Verily, Verily I say unto you

"Verily, Verily I say unto you he that believeth on me hath everlasting life."   Thank you to the good old King James Bible for that quote.   Last night my daughter and I found ourselves musing on Verity, we had been discussing names, and got onto names with meaning, we have a couple of friends one named Charity, whose son used to be confused that he kept hearing of people giving money to charity but she never seemed to have any, and another called Verity, who despite being a banker I do believe.   Even with names like these my daughter said that she had never really associated the names with their meanings, just with the people who bore them.

A little later we had an opportunity to practise some verity ourselves.   We had planned a night at the movies we were going to see the new X-Men movie, my daughter is heavily into the whole superhero thing, and any film with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan can't be all bad.   I booked tickets on line and we made our way to the cinema, as no one was checking tickets we made our own way in and found our seats in a surprisingly empty cinema.   It was only when the film started that we realised that something was wrong, it wasn't X-Men!   I checked, we were in the right cinema, watching the right screen, but we were a little early, we were actually a whole month early! my tickets were for May!



Now we could have exited consoled ourselves with the thought of my stupidity, or we could stay and watch the film.  We stayed and watched the film.   It was a very good film, and one that I wanted to watch anyway. We enjoyed the show enormously, with a cast of Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Celia Imrie, and Timothy Spall, Love Punch was always going to be good, but we enjoyed the script and some nice James Bond "in jokes" at Brosnan's expense.   It was also good to see good looking people of around my age, acting their age and still being entertaining, glamorous and enjoying life.   There may also have been a couple of little morals slipped in somewhere.   Morals that my daughter and I were clearly lacking.

While I don't think that Vue Cinemas are going to miss our few pounds, yet somehow this added to our enjoyment of the evening, there was a little added thrill, a frisson of excitement from the sheer naughtiness of it all,  but I do have my suspicion that we have compromised our verity, our integrity, it is not the scale of what we do but the thing itself.   I have often opined that breaking, or not enforcing any law undermines the whole body of law, in the same way any small dishonest act undermines our own integrity.

The Bible teaches us that there are no little sins or big sins, just sin, any sin separates us from God and needs to be dealt with, and can only be dealt with through Jesus.   So like David I will have to confess that "Against you, you only have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight" (Psalm 51:4)