Author: Jengie

Regression towards the mean, the scientific publishing culture and the lack of repeatability

A recent exchange on twitter the Thesiswhisperer wondered about why effects were disappearing. The feeling is this should not happen with the modern scientific culture, and yet I suspect modern academic scientific culture is partly to blame. To explain why I have to introduce a little known but rather simple statistical fact which may be called Regression towards the mean.

Let me do it by given a common example used in teaching regression towards the mean. The lecturer tells a class that he has the ability to improve people psychic ability. He then writes on a piece of paper a number between 1 and 100 without showing the class. He then asks the class to write down what they think the number is. He then reveals the number and asks to class to tell him how well they did.

Now the experiment starts. He takes a sample from the class of people who got furthest from his value, say the worst half. He points out these are obviously the less psychic to show the effect. With these he performs some ritual, perhaps to stand up turn round three times and say “esn-esn-on” (“nonsense” backwards).

Then he repeats the experiment but this time with only this worst half and low and behold, they perform better. That is there average guess is closer to his value than they were in the previous study.

The lecturer then admits there is no psychic ability involved in this, so what is going on. The trick is in the selection. Indeed if he looked at the Standard deviation for the whole class at the start and the standard deviation for the sample in the second they should be of approximately the same size. People are pretty randomly choosing their number, those who guess badly at first do that pretty randomly and actually if he had taken the full class the performance would have been much the same as before, only the ones who did better would have differed.

Regression to the mean basically means that if there is a selection bias in a distribution as fresh data is produced this will tend to go back towards the mean.

So what has this to do with non-repeatability. For starters I am not belittling this phenomena I have been involved in studies which aimed to replicate a previously carried out study. The prior study reported a huge effect so the power calculation required a small sample size, indeed so small we upped the numbers just to persuade the ethics committee that this was a genuine attempt to replicate. This only to find when we have the data collected that there is no effect visible in the data. So I have experienced non-repeatability.
Nor am I accusing researchers of bad practice. They are honestly reporting the results they get. It is the ability to report the results, i.e. the selection process by journals that produces the phenomena!

Published results and accepted results aren’t just a random sample of all results. They are selected for the results that demonstrate a genuine effect. They particularly like those results that are significant at p=.05 level. However gaining a p-value of less than .05 (or any value) is no guarantee that you have a true effect. For a start off with p=.05, one in twenty of results where there is genuinely no effect get reported as having an effect. Now that isn’t one in twenty of reported results (it might be lots higher or lower) but one in twenty of results where there is NOTHING is genuinely happening. Unfortunately we don’t know where these one in twenty are. It looks like a result even though it there isn’t an effect. We know there are type 1 error, our selection for criteria for publication reports allows one in twenty papers through where there is genuinely no effect.

But what if there is an effect? Well we are more likely to detect it if our sample happens to over-estimate the effect than if it under estimates the effect. In other words there are studies out there where there was a genuine effect but it did not get published because they drew a sample that performed badly. On the other hand on well designed experiments all the studies that draw fortunate samples are likely to significant. So the tendency is to over estimate actual effects because the selection criteria for publication favours those who draw fortunate samples.

This is not news, I have not suddenly found this inspiration, look there are learned reviews exploring this very topic. There are approaches when results start behaving in this way, one is to look at the sample size it would take to detect a difference between the original results and the fresh results, and if that is larger than the two studies then it may well be just the result of regression to the mean. It is also why clinicians are moving towards Meta Analysis rather than the results from just one study, but meta-analysis itself is hampered by the publishing bias.

I also want to sound a warning, skewed data (data where a few people produce very high scores) can quite easily produce odd ball results. This causes problems when sampling, there are statistical methods for analysing this but I have rarely seen them applied out side the statistical class room.

So yes I would expect the published results of effects on the whole to be over-estimates. The over-estimation is a product of the current scientific publishing culture. There are some approaches to alleviate this problem but at present no cure because the cure involves a change of culture.

Rant: Where Roman Catholics and Reformed Christians agree.

So the title is jokey, which actually agree about quite a lot, but the Church of England has given us one more item of common consensus.

Its to do with the way the CofE factions behave.

They quite often pick on another tradition as having something valuable to say. This is not bad, cross pollination  is in my opinion a good thing if only because it can lead to better understandings. The more we explore other traditions and come to some understanding as to how they work the better. If Anglicanism thinks there is something within the Reformed tradition that is worth emulating then by all means emulate it. After all imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I am quite sure that Roman Catholicism is also happy for Anglicanism to explore its rich theological and liturgical tradition and to borrow from it. I am even content for these pressure groups to adopt the relevant badges. Nothing is wrong with that

BUT

When they decide that they know what we believe better than we do and will tell us so, I object. Especially when they decide it is a stick to beat us with. A bit of humility would go a long way. Anglicans don’t seem to be happy to learn from the Catholic tradition or the Reformed tradition they want to claim they have the essence of it and are more truly it than those who belong to it.

Well I have news, to be Reformed or to be Catholic is not something that is down to purifying the tradition until you have some deified essense. It is about belonging. To be Reformed or to be Roman Catholic is not just to adopt a set of stances, it is a whole way of being. You are formed by the community which you belong to, often in ways to subtle to notice.

Look Reformed Christians disagree about what constitutes a Reformed Christian. We would not be Reformed if we didn’t. We have several hundred years of falling out and making new alliances. Yes we are a dysfunctional family, but we don’t like Anglicans behaving like social workers and telling us exactly how we should be ourselves. Or to put it another way the one thing we will agree on, is whatever Reformed is, it is not what you tell us it is!

I full expect that many Roman Catholics will agree with me on this one point.

Church poem

I write poems as a way to be creative, normally my poems try to take you into something, this one doesn’t it is polemical. Perhaps it is worth saying that this poem is actually arguing with those that claim that church is only any use because it gives you the chance to go to heaved.

Church
What use is this institution
kept alive by its few elderly followers
who recite ancient texts,
sing communally
and perform odd ceremonies?

None

Unless
you want to live
and by that I don’t mean
to keep breathing
or to seek your own survival

but rather
to open to the possibility
that you are not
the flotsam or jetsam
of the gene pool
but part of a connected whole
where other lives touch yours
and yours theirs
and to chance by so doing
that you may find reflected in the pool
the image of God.

Who made the Blind Watch Maker

I have decided that it is time that someone did this. I am not the best creative writer out there, nor am I an evolutionary biologist, but for at least the last twenty years the following has been begging to be written.

Firstly let my say honestly in my opinion evolution is elegant. It is an elegant solution to how to maximise the life sustained in an eco-system. Its elegance is that of a good mathematics solution. Mathematics has its own aesthetics, the modern computer solutions which take hours of computing power and involve going through every possible permutation are ugly. The neat classical proof of something in a dozen lines from first principles is elegant. The problem with the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it is ugly and we suspect that what Fermat actually had was a very elegant proof although bigger than the margin. So proven but Fermat’s proof is not found and some mathematicians will go on looking for that proof. Mathematicians suspect that such proof if it exists probably takes less than a hundred pages and would probably open up whole new areas of mathematics.

So then I am using “elegant” in this sense when I am talking of evolution. You might suspect with the diversity that occurs evolution was actually quite complex but it does not seem to be. There seems to be two principles:

  1. Given that only some of the creatures manage to pass their pattern to the next generation
  2. There is a process by which genes within animals are able to mutate and change within a generation.

Given these two you have an evolutionary process. These two fairly simple processes are what drives the whole of evolution on this planet and produces the vast variety of life that exists here. That too me seems to be extremely elegant.

However there is also something peculiar, the processes have to be carefully tuned. It must not be that all creature patterns pass onto the next generation. This would mean no space for adaptation, over population or we would live in a static universe. For some reason this universe does not seem to like static stasis only dynamic stasis.

Secondly the rate of mutation must be controlled. Too fast and you would never get species, too slow and life would die out when something changes. The pace of change has to be right.

In other words to get the abundant variety of life there is no earth the parameters have had to be tuned fairly precisely, as precisely as any mechanical device.

I therefore put to Mr Dawkins and his ilk that the creation from design can be written not from some marvel from evolution such as the human eye but from the process of evolution itself. Precisely understood evolution is an elegant, finely tuned process that has all the hall marks of designer as much if not more so than any marvel it has produced.

Now I don’t personally buy the argument from design, I am afraid I go with Hume and acknowledge that showing elegance and fine tuning is not enough but that you must also show purpose and honestly the best guesses at purpose are just that guesses, however much they are dressed up in religious language.

What I do want to do, is make people aware of what the classical idea of creation within Christian theology is. The first thing is to be aware that God’s pan-time existence is very different from human. If we experience life as a viewer in the movie theatre, God experiences it far more as the director at the cutting table. It is of course wrong, we interact with the movie and for God there is never any scene which does not have his attention. It seem natural then that God can be as much responsible for the processes by which we see the universe is created, as he can be for creating elements within it. In the end these processes are only other elements.

Vulnerability and Mission

The sermon today got me thinking. The minister was going on about the way that we needed to respect other people and also to serve other people as part of our Christian witness and mission. I agree fully with this, respect and service are part and parcel of good Christian mission. However I want to add a third and that is vulnerability

I am well aware that vulnerability is not the first thing that most people thinking of a mission strategy consider, yet it seems to me essential on two levels.

Firstly the kevlar mailed knight in shinning armour is great for getting you out of difficulties, but you don’t actually believe you could become one. That is the rub. The state of postmodernity that the world is in has changed people’s questions. It is no longer “Does it work?” but “Will it work for me?” and the super-person or kevlar mailed knight just isn’t who they are. They want to see the Christian faith working in a frail person like themselves. The closer you can get to a person, the more they can see where your fault lines match theirs the more they are going to be able to trust your solutions.

Secondly there is the fact that the Kevlar coated knight is actually a pretty poor way to allow the light of of Christ to shine through your life. The power is visible but it is assumed to be the power of the individual whom it is working through not the power of God. The other thing is God, at least the one revealed in the New Testament does not seem to think that the normal trappings of power are good ways to communicate what he is about. Oh he can use them if he wanted too, far too many examples of that in the Old Testament but he seems to not use them in the New Testament. Yes he heals people, but he does this for individuals or small groups, yes he can produce food and drink, but he does this for a crowd for a single meal, not a nation for forty years. Yes he can tell the wind to stop but he does not get it to part the Sea of Galilee. In other words he has gone small scale and low key, an interesting change in approach. He is now using the small, weak and vulnerable to show forth his power. As St Paul says God’s power is perfected in weakness.

Reforming church structures to Reform Church finances

It has just occurred that the reason the centre has grown in the URC and the periphery diminished is the way we set our finances. At the moment the finances are a levy which the centre sets on all the local churches. The problem with this is that the centre can see work to do, and then set the levy to pay for it. Once or twice this does not matter.

Under the old Congregational Union, the local churches had far more say over what the levy was and when it was to high simply did not pay it. The centre thus had to decide what best to do with what was given.

So we need to redress the balance of power and put power back into the hands of local churches. One way would be to have a scrutinising body of church treasures to look at the levy. I would suggest that for national each synod would send one church treasurer to a central committee, each appointment lasting five years. In each synod a body of about the same size 12 people should also sit, the rule being for a member that they have to be a church secretary. This would mean a meeting once a year before a synod and it is this body and not the central finance people who should bring the levy.

Such people are a lot better placed than either a full synod or central staff to make these decisions. They can be fully briefed on the central issues but are also well aware of the local church finances as well.

This is not a quick fix, it will not work overnight and it will not bring about immediate cuts. What I expect it to do is over twenty years to consistently reduce the central bureaucracy so that local churches are empowered to carry out their mission or not as they see fit. The only long term way to keep control of expenditure is to put people in control of it who have an interest in keeping it low.

Older Generation and the Church

This was a mini rant I was giving to my parents and thought it was perhaps worthy of a blog post.

Lets be clear, there are certain things that I don’t want to hear from the older generation. Firstly I don’t want to hear them grumbling about the mess the church has got into. Not because the church is not in a mess, but because its a method of seeking to make other people (i.e. the younger people) responsible for getting the church out of the mess. Lets start with facts, the church did not get into this situation overnight, it has taken decades to get into it, and in each preceding decade it would have been easier to rectify than it is now. The people responsible for things in previous decades are now older people. So the grumbling is asking others to get you out of your mess.

Secondly I don’t want excuses not to engage with the younger generation. One of the things that has happened is a disconnect between the Church and the vast number of younger people. It started before 1970s, as I can remember sitting in school in the late 1970s and finding myself the only person familiar with the Easter story amongst my class mates in high school (I hope it was Easter, it may have been Christmas). They already did not know the grand narratives of the Christian gospel. That gap is partly your making, help us bridge it.

Please don’t think you can pass this onto us. What you tried to do then obviously wasn’t enough because it did not halt it. This means there are fewer of my generation in church than of yours, in case you had not noticed it. Expecting us to make the effort to connect with those younger and provide a chaplaincy service for you that allows you to stay within your comfort zone ain’t fair. I suspect our priorities have to be to get the gospel out to those who are younger than us. So yes things are going to be more uncomfortable for you. Believe it or not, its not half as uncomfortable as it is for us.

Now I am really not interested in blame, blame does not solve anything but I am interested in getting you on board, realising that you have a role to play (your retirement from church is cancelled just as mine from work is).

What is more it means change, its not the church kids we need to connect with or keep. I am sorry but we have consistently failed to find a way to keep them through college, when grants came in in the 1960s we should have started looking for new ways to connect. Chaplaincy is often under funded and does not connect back to the local congregation.

It is the secular 20 to 30 years olds who are just setting up a home in the area. How do we reach them? I don’t know, but we have to try experimenting to find a way.

That of course means our resources are directed elsewhere, not to keeping the body of the church functioning as it is, but on trying to develop relationships with people , people who are distinctly different from most of us in their attitudes and ideas. People who are a lot younger and therefore a lot more technologically au fait.

So if you are up for the challenge, welcome to the team, we need all the hands we can get, no matter how weak and full of arthritis they are. If you are not, then I am sorry, but we have more important things to do and at least you can stop grumbling.

Drinking – who should moderate drinking be aimed at?

I have a former boyfriend called S, he has had drink problems, I would not mention this if work and a whole host of other people did not know this already. or at least I would not refer to him so directly if this was not the case. He has brought this largely under control over the last six months and needs a lot of praise for doing that.

Most of this has been done by a principles of alcohol reduction. So he learnt how to tell if something was a weak or strong wine and choose a weak one, he learnt to alternate glasses of wine and water, he taught himself it was possible to go into a pub and order pineapple juice and that actually he quite liked sparkling mineral water. He learnt to have days off completely from drinking. This cut his consumption substantially, each skill was introduce separately so as not to over burden his as he was under pressure at work as he need to complete a course.

On Thursday evening I rang Stuart, as I had cancelled quite a bit of weekend activity due to the cold and say that whereas before I had not been able now if he wanted too he was welcome to come around. He comes around to chat and talk how things are going we normally share a bottle of wine and some garlic bread. He told me his news, basically that he has gone teetotal. That was a surprise as actually no-one has put any pressure on him to go teetotal.

I think the doctor thought that having completed the course and done this reduction policy so successfully the next stage was to get him to adopt a moderate drinking policy. This was for him a complete turn off, trying to manage his drinking in such a way was to re apply the pressure he drinks to escape. Therefore he decided this was too much hassle. You can guess how he spent the evening and anyway he gave me no details.

However when he went into work the next day he met one of the Broomhall Breakfast guys already plastered (the miracle is not I think that the guy was drunk but that he was up at that time), then being called on his drinking by another former drinker who works at the Museum and the also realising he was jeopardising the progress he has made. In the last six months he has come to a better level of financial security, he generally feels better in work and is able to cope better. Faced with that he felt he really had only two choices to loose what he had gained in the last six months and go back on a downward spiral or to give up drinking completely. He chose to give up completely.

I think moderate drinking is a good message for your average drinker. You want such people to understand what their bodies can take and to drink sensibly. Most people who drink recreationally are able to understand about safe limits and are not stressed by the accountancy work of the sensible drinking message.

However I suspect for a number of people with problems with alcohol like S, such a message can be counter productive. The fact is they drink to escape pressure. If the safe drinking message produces pressure, then the either will ignore it and go back to drinking heavily or a few like S may give up completely. I don’t think without the six month building of alcohol reduction Stuart would have done it, he need the tangible benefits of those six months to build the knowledge of what alcohol was costing him.

I also suspect that concentrating solely on the drinking is not a good idea. When you have someone whose drinking problems have got out of hand you need to look at causes. I suspect it is causes rather than cause, and I suspect to be successful you need to act holistically. That meant for S that he needs help in methods to handle pressure, he needs an accountability network (and seems to have at least a rudimentary one) and he needs to develop a life style that favours sobriety. The last includes developing hobbies and interests where not drinking is easy. So as to discourage going to the pub in an evening for some company.

If these two factors are correct, I suspect I know why Alcoholics Anonymous and schemes such as one I heard of in Russia are successful. The Russian scheme involves  the detoxing alcoholic actually lives in community I think for upto a year and even then they tend to move into places where there are churches which have other people who have been through the same programme. In other words they have a simple message of absolute abstention and a support network in doing that. They work because they reject the modern individualism and replace it with personal accountability to others.

Now by all means keep educating people into sensible drinking habits when they are social drinkers. It may prevent some people from sliding into problem drinkers, but with problem drinkers themselves, then some care needs to be taken in using this tool, as it has the potential to push a person further into problem behaviour. We need a different approach then.

My stance on depression

I picked up a friend on Facebook which says:

“Depression is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign that you have been trying to be strong for too long. Put this as your status if you know someone who has or has had depression. Will you do it, and leave it on your status for at least an hour? Most people won’t, but 1 in 3 of us will suffer at some point in our lives. Show your support. I copied and pasted, will you?”

Now I have toyed with taking up the challenge and putting it on my perspective but have not for two reasons.

  1. It is manipulative trying to get people to support this statement about depression. I don’t like chain messages, I think they are almost as bad a chain mail
  2. It is factually in accurate, Depression is common but one in three is not even featured in Mind’s estimates for Mental Distress. The worst being 1 in 4 and that covers all mental health cases even those with such mild distress they don’t go to the doctor. Secondly being strong too long is not the sole cause of depression. Just like falling out of trees is not the sole cause of broken legs. For some it no doubt is, for others it can be a whole host of things.

So where do I stand.

Firstly I suffer from Mental Health Distress, I am/have been on anti-depressants for more than five years, treating mild to moderate depression, I also take medication for an anxiety complaint. However if you met me you would not pick this up very easily. Some of this is helped by the fact mine takes the “smiling” form indeed I smile more when on anti-depressants than off them. However it leaves me with a lot of very physical symptoms. I get tired very easily, need a lot of time alone, suffer from migraines and get other painful symptoms (yes that is physical not emotional pain). When I was bad I lost the ability to concentrate for more than a few seconds (I took to reading books with a rule basically so I knew which line I was on) and became very un-proactive (it is very hard to get the energy for anything if you feel totally exhausted all the time). I do a lot despite this partially because the anxiety stays better under control if I am busy, partly because boredom is a good way of triggering depression symptoms for me and partly that is who I am.

I am telling this not simply to state my credentials but also so you realise that the form my mental health distress is unusual. There are many people out there with far more common forms of depression.  For many overwhelming sense of sadness is a major feature. Just because I am up and doing things (well I am either that or curled in a small ball in my bed) does not mean other people even with similar diagnoses are able to be up and doing things. Depression does not come in only one flavour.

Also what I have experienced is relatively mild, there are lots more serious forms out there. I have no special right to insight by virtue of this experience, there are forms that although I try to empathise with I do not really experience. I have little tendency towards either substance abuse (including alcohol) and self harm for starter. Both of these symptoms are experienced by a significant number of people who are suffering from mental health distress. In some cases I suspect they are attempts to relieve emotional pain rather than symptoms.

Equally there is no single cause of mental health issues. Yes some of mine is hereditary, some is due to poor life choices and some is due to life events over which I had little or no control. I suspect I am not the only person to have multiple causes. Other people may have theirs ‘created’ by long term abuse, or dealing with tragedy close at hand or even other disability or physical illness. There are no doubt other contributing causes. Stress plays a role as does unexpressed anger but they are not the sole cause.

What perhaps characterises many mental illnesses more than anything else is that thought patterns differ markedly from the healthy.  In mild forms these can almost be intangible to those around a person, perhaps a tendency to be slightly more pessimistic or worried over things but not much else. Quite often what people don’t realise is that the individual is making a huge effort to function normally. As it trips into moderate, the person still has an understanding of what normal is, but they are not able to make the effort to function in that way and inevitably display more ill behaviours. In my experience people really strive long and hard to retain some connection with normal thought patterns. However with severe the person actually has lost connection at all with normal thought patterns. What is also true is the vast percentage of people suffering from mental distress are in the mild category, the headline grabbing categories are in the severe. The services are such that there is little or no help available for people who are mild. It is not good for even the severe. Yes that means the vast majority of such people struggle on with the help of friends and family.

However to say that it is a characteristic of mental illness to have dysfunctional thought patterns is not to say that it is not physical, it is markedly physical in a variety of ways. Many people who have mental health problems will manifest physical symptoms, I already mentioned I suffer pain, but in set circumstances it can also cause me to vomit or to shake like a leaf. Just because a symptoms origin is in the brain does not stop it being distressing for the individual who is going through it. Nobody likes eating a meal then heaving it all back.Especially if you are out celebrating with friends.What is more physical treatments work, sometimes these can be as simple as mineral supplements, exercise and such.Even things like massage and aroma therapy have brought some relief to some.  Other times they are complex drug regimes.There is no barrier between the mental and the physical.

Talk therapies can work and are useful. The success of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and associated therapies is to be welcomed. They are not a cure all, but they are a major step forward and at the very least make people suffering from mental distress more skillful at keeping contact with normality.

So what as someone undergoing mental distress do I want. Well firstly don’t define me as that, I do lots of other things and the more you help me hold onto those other things the more you help me function normally. Secondly when I can’t do something or my behaviour becomes odd don’t assume it is about you, its more often me trying to cope with my illness. I like many others am actually quite skilled at dealing with my illness, I can and do manage it, sometimes trusting me to manage and ask when I need help is the most constructive thing you can do. It is amazing how often people’s need to help means that I have to manage that on top of my illness. For those who want some idea of how draining this is, please read this article on spoon theory, and understand that if I am having to tell you how to help I am using my spoons to do that. Finally oddly if I start withdrawing, please try an make the effort to keep low level contact. What it normally means is that I am personally not able to sustain the contact in the form at the time, if you can take the effort out of doing it, then I probably will appreciate it. There is a gap between when I can make the effort to keep in contact and when I am no longer able to sustain contact.In that gap gentle contact is likely to sustain me rather than allow me to fall further. I know I am usually the proactive one.

On a more general note, you do know someone who has suffered mental health distress, but they may not be willing to be open about this.Try therefore when someone is behaving differently not to jump to conclusions and certainly don’t jump to conclusion because you hear someone has a mental health diagnosis. We remain individuals in our illnesses. More importantly if you have the opportunity please try and find out more about mental health issues, you never know it may be you that needs the knowledge next.

The Discipline of Joy

This is a response to Chapter four in John Ortberg’s book “The Life you have Always Wanted“. He does not say that Christian’s should be happy and smiley all the time. That is bad theology but he does suggest we should practice joy but then does not tell us what joy is.

I am going to suggest that what he means be joy is those practices that lead to celebration and I therefore think that a two fold approach is needed

Stage one is a practice which is very close to Buddhist mindfulness, the only difference being that it tends to seek out pleasant experiences rather than just taking any experience. That is when something good happens you take the time to actually experience it, enjoy it, savour it, appreciate it, there is not a good verb in English. John suggests spending a whole day doing this each week. That I would not think possible in modern life, too many commitments but it is possible to have the occasional spoil yourself day and/or to try and have five minutes when you just let yourself savour what you are experience. It might be the warm blankets over you as you lie down to go to sleep. Just feel their weight and the warmth reflecting back from your body. What I find really good for doing this is to write poems. Most of mine start with me just trying to capture some experience in words. I have to experience it first before I can find the words.

Stage two is complimentary and that is to practice gratitude. No I do not mean the idea of thanking God for the cut knee. I mean when you come aware of something as given, whether from God or from another human being, just acknowledging that. It takes all of two seconds to do. Somebody opens a door for you and you say “thanks”, a person serves you in a shop and you say “thanks” even a driver lets you into a flow of traffic and you wave your hand. It makes you aware of how many things you receive each day. Then there are things that are not due to any other human but are not under your control either: it not raining on a wet day when you leave your brolly at home, the flavour of blackberries picked while out walking, having the health you have or a good family and friends even a nuch needed parking space. To acknowledge that much of life is given and as a Christian I see it as given by God so it is natural to thank him.

The thing is that together the two work together to provide a motor out of which celebration naturally happens. A life savouring the generosity of God, can there really be a better basis for joy.

That is not to say nasty things don’t happen they do and it is totally right to be cross when they do but a discipline like this helps so that nasty things don’t overwhelm us. It provides hope in times when hope otherwise seems far away. Sometimes all we can do is savour the pain and offer that to God but God takes even that.