What do these images make you think about?

We were in Bangkok for a few days, and one of the days we spent doing the “temple tours”. Thailand is a buddhist nation an so alot of outrech teams go out on prayer walks and try and cover the city and the ministries in prayer before they start or before they leave. We saw ornate buildings and statues covered in gold and pretty stones and carvings that only master craftsmen can create. Years and possibly decades of work put into a structure dedicated to gods and non gods who sit silent. The silence resounds around the slums and high rises that make up this city that dwarfed Sydney by almost double. Whilst men and women and children struggle to eat and pay rent on slums that i wouldn’t take a dump in, their silent religious icons bask in their glorious indoctrination that people don’t matter, suffering can’t be “cured” or helped, so let it be.

Some of the opulence of these places made me want to vomit. They would have these breath taking views out into the city, filled with strangely ordered and patterned slums. That we earlier had walked through and found broken, starving, hopeless and beautiful people. Crying out for some kind of rescue from a life they were resolved to live because of a false reality of powerless and unwilling forces of nature.

What if we crafted the slums into well designed, beautifully built houses? What if we creatively designed better power and better roads and better cars and better farming techniques. With the same powerful creativity that built a 40ft giant buddha, we could redesign and recreate a whole society into LIFE. Instead of the hopeless mediocrity of a nation of some the most kind and lovely people racked with sex tourism, apathy and desperation.