Figures

I'm busy trawling through some pages of figures just now. I quite enjoy working with figures, sorting out accounts; adding down, adding across, checking things match, that totals agree. It's frustrating when they don't, on the many occasions when something's been missed or mis-recorded, but then again, it's immensely satisfying when you find the mistake and correct it, and when things balance again.

Often, I've found a mistake and corrected it only to discover that the correction takes me in the wrong direction, and that the discrepancy after making it is greater than before. At first sight, that can be quite disconcerting, but in fact it's a necessary part of a larger process, in which it's good to have managed to remove one mistake that was in fact hiding another - or even more than one other.

As we assess the world around us, we're all too often looking for a single source of problem, a single person or organisation to take the blame for whatever it is offends or displeases us. "It's all the fault of . . ." we say (fill in the gap - the European Union, the government, the bankers, the bosses, the trade unions - we've all taken aim at one of those sometime or another, I should think). Reality is much more complex; the obvious targets are not the only people to have messed up, mistakes are made by many people, on many sides, and it's generally true that cock-up is a bigger factor in the way things work than conspiracy. And anyway, is it only 'they', whoever 'they' may be, who need to take responsibility?

Jesus famously (John 8) came across people all too ready to throw stones, and to lay the blame. It's the one place in scripture where he is described as having written something, though we're not told what it was he wrote (in the dust, at his feet). What he said was this: "Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone." And the crowd dispersed. I'm certainly in no position to cast stones. Are you?