Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Right Rev John Chalmers, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
The Space is a drop-in centre in Govanhill run by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. One day, a mother of nine children who had been traded in for a younger model found her way in desperation to the Space. She had been left to care for her children alone, but her biggest challenge was her young son who had severe learning difficulties and was incontinent.
The boy could hardly walk; his shoes were two sizes too small and they had not been off his feet in months. All I am going to tell you is that the worker at the Space bought socks and a new pair of shoes for that young boy, peeled off the old shoes, took the boy’s feet on her lap and washed them clean. While she did that, the boy’s mother wept. She wept because, where she stands in the pecking order of life, no one had ever done that for her or for her boy.
The woman was experiencing love and grace being poured out. There were no words, but two things were true of that scene: real practical help was being given to someone on the margins of society, and the God that I believe in was present—present in a pair of shoes and socks from Asda. The God that I believe in is not some puppet master presiding over good and evil in the universe; the God that I believe in walks with the poor.
The real reason for telling you that story is that I believe that there is a direct link in the chain of consequences that connects this place of government to that woman and her child and to the worker dedicated to her work at the Space. You see, I do not subscribe to the idea that people enter public life for self-aggrandisement. The people I know who give themselves to public life do so in order to make a difference and leave the world a better place than they found it.
Today, I want you to know that, when you make the right decisions here about how priorities are set, how money is spent and how the right resources find their way into the right places, somewhere way down the chain, a needy child gets a new pair of shoes and a mother starved of affection gets the chance to weep.