Cusp

I don't think it's just me. I feel it the air, I feel it in the water. Many things that were are not any more... oh sorry, that's the Lord of the Rings!

Seriously though - it's that feeling I had in September 2001, May1997 & Christmas 1989, watching national and world events and knowing that everything was about to change in some fundamental manner. The big cities around the world are full of the deafening sound of stock markets crashing through the floor. Banks are being bought up by governments, global financial systems are in near terminal gridlock, inflation is soaring and recessions are being predicted (and felt) left, right and centre.

The US appear to be on the verge of voting in its first black president - a new JFK maybe? Russia has flexed its muscles in Georgia and finally thrown off any pretence to be being a Western friendly democracy - so much so that the talk is of a new Cold War. We even had a resumption of the Cod War between England and Iceland last week - albeit very briefly, and not over North Sea fishing rights. Power cuts and brownouts are being predicted in the UK this year - it all feels very like the seventies. Bring back Life on Mars I say...

All in all, things are going to change in 2009 - it will be a very different world to the one we faced at New Year 2008, let alone 2007! Only the arrogant or the truly prophetic (or darn lucky) would dare predict where all of this is going, as a new financial calamity, a new geopolitical shift, a new unprecedented global disaster seems to be happening on an almost daily basis. But it will change.

Jesus warned his disciples about this sort of thing - it's normal history though, everything as it always has happened - wars, rumours, economic and political sea changes. We just forget history and assume that this is unprecedented. It is not.

His reminder was not to worry, these are just birth pangs - because ultimately something new is coming, just not quite what he pundits are expecting though.