HOW often have you sat with a friend or stranger chatting away about the world, its personalities, troubles, half-remembered fact and gossip? Another person enters your congenial space and someone says, “We were just putting the world right”

I hope that is a regular thing for you too - putting the world right - because the world certainly needs someone to “put it right”!

Conversation is often informed by our generation, the news feed we favour, the politics we follow, the state of our health and finances!

The best conversations swerve seamlessly from one topic to the next. The best person to converse with is one who listens as well as imparting wisdom.

If we sit with somebody who likes to score points, always be right and rarely listens to anyone but themselves (thereby only ever hearing good sense!?), the natter becomes a contest rather than a sharing discussion. Having said that, it is also good to sharpen opinion against another’s views that we disagree with.

So, we naturally set to “putting the world right”. I have often parted from those times with the possibly negative, accurate but cynical comment, “Yes but who listens to us anyway?”

That observation has truth in it but not if it leads to action. Inspired and fired by purpose, facts or a deep conviction, through letter or email writing, banner-waving marching, orange paint throwing, prayer or standing for positions of influence, we still have power to change things.

I suspect our current MP, and those who stood with him for election, came to the point of putting themself forward in order to effect change, after much conversation and soul searching.

Enough voters gave him their pencil mark to turn his world upside down, sending him to Westminster, adding his voice to put the world right whilst acknowledging one person can only do so much.

Don’t be disheartened: write that letter, keep the art of conversing alive, have a good natter, chinwag, chat, try not to get disillusioned by the weight of the world’s woes - twas ever thus. And pray, God is always listening.

Paul Benney

Superintendent, St Austell Methodist Circuit