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Good Morning, Last week I received an email from a colleague who I’d not seen for years. It explained how they’d fallen on hard times and contained a request for a specific amount of money. A follow-up email included bank details and the hope that I might be able to help out; it was much in the style of one of those Nigerian legacy scams. I assumed that their email address had been hacked and so I ignored it. But when a further email arrived, explaining a little more and leaving a phone number to call, I began to see it as a genuine if desperate request for help. Before calling I went through the list of reasons not to help: all sound, all sensible: the money wouldn’t be enough to make a difference; they’ll just fritter it away; they’ve got themselves into a hole of their own making; and I’m sure I’m not the first person they’ve asked for help. But that same day, with irritatingly apt timing, I read the bit of scripture where Jesus says: give to one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. When I went back to the text and searched for get-outs and caveats I couldn’t find any. All my uming and ahing was rendered academic when I actually spoke to them. They had indeed fallen on hard times. Their life had seemed secure: they’d had steady work, a good relationship, a decent flat in a nice part of town – they were probably in that top 1% that economists talk about. But then they’d fallen off the edge of a cliff. Yes, there were self-inflicted reasons for this plummet. Mistakes made. Personal demons battled. But the descent to ‘living like a dog’ as they put it, had been swift. Poverty, as it says in Proverbs, had fallen upon them ‘like an armed man.’ As I listened to my colleague’s story, the reasons for their descent seemed not to matter so much; it was the ‘this-could-be–you-ness’ of their plight that struck home. It was much easier to fall off the edge than you’d think. And the thought that it ‘could have been me’ wasn’t just a platitude. It was and had been me. Over the course of my life had I not been on the receiving end of other people’s financial help? Had not people’s unreasonable generosity got me out of difficulty in the past? The sheer competitiveness of life, with people seen as winners or losers, the atomising of community, the widening gulf between rich and poor, makes it seem likely that ever more people will fall off the cliff and not get up again. But, as my colleague’s story shows, the contingent, fragile nature of life is a reality for all of us. It’s a failure of imagination not to be able to picture yourself falling off the edge. And we need to be able to picture it because, in the end, the thing that catches someone’s fall from grace – is someone else’s grace.