BBC Radio 4 20170729

Do I keep taking the tablets, or do I stop when I’m feeling better? Doctors have long advised that a course of antibiotics should always be finished, for fear of undermining any good that’s been achieved. But medical researchers are this week arguing that persisting is often not necessary.

No one is suggesting hasty policy revisions, and the current instruction still amounts to ‘Do what doctor tells you’. But when guidance changes - even when it needs to - it can be confusing.

I remember a time when most people regarded a rich dark tan acquired through exposure to direct sunshine as a clear sign of robust good health: it seemed so obvious - but we’d never even heard of melanomas, and I’m glad we have now.

Taking care in what we eat and drink is clearly common sense - though rival specialist diet promoters do sometimes seem to imply that just about everything we enjoy is bad for us, and that can be a bit bewildering.

As we discover more, understand more, life becomes more complex. Inevitable change can present unwelcome demands: we have to make decisions which we might prefer left to someone else. What if there were a super mentor of some sort, who would make his or her wishes irresistible?: we’d then have no option but to be the agents of some larger purpose.

It can seem an attractive proposition: it would save us from any heart-searching, from agonising over conflicting demands, wrestling with changing circumstances, above all from responsibility. We’d just do what we were told.

It’s possible to be looking for that kind of relief in any number of directions:

from political movements, with black and white certainties, party lines to follow, pure loyalty to demand;

from less obvious deities - the fashionable view, what’s on trend, what everyone who matters is doing, thinking or tweeting - if I’m doing what everyone else is doing, I can’t be to blame for my choice;

or from religions, with holy books and traditions and sometimes mechanisms for enforcing discipline.

Certainly as a Christian I want to look to what I understand to be God’s intention for human life, and seek to make decisions in the light of it. I want to reflect on the encounters other men and women have had with God in their hopes and fears, their strengths and weaknesses.

Above all I need to observe the way of love as it’s made visible to me in the person of Jesus Christ, and seek to allow it to influence every segment of my life. But then…I can’t duck it - in light of this, I still have to decide. Will I finish the course - or will I stop because I might be feeling better?