Pause for thought - Thursday 31 August 2006
JUNK MAIL
I don’t suppose the Royal Mail man, had the slightest clue that he would be up to his eye-lashes in trouble for giving a few friendly tips on how to avoid the mountain of junk mail which comes through the door.
But I don’t suppose the Royal Mail had a clue about the hullabaloo they would cause by the ridiculous reprimand of the poor fellow. It wasn’t just that he let out a Royal Mail state secret: it was that his insider advice was bad for the budget.
Because, believe it or not, junk is big business.
Did you know that junk turns over more than £25m worth of business from the 3.5 billion items sold every year?
And it turns out that although everybody calls it ‘junk’ two thirds of us slither off from the door mat with a wry smile and a bargain to chase up. When it comes to junk, a lot of us are really Steptoe’s at heart you know! And my guess is that deep down most of us are always on the prowl for a really good deal. That’s probably why we call it ‘junk’ only after we’ve looked through the stuff.
As the Royal Mail spokesman said, “It’s only junk if you don’t want it.”
So one man’s junk is another man’s jewellery.
But information is never ‘junk’ when it meets my personal needs.
So take the Bible for instance. For lots of people the Bible is nothing more than a colossal waste of paper: unfashionably outdated with absolutely nothing useful to say. And all its claims about peace, forgiveness and God loving us? Nothing more than false hope for the hopelessly naïve.
For thousands of people it’s just junk.
But there are also a lot of us for whom this Book has turned out to be a prize win. Its timeless wisdom, its positive values, its insider views on the meaning of life - and its comfort in death - scratch precisely where we itch.
Forgiven, changed – and always being changed - we can only think of the Bible as a real bargain.
Joel Edwards
