Cyrus is My Shepherd

'Guess who your niece found behind the car park at Waitrose today,' my sister texted me on November 1st. Knowing my younger niece's preferences my first thought was a fairy, and I hadn't banked on the real answer, Donald Trumpkin, as you can see in this photo. Like the real thing, this one is impressively orange-hued. Unlike the real thing, it can just be taken to the compost heap once you decide you don't want it anymore.
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My Goth friends Amanda (who is American by birth) and Paul have a small son, Ryan. Amanda had a conversation with him yesterday:

Ryan: Donald Trump is a bad man. I'm going to kill him and his huge army and then I'll get the biggest present and he won't be able to cause trouble.

Amanda: I don't think killing is a good thing to do, Ryan. It would be better to take him away without hurting him.

Ryan: We could send him to the moon, but then he would make the aliens leave.

(When Ryan was a baby, he would laugh heartily at the Dementors in Harry Potter. He's hard to intimidate).

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Yesterday, too, as we all struggled to assimilate the new world we are suddenly thrust into, the clergy of the Hornington Deanery gathered over lunch for Deanery Chapter. We gingerly tiptoed around the topic of nuclear holocaust ('I haven't given the red button any thought for years', said one priest, 'I'm doing it now') and focused rather on the chocolate cake brought along by a retiring colleague. One local incumbent pointed out that there were plenty of instances in the Scriptures of God using unlikely rulers for his own purposes. 'I really don't like that kind of theology', countered another. 'I'm not saying Trump was elected because God made it happen,' said the first, 'only that God can make use of anyone he wants.'

This is of course true, as far as it goes. God brings the armies of the King of Assyria into Israel because Israel has proved faithless, then crushes Assyria in turn by the new empire of the Achaemenids. King Cyrus arranges for the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple and gets called 'Messiah' by the prophets, no less. The trouble with this simple picture is that it was painted retrospectively as the Jews analysed their own history to see where they'd gone wrong and where God's hand had been in the events of several centuries: whereas we have no such perspective and are just guessing. We can indeed have confidence that (ultimately) 'in all things God works for the good of those who love him', as St Paul puts it in Romans, but that doesn't mean he actively plans particular events. We are still given the capacity to screw it all up if we choose.

Sadly, in a fallen world necessary qualities are entangled in a single human soul with facets you would sooner not have. More radically, those negative aspects of a person's character may actually be the reverse side of the beneficial ones (think of our discussion of the bloodymindedness of Phil Shiner and his ilk a few months ago). The times may call for a leader who perceives something nobody else does, and has enough self-belief to push a response through against universal scepticism: and only the Lord may know what that is. But alongside self-belief often go ruthlessness and arrogance, over time if not at first. Such is the business of the world we have, rather than the one we might choose to have.