Dear LPG,

We are all missing going out.  On the few occasions that I have ventured out over the past month, through necessity, I find it surreal to look around and see how few people are on the streets and just seeing so many shops, clubs, schools and other places that we take for granted are available to us, with their doors closed and shutters down has a strange effect too.  

Lock-down has been hard for all of us but, as an older West Indian man who has spent a lot of my life living in England, I have noticed that the closure of one particular institution is having quite an effect on the older ladies, especially those who originate from my part of the world.  We are all missing being able to go out when the mood takes us and on the occasions that I have ventured out it is surreal to look around and see so many shops, clubs, schools and other places that we have always taken for granted, and which have always been available to us, with their doors closed and shutters down.  

I am conscious that most women in my age group, and from my culture, are inclined to start going to church regularly as they grow older. I once asked one of my wife’s friends, why is it that when women get older they start going to church regularly. The answer was, “what else is there?” 

I think that, most individuals would have done a full circle; started off going to church as children, then become teenagers yearning for the social life of parties and worldly pleasures leaving little time for a weekly visit to church.  Then later, most women become mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers while we men do likewise, becoming fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers.  But men tend not to go back to becoming regular church-goers in their later lives; they are more likely to remain ‘men of the world’.

This leaves me wondering just how many people who go to church are real Christians.  They will proclaim to be but how can you serve two masters; to believe in God and partake in the work of Satan? There are many variations all over the world and I know so-call West Indian Christians that believe in black magic (the Jamaican word for it is obeah).   Every now and then this is demonstrated in things they do in life.  Many people believe that somebody is responsible for many of the negative things that have happened to them and act accordingly in some vengeful way.  ‘Believe kill and believe cure’ as the saying goes. 

We all have to choose what we believe in, and self-isolation is giving us all so much more time to think on such things. 

My advice… Don’t live a lie, because if you believe there will be a day of reckoning, what will be your excuse, for choosing the wrong path?

Rudy Morgan