Up to his neck in the Brown stuff

What a week it's been! What a week to be anyone other than Gordon Brown. "10p tax band for your thoughts", many a backbencher has shouted to him.

What must poor old Gordon be thinking at this moment in his increasingly shaky looking career post Crewe by-election. And what a career it is. It is careering off the rails as each week passes by.

To be Gordon and not to be desperately bitter must be a tricky thing indeed. He waited ten long years to be PM, and when he finally stepped over the threshold of number 10 for the first few months he was not allowed to bend over to tie his shoelaces because his people feared the public might be blinded by all that direct and powerful sunlight.

But that was all too short-lived. Pretty soon the Special Relationship gave us the global credit crunch and then a home grown crisis was spawned via the removal of the 10p tax band which endeared Mr Brown to almost no-one on the Labour backbenches. 

All very political and all very boring. But is there a religious spin to all this?

The only spiritual/Christian slant I can see within all this is to do with how we handle disappointment in life. I'm not sure how I'd react if I were in Gordon Brown's shoes and to be truthful we don't really know his innermost thoughts on the matter - what lies behind the rather dour facade?

Bitterness and anger are common responses to the sense of unfairness or injustice that many of us experience in life. We can do 2 things with this bitterness.

1. we can repress it which takes us straight to the Shrink's couch or to the front of the queue in Coronary Care, or
2. we can channel it into positive action

Life is basically unfair. There I've said it! I hope you were sitting down when you read this. Not that good things and bad things don't happen to us all at different stages in our lives, because they do. What I mean is that in the bigger picture injustice makes a house call at everyone's home at some point. 

The question is, how do we handle it? Rage against God?! Rage against the world?! Rage against ourselves?! Unfocused rage, aimed at whoever, inevitably turns inward and becomes destructive. Rage that is converted into positive action can be a powerful force in the world.

The Bible says "in your anger do not sin". What I think this means is that directionless anger can often become sinful, i.e. self focused and egotistical. However, anger that strives to change and transform what is unfair and unjust leads us not into sin, but into the very heart of God.