There was I thinking it was the usual unconscious conspiracy

and all the time it was a young guy in a bank pressing the wrong button a few times too often...

The housing market, the international economy, it all gets on my nerves sometimes. If enough people say that houses are losing in value - well, sure enough, they lose in value. If people start selling rather than buying then stocks and shares drop. If we spend too much we fuel inflation. If we stop spending and save we spark a recession.

It's all about "confidence". Which means what we think and how we feel.

It's the nearest I come to believing in a global conspiracy. I am a firm adherent of the incompetence theory of global events, except that sometimes we exerce our incompetence all together at once - a kind of unconscious conspiracy of incompetence.

However, it seems that the stock market falls may be linked rather to one young guy, perhaps poorly supervised, who pressed the wrong button a few times too many and lost his bank 5 milliard euros. They call it fraud. I ask what do they expect ?

I so believe in teams. I read this morning in EMQ a statement that I only part agree with. "All believers must answer to the Lord for their own decisions regarding what is biblically permissible in their own personal conduct". Well, yes and no... Peter also had to answer to Paul for his refusal to eat with the gentile Christians.

We are all slightly crazy because of sin. None of us functions too well any more. We think something is utterly logical and totally spiritual and completely biblical and it's because we simply can't see half the issues involved. It's one reason why God put us together in couples, families, churches, teams, elderships, companies, partnerships, etc. etc. (And, of course, to express the deepest reality of his being one God in three persons. Nobody can fully reflect the image of God on his own on a desert island. That's a team job)

However, to understand is to forgive, they say. The same weakness that makes teams necessary ought also to give us a forgiving and accepting attitude towards one another. We all stumble in many ways, says James, and it's true.

So is it fraud or is it "somebody trying to do his job too well and failing spectacularly" ? Someone else will have to answer that question, but it does remind us that there is a difference between human weakness and sin. Sin is culpable. Weakness is just one of those things. It isn't always easy to tell the difference, but it's always important.

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