Thought for the week: Whether losing or winning, trust in God and do the right

David Shelbourne, a contemporary historian published recently a list of eleven excuses trotted out by those who failed in a moment of crisis. Here they are and you will recognise many of them and I trust you will have used none of them. There is nothing you can do about it; it's never been any different; there is no quick fix; it is the price of a free society; you must go with the flow; you cannot turn the clock back; the problem is more complex than you think; it is beyond our reach; you are focusing on the wrong issue; who are you to talk? and everybody's doing it so how can you object?

There they are so check them out. There is a vast difference between an excuse and a reason. There may be some validity in the latter, but none in the former. Excuses are the armoury of the coward, 18th century English poet Alexander Pope reckoned. "An excuse is a guarded lie," 18th century American politician Benjamin Franklin contended. "He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else".

To resort to feeble excuses when it comes to the crunch only reveals how lacking in courage one is.

For all such the Old Testament of Proverbs has this rebuke. "if you fall to pieces in a crisis there wasn't much to you in the first place" (chapter 24, verse 10).

The cunning Pharisees knew of the measure of Pontious Pilate. They had observed across the months that when pressed sufficiently the Roman governor would eventually blink. And so it came to pass and even though he made some drama out of a quote about water, Pilate comes down to us as a weak man and received a judgmental reference in the Apostles Creed.

So how should one handle our reaction to a crisis? Keep it simple and in the words of Norman MacLeod, a Scottish Presbyterian churchman of a century and a half ago: "Whether losing, whether winning, trust in God and do the right".