Locks the door, starts the engine - allows me to enter my own home - prevents the stranger access to private territory - turns a door into a barrier - imprisons a man for a life sentence or with one flick of a finger allows me to leave rain, cold, storm and dark for warmth, comfort, light and friendship! So small - so vital! A hundred miles from my destination - here a machine that can eat up the miles but no key to enter or start its engine - making it almost impossible to get there!

Gibraltar the KEY to the Mediterranean - the code, THE KEY to decipher the meaningless message - the key man, the key word, the key job!

Has God got a key?

If so, what is it?

How many people are in prison - no key to the solution that would set them free! The inward prison and the inward chains are a thousand times worse than Wormwood Scrubs - black despair produces a more hopeless hopelessness than ever the bare - backed galley slaves experienced chained in rows by ankles and wrists, their cruel task masters lashing their bleeding backs as their oars dipped in perfect unison to cut swiftly through the gleaming waters! No blacksmith can forge, no key cutter produce, a key to open the dungeon of utter numbness that is the experience of millions in deadly vicious habits and fear! Pile up all your Blackpool Illuminations - and its breezes, all the best of Psychiatry, the chemist's shop, the Bingo hall, knees up Mother Brown at the Saturday night local, pep talks and pep pills - all this and much more will never meet man's deepest need and set him free! Is there a key?

While many will be quick to supply an answer such as Religion, a thousand voices challenge the reality of many religious people as they cry "We cannot hear what you say for the noise of what you are! "Next in the angling queue on life's pier is the Christian who seeking to obey the word of Jesus "Follow Me I will make you Fishers of Men" produces not a hook but a net - he declares Religion is not the Key but Christ is the answer! "Going into a church no more makes a man a Christian than going into a garage would make him a motor car - Ye MUST be born again."

He certainly is right but your wily worldly wise man does not swim into the net - he never reads his Bible but he does read his Christian and so politely, or impolitely declines the offers of his benefactor! Why? Does the answer lie in the sarcastic slur - "See how these Christians love one another?" Do our divisions and lack of love and unity preach more eloquently than all our preachers? After all BEING is more important than saying! - although WHAT you say finds its authority out of WHAT you are! THE LORD BLESS ME AND MY WIFE, OUR JOHN AND HIS WIFE, US FOUR AND NO MORE, AMEN. Certainly one could well say that Love is a "lost" key if it is not THE lost key!

Said Christ the Lord 
I will go and see 
How the men my brethren believe in Me! 
Great organs surged through arches dim 
Their jubilant floods in praise of Him 
And in Church and Palace and judgment Hall 
He saw His Image high over all
But still wherever His steps they led 
The Son of God bent down His Head!

 Then Christ sought out an artisan 
A low browed stunted haggard man 
And a motherless girl with fingers thin 
Who pushed from her faintly want and sin 
These set He in the midst of them 
And as they drew back their garments hem 
For fear of defilement 
Lo these said He 
Are the images ye have made of Me!