Lord I have heard of your fame: I stand in awe of your deeds, O lord. Renew them in our day, in wrath remember mercy. Habakkuk 3:2

Is this a test of faith? How well a person can identify and support this claim How much meaning it has for us? We have been studying Habakkuk in hall fell, it seems to me that we live in a similar world to the one where Habbakkuk interceded with God for. One where the church "the law is paralysed and justice never prevails," (1:4) the body is divided and weakened and not able to share the abounding injustice of a God who would sacrifice part of himself to engage with us. Habakkuk leaves his encounter with God in a submission to God and an understanding of how God's plan of salvation has been mapped out across history.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights Habakkuk 3:19

Have Christians denied that Christ has set us free from sin into true freedom that of serving him? When we study the Bible do we deny that we are equipping ourself with the belt of truth and the feet fitted with readiness (Ephesians 6:10-20). We need to be practically active in applying scripture to our ownlives and in our community and the institutions we are part of.

Just watched 'Shaun of the Dead' and was amazed by how true a depiction of the world it holds today - the people we interact with in our lives are zombies in many respects and if we look into ourselves can see it in us too. Bristol is as good as any a place to analyse this Globalisation / McDonaldization / Rationalisation. The social spectrum of this world has been "disenchanted" (Max Weber), it has lost its meaning. I see students engaging in whatever satisfies them: drug culture, sex, clubbing, intellectualism and popularity, similar things can bee seen in the business men and women that walk the streets, and the potential can be seen in the students of Clifton grammar school in their blazers. The education system composed of lectures on enlightenment thought and the pressure of peers seems to lay down an iron cage of world understanding. David Hume arguing for a determinist understanding of human agency says "Above one half of human reasonings contain inferences of a similar nature, attended with more or less degrees of certainty, proprtioned to our experience of the ususal conduct of makind in such particular situations" (David Hume - Enquiry concerning Human Understanding p156 1999 Oxford University Press). It is my belief that the world is now so rationalised that well over half our human reasons for action come from a similar understanding of the world which has numbed us to the life we should all be living. It is now then more than ever that the world need to remember the testimony of a man who lived two thousand years ago and said of himself "I am the way the truth and the life" (John 14: 6) that all might live a life not in a box but in freedom from the slavery of this iron cage that is cast upon everyone.