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Recently it has been striking how much of life is a competition between the reds and the blues. Labour or Conservative in the UK election; Chelsea or Liverpool in European Championship football; Leinster or Munster in the Celtic Cup; Gary Rhodes or Jean-Christophe Novelli in Hell's Kitchen.

We humans seem to see most matters as a contest between two sides. Such battles can completely capture our imagination and emotion. The result can leave us feeling wholly vindicated or woefully abandoned - seeing red and feeling blue. We can invest so much in them that they define our worldview or steal it from us. We end up seeing everything in terms of red's victory over blue, or are left feeling life is empty now that blue has beaten red.

The thing is, we get so caught up in understanding things as a matter of either one side or the other, and so consumed by the importance of our side coming out on top that we fail to see the bigger picture.

Joshua, leading the Israelites into a forthcoming battle at Jericho, saw everything in terms of his side against their adversaries, even the commander of the Lord's army. It took God's commander-in-chief to point out to him that there was more to the situation than the either/or, than the reds and the blues. What counted most was that God was present and to be honoured by Joshua. The two sides would somehow fit into his scheme of things. God did not fit into theirs.

There are many pitfalls when we put so much weight on our red/blue dichotomies. We can become triumphalistic about our side, little realising that their victory may be insignificant in the grander scheme of things; we can falsely interpret temporal success as an indicator of divine approval; we can be blinkered to the flaws in our heroes and their inevitable demise.

We can become pessimistic, thinking that all is lost, or that everything now depends on us; we can grow bitter and obsessed with redressing the situation; we can end up haplessly resigned and apathetic, as though nothing we do could matter any longer.
But no battle of ours is the be all and end all. The great victory has been and was always going to be won by God, the God who is in no way limited to our imagination in how he should do things through us.

So we need to hold on to the bigger picture at all times. This is not to say that there should be no emotional engagement or interaction with our reds and blues; happiness and disappointment, anger and joy are all essential elements of our human condition. It is inconceivable for Joshua not to have been thinking about the battle and with a vested interest in its outcome.

But whatever the outcome, God is in command of proceedings - his bigger picture includes some red and blue, green and orange, black, white, grey and more. We must hold this picture in tension with our life experiences, that it may foster in us both humility and hope.

Ben Walker

Watch www.contemporarychristianity.org in the coming weeks for a resource on people of faith acting in the moral murk of politics in the book of Esther.