20 July 2024

Things may have changed by the time this blog is published but as things stand, Joe Biden is still heading for another Presidential election and hoping to gain a second term. At 81 years of age, he is only three years older than Donald Trump who has just survived an emotional assassination attempt.

It seems extraordinary to me that Joe Biden has shown very little self-awareness into his own performance misnaming  Zelensky as Putin etc.  Either he is unable to exercise any self-awareness or he is unwilling to accept that he is not the best person to defeat Donald Trump and enter the White House for the Democrats.

Why  is it that people and especially men find it difficult to accept that they are aging and there are plenty of younger people around who would be just as capable or even more capable than they to fulfil the President’s shoes? I can think of two good reasons.

Firstly, he is addicted to power and all the influence he is able to exercise. We see this in Putin who, in his seventies,  has managed to change his country’s constitution in order to fulfil his ambition to stay in power for another twelve years finally ending his career aged 83! Maybe?

Secondly, he is afraid of death, the death of his presidential persona which is simply concealing his own inevitable death. No-one likes to examine their own mortality and to put themselves in a place where they are no longer useful, needed, wanted. But we are but dust!

Let Jesus be our exemplar. He exercised the briefest of ministries – not forty years like some of us but three. He died a young man aged thirty-three. And he delegated responsibility to twelve others none of whom were as capable as he. The result? Two thousand years later - a worldwide Church of some two billion people! Quite an advance on twelve!

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