The passage for this week has Jesus telling Nicodemus that unless he is 'born again' he will not see the Kingdom of God (John 3:3). Nicodemus wanted to make sense of what Jesus was saying but found that it did not fit with his way of looking at the world. Jesus told him to stop trying to put everything he heard into his own pre-held categories of interpretation and to learn to look at the world in a different way. Nicodemus was so entrenched within his own worldview that for him to do what Jesus was asking would have been the spiritual and emotional equivalent of being 'born again'. We are like Nicodemus when we are unaware of the different worldviews that shape how we live our lives. The ethos of the market place is all consuming. We take the idea that work is to be rewarded into our private lives and assume that happiness is ours to earn rather than a gift to be received. The mistake is to think that happiness lies in what is extraordinary and different rather than in what is everyday and common place - realising this simple truth could be our rebirth for today.

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