The Personal Website of Michael Foord

We are good. We love. And we are strong. We choose to love, love under will. Love is the Law The law of God is love. Utter obedience to the law is what God requires, that's the standard, this is what God requires of us. When we love one another with full and genuine hearts we fulfil the law of God. 1 Peter 2: 5 And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are his holy priests. The assertion of Christianity is that when our lives are really joined, when our lives are shared with one another in genuine care and affection, then we become a holy temple. A house, built of living stones, where God dwells. That when in spirit and in truth we live as one people, then the power of love amongst us is literally unstoppable. From amidst us can rise a perfect and divine love. And love is not weak, love is strong. From 1 Peter 2: 9 You are royal priests, a holy nation, belonging to God. Building this, making it real amongst us, is the

 This is an emerald and diamond ring worn by my mother Nina Foord. In this photo her hands are still a bit "raw", a side-effect of the chemotherapy she has just completed after a successful operation on bowel cancer. It has not been my mother's best year but she has pushed through it with dignity and determination. The ring was made by my great-great-grandfather who was a Prussian Jew and jeweller to the crown Prince of Prussia. This ring was made as an engagement ring for my great-great-grandmother. It was lost during the holocaust, then somehow (we don't really know how) it made its way back to my grandmother after the war. My maternal grandparents were German Jews who escaped Berlin to the UK just before the Second World War started. Jewish lineage is inherited through the mother, which makes me, along with Kate Biddlestone and David Foord, Jewish. This is part of our story. Almost all of my grandparents' family were murdered by the Nazis during the

I've slightly changed my mind on certainty. Descartes' conclusion was "I think therefore I am": the *only* certainty is "I Am".  So that is certain, but beyond that we must abandon certainty as the basis of knowledge and our interaction with the world. We must be willing to live with uncertainty. Interestingly, modern physics teaches that uncertainty (and chaos) are fundamental properties of the universe.  When certainty has gone, what you're left with is something like "degree of confidence". This is very like the scientific method, developing models of how the world works knowing that they are incomplete and at least partially wrong (you probably can't be right, but you can aspire to be less wrong). Always be willing to be wrong and evaluate new experiences and ideas in the light of what you already know.  A phrase I prefer to "degree of confidence", but which some people find problematic, is "the measure of your faith"

"I'm a body with a brain, that's all I am. A physical being, a small part of everything." "Woe to you teachers of the law". A familiar phrase for Christians. Woe to you who teach law. Woe to you who preach rules. "Woe to you" is a curse, from Jesus. There will be woe. Those who would make Christianity into a religion of rules (as has successfully been done for generations) want everyone else to be as dead inside as they are. This is why Jesus said of them: You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. If you think I'm wrong and my opinion annoys you, there is an easy remedy. Prove me wrong! Be more full of life, more loving, kinder and more alive than me. And I'll like it! I want to learn from the alive, the loving, the giving. I won't learn from the dead though. Don't be dead, please. You don't have to. In life,