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Good morning. I spent yesterday looking out of the window at my parked car, trying to stop myself from the urge to jump up and drive off in search of fuel. I’ve got a quarter of tank, I don’t actually need to drive for a few days, but an itchy anxiety is drilling into my brain. So – here is a shameful confession: I am the kind of person who catastrophizes easily. For plenty of others, struggling to get to work, or fulfil an urgent commitment, it is much much worse. After eighteen months of strain, the fuel crisis is taking its toll. And we are all quick to cast blame: Brexit, the Government, the media and perhaps, more pervasively, one another. For what are you doing in the petrol queue except stopping me from getting my share? We are pitted against each other, competing for short supplies. And the thought comes back again and again: How do I know, as I gaze out at my car, that my principled decision not to fill my tank, is not going to be exploited by your rushing out to fill yours?

It seems we don’t just have a fuel crisis but a crisis of trust. We do not trust one another and this is linked to deeper lack of trust in everything. Many of us have been accustomed to our daily wants being met. It is here that I find some of the teaching of my own Christian faith really difficult. I’ve been brought up on those words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let today’s trouble be enough for today’. There’s a lot before that about considering the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. We might assume, with that poetic language, to think that Jesus was addressing a group of over-stressed people trying to relax and assuage their feelings of angst. But his audience were most likely utterly desperate, hungry and sick, harassed by circumstances way beyond their control. Telling such people to trust is quite a risk. Especially when he said nothing at all about things getting better. This is not offering reassurance, there are no promises that the crisis will soon be over, instead here’s practical sanity. Live in the moment, live in the present, because the one thing that is certain in this life is that you cannot control the future, either by buying it or selling it or trying to escape it. Today as I stare at my stationary car I want to remind myself to live in the now, not only because there is nowhere else to live but because to do is the only freedom from panic that we have.