I don’t know about you but I’ve been slightly taken aback this week. As I sit here and write this the UK has voted to leave the EU. Big news. But off the back of this news it feels like the world is wobbling around us. Politicians are resigning, 2 million people have signed a petition, I overhear angry conversations everywhere I go and the financial markets are all over the place. It makes me wonder what the world will be like in a week, a month, in a year or in 5 years. What can we trust? What will be the same? Will anything change? Will everything change? What world will my kids grow up in? Will we be better off? Are we stepping into oblivion or something in between?

No one really knows …

I’m not going to get into the rights or wrongs of leaving the EU but it’s made me ask myself a key question:

Where is my trust?

If my trust is in our leaders, in our financial position in the world, in the EU, or in the UK, then frankly right now I think it’s time to take cover. The truth is that our world is shaking. Whether you think the decisions which have been made recently are good or bad, if we put our trust in those things then right now we’re in trouble. There are these moments in life where it feels like the whole world shakes. What we must do is look around for something that isn’t shaking to be our rock.

One of my daughter’s (she’s 2) favourite stories at the moment is Jesus’ parable (Matt 7:24-27) about the man who built his house on the sand or on the rock. The man who built his house on the sand is up for a quick fix and just whips up what looks like a great house but when the storm comes it falls flat. It looks good but totally fails. The other man builds his house on a rock. It’s hard graft but when the storm comes it stands up. Most of us will be familiar with this story but right now, when it feels like our world is shaking and we wonder what there is that is stable, it’s a good one to go back to. Jesus’ point is not what we often think. Yes, he is the rock but the way in which we build on rock is to,

“hear these words of mine and do them” (Matt 7:24)

Startlingly we are not just told to listen to him and we’ll be fine, we also have to DO what he asks. At the heart of everything we do as REBUILD is the desire to help people hear what God is asking of them and processing well how to do it. Our REDISCOVER is all about this. We long to gather together and serve each other as we seek to hear what God is saying to us and make a plan to actually do it. Jesus tells us that when the world shakes the only safe ground is to hear his word and act upon it. Never more so than right now is that vitally important.