Thought for the Week - 19/9/2021

Dear Friends, 

The death was announced this week of the inventor and entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair who invented the first slimline pocket calculator in the 1970s, popularised the home computer in the 1980s with the ZX Spectrum, and launched the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle in 1985, which it has to be said was not a huge success. His daughter announced his death saying that he had been working on his inventions the week before he died because that was what he loved doing. ‘He was inventive and imaginative and for him it was exciting and an adventure, it was his passion,’ she added. Sinclair was a man ahead of his time and his daughter said, ‘He was very good at imagining things that people might like or might need, even though they didn't know they wanted them.’ I was interested to learn that Sinclair was an atheist, someone who didn’t believe in the existence of any deities, but he did believe in his talents and gifts and skills to create such useful and inventive things for people to use. We might say that Sinclair was a man of vision, seeing into the future what things might be needed and seeking to find a way to make them. Even if he didn’t acknowledge the existence of God, God knew him and blessed him with a creative spark. In the book of Exodus we read of two men, Bezalel and Oholiab, whom God had chosen for the construction of the tabernacle, the holy tent where God dwelled amidst his people. God’s Spirit empowered them to work with every kind of crafting including woodwork, stonework, metalwork, engraving, embroidery and weaving. Indeed, it was Bezalel who made the Ark of the Covenant, the box that contained the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. But both Bezalel and Oholiab didn’t keep their talents to themselves but helped to teach and train others to use their God-given talents and gifts. God is a God of beauty and design – you just have to look at the flowers in the garden to see that – and God loves the creative vision that is in each one of us. We may not be a Clive Sinclair or a Bezalel or Oholiab, but whatever we may create, may we do for the glory of God.   

Grace and peace,

Neil

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