone to get next! I also really enjoyed Simon Watt’s What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Digital Distribution, a talk repeated from Brighton in the summer, but incredibly interesting nonetheless for those hearing it for the first time. Simon is the Vice President of Technology at Universal, and it gave me great hope to see the great positive strides his company were making in addressing the issue of piracy from what I see as the correct direction – provide the consumer with a better product than the pirates!

All in all, it was a nice day out of the office, and good to support a new conference. Let’s hope again that more people decide to come and support next year, both in numbers and in speaking, and maybe we’ll be able to fill up an entire day with programming talks! If they have me back, I’ll speak again, don’t worry about that!

Oh, and if you’re here looking for slides for our talk, sorry, but if we do get them online (and to be honest, that’s unlikely), they’ll be over at the Bizarre Creations web site. And if you’re looking for programming insight, sorry, but this blog is where I mostly entertain ideas on theology, emergent Christianity and post-modern philosophy!

 

Encouragement

Well, I’m back from the USA and thrown right into my cell group’s “November Advent”. Basically, we thought it would be good to do something like Lent in preparation for Christmas (and because it would just be plain old good for us), but wanted to avoid Advent and Christmas because that’s when all the fun stuff happens. Thus November Advent was born, a month when we’d collectively try to give things up, pray and fast a little bit more and encourage each other a lot.

One of the things we’re doing is posting some brief spiritual thoughts each day on our group Facebook page, so hopefully we don’t just use the Internet to check football team message boards or worse. It’s my turn every Tuesday, and this week’s theme is Encouragement, followed by Praise, Doubt and Love. So look out for those updates in future weeks, and hopefully you’ll enjoy my musings on encouragement below.

"It's because we didn't bring any bread."

I have to admit, I’m not very good at encouraging people. I’m pretty good at making it sound critical. “Wow, you were amazing. Most of the time I think you’re awful, but tonight, wow, you really outdid yourself.” People don’t really take kindly to that sort of encouragement, but sadly I’m going to begin along those lines. But please, keep reading, it will get better! It will be encouraging, I promise!

All I ask is can we just admit that we all screw up? In fact, we all screw up on a regular basis. You might even say that we screw up professionally (except that we very rarely get paid for it). Or let’s take it further, that we are screw ups. But the thing I find encouraging about that fact is that God uses screw ups. I don’t have to be anyone special or possess some superhuman abilities, but I can just be me, a poor and broken human being, and God can still love me and use me.

Let’s take David, a man described as “after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22) who let’s just say would probably be very much enjoying the era of internet pornography. Or the rag tag band of fishermen, tax collectors and other misfits who Jesus chose as his disciples, who managed to get even simple answers to Jesus’ questions very, very wrong. You can imagine the huddle they formed after Jesus warned, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees.” (Matthew 16:6)

“What’s he on about now?”

“Something to do with yeast, I didn’t really get it.”

“He must have bread on his mind. Can’t have had his breakfast this morning.”

“Really? Doesn’t he know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?”

“Sorry, I’m afraid it’s my fault. I didn’t make him a packed lunch.”

“You didn’t? And you didn’t offer him yours instead?”

“Well, I did offer, but he doesn’t like marmite sandwiches.”

“Ah, so maybe that’s why he’s telling us to beware of the yeast…”

Then there’s the fringe characters like Zacchaeus, a fraudulent tax collector (maybe the first word is redundant) who Jesus saw something in and managed to change his life. Or Rahab, who was not only a prostitute but even worse a Canaanite, who God called and chose to serve him in helping to hand Jericho over to the Israelites.

What I love most though, is how many of these characters, good or bad, useful or useless, all make up the genealogy of Jesus. The flawed King David, the wise but led astray Solomon, the evil Rehoboam, the good Jehoshaphat, the utterly unknown Matthan and the prostitute who became an adopted outsider Rahab… they are all in there. So Jesus came from a family of broken people, just like you and me. And God can use broken people, just like you and me.

That’s what I find amazingly encouraging about Christianity.

P.S. I’d also highly recommend reading some Adrian Plass if you haven’t already. Those are books that describe a pathetic man somehow managing to be used by God in some small way. I always found them helpful as they made me realise that I didn’t need to be the superhero so many others around me seemed to be, at least on the outside.

Trip to the USA

Very early tomorrow morning, Dave and I are flying out for our trip to the USA. We seem to have been planning it for ages but finally we’re actually going!

It’s not exactly a holiday, but more of an opportunity for theological reflection, especially on Dave’s desire to plant a church in the near future. For that reason, we’re heading to Grand Rapids, Michigan to visit Mars Hill Bible Church, the church that Rob Bell founded.

Chicago & Grand Rapids

This is Dave’s choice, so you’d be better off asking him for the specific reasoning, but I think Dave feels that Mars Hill is a church that appears from the outside to have done things right. It seems to value and love people in the way that Jesus would, plus it has an outward-looking focus in their [XYZ] missions, where they look to make a big difference to communities both close at home and abroad. We’d really just like to see if it is as good as it sounds, whether the people on the pews really feel loved, changed and involved with the missions, or whether it’s just somewhere to go on a Sunday morning. (Not to mention, navigate our way around the totally different dynamics of an American mega-church).

In many ways, we feel we’re going to be a little disappointed before we go, or at least, visiting them won’t be as much use as first hoped. One of the main dynamics for a church is the surrounding community, and to be honest, from reading about it, Grand Rapids and Western Michigan seem to be very affluent and comfortable areas of the world, very different from inner city communities in Liverpool. But I guess this trip isn’t just about Mars Hill, it’s also about the time of dialogue and discussion between us about the nature of church and hopefully seeing something in a whole new setting will really spark us off creatively.

The Irresistible Revolution

We’re also planning to read a couple of books together while we’re away. It’s something to do on the plane I guess, but it’ll be useful (and a different experience for me) to be able to read through a book and discuss it with someone at the same time. The first book is the The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne, which describes attempting to change the world through little acts of love and a radical call to social justice. Certainly seems to be good reading, very relevant to the potential church plant. The second is The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright, for no other reason that we both have copies sitting on our bookshelves at home, unread, and Tom Wright deserves far, far better than that. We probably won’t get through both books, but it’s good to be optimistic!

The Challenge of Jesus

Our current itinerary begins when we fly from Liverpool to Chicago via Amsterdam on Saturday, then hop in a rented car and make our way along the coast of Lake Michigan up to Grand Rapids, then somehow make our way through the rest of the day recovering from both jet lag and a ridiculously early start. Then we’ll attend both Mars Hill services on Sunday morning, hoping to meet lots of interesting people and find out where they believe they fit into the [XYZ] missions and other ways of serving at the church.

After that, and for the next few days in Grand Rapids, we don’t really have any specific plans. We’d like to go and tour the local aspects of the [XYZ] missions, such as the housing program, so will probably pop down to the Mars Hill office to ask for some information, but that could either take all day or an hour! I want to visit the Frederik Meijer Gardens (since that seems the only thing worth seeing in Grand Rapids… don’t get me wrong, it seems like a really nice place… just a little boring for tourists) and we have some ideas of driving up into what seems to be vast wilderness to the north of Grand Rapids, but nothing too concrete. All I know is that I’ll have to keep Dave away from the fishing…

Then on the Wednesday we’re driving back to Chicago, since I’m not flying into Chicago twice in one year (like with GDC in March) and not seeing any of it. We’ll take all day to do it though, and stop off and all the little towns on the coast along the way. Holland will be the first stop, which sounds very interesting with its Dutch heritage, plus the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore seems worth visiting, as does watching the sun set over Lake Michigan. It’ll be a properly American road trip.

Then in Chicago we ditch the car before spending Thursday and Friday touring the city. I get the feeling I’ll put on a lot of weight as apparently no other city on earth takes its fast food so seriously, but I’m mainly there to see the architecture, especially the skyscrapers. The first thing that struck me in San Francisco, the first city I visited in America, was the immense scale of it all and Chicago will just take things a step further. Plus I’m sure by this point we’ll have shopping lists from our families to plough through.

Then it’s the sad goodbye as we fly back on Saturday afternoon to arrive back in Liverpool very, very jet lagged early on Sunday morning. I’m sure we’ll have had an amazing time, and I’ll make sure I write down as much of it as possible here in this blog. So wait patiently, you’ll hear from me soon!

Talking the Talk #3

So, what’s the second distraction that stops us from walking the walk and living out the true miracle of Christianity? I’ll have to borrow a phrase from Pete Rollins: “changing something so that everything remains the same.” Just like the leaves change colour in the autumn so that the seasons change as in every other year, we also change things in order for everything to eventually remain the same. There are two major ways I think we do this, and they’re inescapably linked and hence both are illustrated in the following parable:

There was once a god-fearing man who worked for a large corporation in the centre of a large city. Every day he caught the crowded commuter train to work and then walked the short distance to his office alongside many other people. He never noticed the people he passed by, until one Sunday when the preacher gave a sermon extolling the congregation to do good deeds to those around them, reminding them they could see Jesus in the eyes of the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger.

On the Monday a bedraggled tramp approached him as he got off the train, asking for money so he could have something to eat. The man, remembering the words of the preacher, dug into his pockets and dropped a few coins into the tramp’s hand. He then walked off to work, content that he had fed this particular manifestation of Jesus.

On the Tuesday he spotted a distressed teenager on the train station platform. “I’ve lost my ticket and I haven’t got any more money for the train fare,” she explained. Grateful to once again do a good deed, he paid the money for her ticket and smiled all day at the office at his new found good nature.

This continued all week, and the week after, and for the rest of the man’s working life. On his journeys to and from work, whenever he came across somebody in need he always strove to give them some money to help them out. Every now and then he even took food and blankets to give out to the homeless people sheltering in the doorways of the shops and offices that surrounded his office.

When the day of judgment came, this man stood before the heavenly throne as Jesus, shining in all his glory and with a shepherd’s crook in his hand, began to separate the sheep from the goats. He moved through the throngs of people, casting them either to his left or to his right, to eternal punishment or eternal life. When Jesus approached the man, to his surprise he was thrown amongst the goats. Shocked, he exclaimed,

“Lord, were you not hungry and I gave you food, were you not thirsty and I gave you something to drink, were you not a stranger and I welcomed you, were you not naked and I clothed you?”

Jesus turned back to face the man with a sad look upon his face. “I did not want your food, your drink, or your clothes,” he spoke softly. “I did not even want the money you gave me. All I wanted was you, all of you, and you never gave yourself to me.”

Did this man actually change anything about the world by giving money to homeless people (and others in distress)? The sad thing is that he probably didn’t. He merely fed one poor hungry soul, but the fact remains that the hunger would quickly return and there were and would be countless more left unfed. Nothing else changed in his lifestyle – nothing that would begin to get at the root causes of the situation and solve poverty and homelessness once and for all. And forgive me for sounding anti-capitalist, but the big company he continued to work for probably perpetuated these oppressive systems. In effect, he was changing something so that these systems could remain in place.

Also, did this man actually change anything about himself? In effect, he was simply paying a tax. A small tax of minuscule monetary value and time, played out in a small window in his daily life. Is Christianity simply about making small changes? Is Jesus meant to be confined to a few small minutes of your life? Jesus demands all of you, all of your time, all of your money and as such we cannot confine our actions to any one time and place. We have been born again, and that should affect all of who we are and everything that we do. This man had changed something about himself so that he could stay as the same person.

All this doesn’t mean that I don’t advocate social action! Of course I advocate giving food to the hungry, water to the thirsty and clothes to the naked. When we meet such people the only correct response is one of immense love and compassion, a call that we have no choice but to heed. But we need to be aware that Jesus demands all of our life, not just these small deeds, and that we need to cast our eyes much higher if we’re going to solve the root causes of these problems.

I certainly don’t have any easy answers. In fact, there’s very rarely an easy answer to any of the world’s problems. Even if there are answers, not all of us can do something about them. And although I’m rightly scared of just making changes so that everything remains the same, I can’t let this fear paralyse me into inaction, which I’m sure is an even bigger sin.

But please, remember that Christianity is about a fundamental transformation of existence, and that transformation should realise itself in a transformation of the entire world. Our new being should bubble out of us, overflowing with love and affecting all those we meet, and along with these encounters, it should be a catalyst for change in the wider world, influencing governments and nations. We have to aim big, we have to aim for what God aims for:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:1-4

Talking the Talk #2

Last time, I wrote about how as Christians we seem to get distracted away from the true miracle of Christianity, the miracle of transformation where you are never the same again. The first cause of this distraction that I’d like to talk about is our obsession with the spectacular.

The thing is, when we talk about miracles we immediately jump to thinking of something physical, something that we can see: the blind seeing, the lame walking, the food multiplied, the weather changing. But if we limit ourselves to this idea of the miracle, we miss what is truly amazing, like I see happening in the story below:

When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone? At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” – he said to the paralytic – “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God; saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

Mark 2:1-12

These people seem to have been bedazzled by the spectacular. Amazed by this paralytic suddenly being able the walk, they forgot about the true miracle of this story, the miracle of forgiveness that Jesus was able to give to this man. (Funnily enough, the bad guys of this story, the scribes, do seem to spot it). For forgiveness is a miracle far beyond that of physical healing, which merely changes the present and the future – forgiveness is something that fundamentally changes the past as well, because once you are forgiven then you will never view those events in the same way ever again.

I think Paul understood this concept of the miraculous. He focuses on Jesus’ death and resurrection, but never speaks about his miracles on earth, because I imagine he didn’t consider them important to the message. But he does continue to speak passionately about things like forgiveness:

…and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Ephesians 4:32

Moreover, given that Paul is someone who very visibly had his life transformed by Jesus, he speaks passionately about the radical difference that Jesus makes in his life:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Philippians 3:7-11

Now, all this isn’t to say that we should reject physical healing and all such “spectacular” miracles. When confronted with the sick, all we can do is show them compassion, look after and care for them, and pray every day for God’s healing. Just as Jesus showed his abundant compassion to the sick and healed those who came to him. But let us remember that this is not the be all and end all of our faith, it is something so much more than this; it’s about changed lives.

And not even about the change of life brought about by physical healing, since in the story of the paralytic, Jesus clearly thought something else was even more important. This change of life is one brought about through Jesus’ death and resurrection, one of forgiveness, one of dying to sin and becoming alive in Christ. And it is for this miracle that we should be eternally thankful.

Talking the Talk #1

We’ve all heard the challenge, “You talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?” But recently I’ve noticed a different problem. People who can walk the walk, and indeed more often than not do, but whose talk either individually or collectively tries its hardest to undermine that fact.

I first noticed this when at university. To be honest, I was never a big fan of the Christian Union, but one thing that annoyed me in particular was their treatment of international students. They’d put on events for them, such as a café and lunches, all with gospel talks and gospel messages. These were the most vulnerable people, who were simply being targeted as “easy prey” for conversion. (Of course, those higher on the social standing were conveniently ignored.) Why couldn’t we help these people as Jesus helped the poor and the oppressed, with no agenda and simply seeking to help them when they were at their weakest?

But despite my strong moral objections, there was another fact that I could never escape. The Christians I knew who helped actually knew international students, unlike myself. And when they were with the international students, they were the friendly, compassionate and loving people and that I knew they were. Far more so than I was, despite the fact that my theology was more correct, in my eyes at least. I was talking the talk and not walking the walk, but I still felt disturbed by those doing the opposite. Why were they doing their best to minimise the impact of their love?

For me, at the heart of Christianity is a transformation. A transformation where a miracle happens, something inside you changes and you are no longer the same person. This is why Jesus told Nicodemus,

No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.

And Paul elaborates by describing the change that happens inside every believer, symbolised at baptism,

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

As I look around at those I know who follow Jesus, I see those who have had their lives transformed by God. In the case of the international students, I saw the Christians who worked with them demonstrating this transformed character. Yet we ignore, forget, downplay, are afraid of and simply try to talk ourselves out of this, the true miracle of Christianity. Two reasons for this immediately spring to mind, the first of which we’ll explore in the second part of this series.

New Books

Lots of new books have arrived for me over the past week, and hopefully not all of them will just sit on my shelf collecting dust. Or perhaps more accurately, sit on my floor and collect dust, since I think I’m now officially out of bookshelf space. These purchases are a mixture of post-Greenbelt fervour, The Book Depository giving me ten percent off all orders and a decision to investigate further into postmodern philosophy and its relation to Christianity, since this seems to be a major influence on those who are in turn influencing me. So, what did I get?

• Drops Like Stars, Rob Bell: Although I was at the talk of this title at Greenbelt, I missed most of it from looking after Aidan, my friends’ five-year-old son. Then when it was unavailable for download because of copyright issues, I felt I had to buy the book. A large hardback designed as a coffee-table book, this contains thoughts on the link between suffering and creativity.
• What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, John Caputo: Who could refuse to buy a book with a title like this? For someone who’s going through the pain of deconstruction at the moment, this was a must read.
• The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello: A collection of short parables recommended by Pete Rollins. Stories are such a postmodern way of communication.
• Graven Ideologies, Bruce Ellis Benson: This looks at the views of Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on modern idolatry, the act of putting something (which inevitably looks like yourself) in place of God, and how in modern times it is our ideologies, not stone carvings with which we replace God.
• Christ in Postmodern Philosophy, Frederiek Depoortere: A summary of how Christ is viewed by three postmodern philosophers, Vattimo, Girard and Zizek. Zizek is all the rage with Christians nowadays, so this summary of what he and other philosophers think about Christ seems very interesting.
• I Am the Truth, Michel Henry: Our notions of truth are something that I’ve been bothered with for a while now, and this book was mentioned by Pete Rollins in the Greenbelt Café Philosophique. Instead of examining what we mean by saying “Christianity is true”, Henry investigates what Christianity claims when it says it is true.
• The Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank: Zizek is definitely in at the moment, and this debate between the materialist and radical orthodox Christian Milbank around the monstrous event of God becoming human seems too good to miss.
• New Testament Apocrypha, Volumes 1 & 2: The best thing about source material is that you don’t feel guilty about not reading it, since it’s for reference not for consumption.

No more room on the bookshelf...

I’ve begun by reading Graven Ideologies, which is excellent so far (I couldn’t wait to get home from work today to read it). I’m not a natural with philosophy so it’s been a bit of a struggle to come to terms with some of the ideas but it is still absolutely fascinating. I’ll post a summary up when I’m finished.

The Twisted World of Budleigh Salterton

“It’s too quiet. Far too quiet.”

Bren spoke what we were all thinking as we walked along the streets of Budleigh Salterton. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the horizon was beginning to gain a healthy orange glow as the sun moved ever closer towards setting. The houses were painted a white that hadn’t faded, and the quaint local shops could be seen in the distance. With a warm temperature and cool breeze, it was the kind of evening in which you’d expect to see children playing and hear their joyous voices echo through the streets above the general hustle and bustle of a thriving commnity, all out to enjoy the weather, the beach and the beauty of their town.

But it was quiet. Far too quiet.

And it was in that moment that you began to wonder if there was a reason. Perhaps every day at sunset, a terrifying monster roams the streets at night, devouring anyone foolish enough to venture outside. Or had the apocalypse occurred, and the residents been taken up to heaven in the rapture, leaving us alone to face the four horsemen. Or had a botched scientific experiment polluted the water supply with a disease that turned everyone into zombies, a huge horde of which would be awaiting us as we rounded the next corner. Or were we simply in a war zone, with this coastal town being used as the landing point for the French invasion and soon the sound of gunfire would pepper the air and we would have to flee for our eyes.

I voiced my fears before attempting to weigh up the scenarios. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked.

Bren answered with surprising insight. “Look at the faces of everyone we meet. Watch how they glare with a mixture of anger and fear. We are the worst thing that could happen.”

It was quiet. Far too quiet. And we were the reason.