Ordered values that always had a fixed point of return to turn back to whenever a detour had been taken in the wrong direction now appear to be a thing of the past. Very subtly, this anchor — the keeping-place of a Christian consensus — has been watered down and at last replaced. Our astonishment and horror at what we are experiencing and have inherited, in reaction to values we ourselves had sown, are merely the harvest cast back at us. In other words: a reaction, and not an action.

Old methods of looking for solutions will do us no good this time. The dynamic of the problems now staring us in the face has changed too much. Since the epidemic of degenerative diseases, we have learned that health is not to be left to the doctor — it is wiser to take responsibility for it yourself, to be proactive and cultivate a healthy lifestyle, rather than wait for the diagnosis and then turn to the doctor to be rid of the symptoms.

What is true of the individual is true of the collective individual, the community. The body heals best when it detoxes. Medication can temporarily and successfully suppress symptoms (consequences, reactions, karma), but the underlying disease will always return.

How does a community detox? In the same way as an individual. Be rid of all the impurities in the collective spiritual bloodstream. Wellington is not destined to be a place for murders, or to be the seat of drug dealers. This town has, since its founding, been called, equipped and anointed to heal — to be spiritual medicine. God's apothecary. Is that not perhaps why the onslaught to wrest Wellington from its destiny and calling is gathering such intensity? This line of tension is building toward a long-planned crescendo that means to announce God's greatest breakthrough — a Kingdom strategy that Reverend Andrew Murray, in particular, set on its steady course, so that in our own day and time it might become the elixir to heal, miraculously, the greatest disease of the moment. A triumph of Light over darkness. The town's unashamed owning of its identity, rooted with abandon in firm conviction, lived out and proclaimed. Because the most intimate truth of the genetic make-up, and all its deposits in the bloodline, will always find a way to draw us back to where it functions most effectively and most purely.

There are not more evildoers than there are good people; there are not more people who hate and who fear than there are people who believe and who love. The only difference between these two groups is that those who are fearful, those who plant bombs, stir up trouble or are loveless, do it with conviction — Conviction is a force multiplier!

It is time we detoxed. For unless we recover our own health again (confessing everything that stands between God and us, and between us and others), we will, like a pathetic plant without roots, scorch away before the faint little heat of a drought, a chaotic government, a weak economy, villains, or ordinary people walking past us in the street, stripped of any "impulse control". We raised them, we paid for their schooling — we formed them, or helped to form them — but somewhere there was a built-in weak link, or links. Could it be all the bloodthirsty games and videos we used as a "nanny" while they were in their soft, formative years? Who knows. Or perhaps our own broadcasting of fear, and our belief that everything that can go wrong, will… We can put our thoughts to work to create either a negative or a positive harvest, but we can never neutralise the power of thought to create. God is not going to sabotage His own spiritual law of sowing and reaping.

It is time that, after deep and honest self-examination, we draw the line. A clear line that says: We are taking our atmosphere back; we are taking our covenant children back (and we confess, in shame and with penitence, that this town has sent far more than its quota of broken boys and girls out into the world with a worthless and confused sexual identity, on account of crimes committed against them); we take responsibility for the students in our town who first had to come here to study only to use drugs for the first time. Learn this lesson from Reverend Andrew Murray: without role models, you send your youth into the future leaderless — and that is scarcely a future for them, or for yourself. It was children and the salvation of their souls that gripped him and inspired him to action. Not the beautiful valley or its wonderful potential of natural beauty! Let us take up this calling and this anointing from him afresh.

Karma has turned collectively. Individuals are now paying for the karma of a community. Pinkster is here. Let us bring the Light to the darkness, and not the other way around any more. Health is the absence of illness. Illness is not the absence of health.

This month marks twenty-two years that Val du Charron has enjoyed the privilege of serving a beloved valley and its people — mostly with words. Thank you to every dear reader and every advertiser. I greet you with a traditional Navajo prayer called "The Beauty Way." Something beautiful, and prophetically fitting for us to pray over our valley, to believe, and to agree upon together.

In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty on my left I walk With beauty on my right I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty below me I walk With beauty within me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again

Amanda Kreitzer