March 2025 – Glenn Myers

I am with you

Whether you like it or not

A welcome guest post from my friend Colin Bearup.

Doesn’t work. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Perhaps one of the most treasured sentences in the Bible is ‘I am with you’. It occurs many times and is often preceded by ‘Do not be afraid’. In times of anxiety, crisis, challenge and, well, life in general, to know that the Lord, the capable and wise, is with us is reassuring. However, I came across it the other way round: I (human being) am with you (Lord). That simply must have a different vibe to it. The Lord doesn’t need us to reassure him.

Psalm 139:15 says “When I awake, I am still with you.” I don’t know about everyone else, but at the prompting of my bladder, I get up in the morning, feel around for my slippers, put on my dressing gown and go to the bathroom. Then I go to the kitchen, make myself some tea, get some cereal and then sit down. When I have eaten, I consider myself to be sufficiently awake. Then I compose myself and reach for my Bible. It is like the shopkeeper, entering the shop, opening the cash register, unlocking the front door and saying “OK you can come in. I am ready”. Or even “the doctor will see you now”.

The unarguable reality is that the Lord does not show up when or because we are ready. He is already there. It is just that we have not given him our attention. Personally, I have always read Psalm 139 as the story of a journey. David goes from pondering how fully God knows him and slides into a sense of near panic – he cannot get away, he is never private, never alone, always exposed. We human beings, generally want to manage how exposed we are. We like to have some say in the matter. Finally he arrives at a place of trust and willing surrender.

I suspect that many of us rub along with God, keeping him at a manageable distance, imagining that we go into his presence and come out again at our convenience. Then one day we realise, like David, how utterly open to his view we are. We need to pass through that discomfort of realisation and emerge on the other side into a place of total trust. We become just a little bit like a small child, who wakes up in the parental home, at ease in the presence of apparently all-knowing parents.

Although nothing is hidden, David concludes with the invitation “search me and know me,” a full and cooperative acceptance of the Lord’s overwhelming knowledge of him with a view to being purged of all that is displeasing and being led in the way everlasting. Living with this perspective, one of sure and trusting knowledge that absolutely everything we do and say is known to our loving father God, that knowing we are in his presence whether we are aware of him or not, must lead to a very different way of living. Whether we attain it, is largely up to us. The story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, does not end with the hug and the party. No, it concludes with the father speaking to the miserable elder brother and saying, “You are always with me, everything I have is yours.”

A trellis to grow your life on

A word to the battered and weary.

I keep reading of people who quite tired of figuring out what’s right, what’s wrong, what a good life, what it’s all about. Dating is a minefield. Success is a mirage, celebrity is depressing, freedom is enslaving, hope turns sour, dreams disappoint.

Some of these battered and weary people are becoming Christians or if you like, Christian-adjacent, seeing the ancient Christian values as useful signposts even if they are tentative about going the whole hog, or perhaps, the whole dogma.

There’s a lot to this.

For one thing, creaking though it maybe, Christianity is ancient and it has infused our culture and spawned many good lives like nothing else. A couple of hundred yards from our home is a church that was founded in the ninth century. (As I have mentioned before and often think about.) The fields around it had been harvested for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years already by then. But still: for the last one thousand, one hundred years Christian worship, Christian faith and Christian values have been seeping into village and national life and collective memory and ancestry.

For a second thing: Christianity is mainly and mostly about the heart. It isn’t a programme for national prosperity, or preventative health care, or political reorganization. Primarily it pins us like collected butterflies down to one main things: Above all, guard your heart. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning, the peace-making, the pure in heart, the hungry for justice. And the test of these reformed and reforming hearts is not the mystic poetry they write about the experience (for example), or great revolutionary or counter-revolutionary acts (for another example), but the practical outworking of goodness and faith in their daily lives.

Which can lead to any number of different, interesting, varied, full lives.

No wonder it’s inspired lives across 50 generations, has experienced ups to match its downs, and may yet catch on widely again.

How to transform every community in the West

Nothing too ambitious….

Start with a worshipping community of Christians
It has to use some energy maintaining itself but
It has spare energy to use outside itself so
Do some theology. Christians are heralds of a new world where God and people are together. We can’t make that new world, but we can be a sign of it, an instrument of it. A portent of it, if you like.
Do some Bible study. Around Ash Wednesday (not so far from when I’m writing this) the great passage in Isaiah 58 defines what ‘fasting’ looks like:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
⁷Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness^[a] will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
⁹Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

(Isaiah 58:6-9

6. Understand the times. We are not, in the West, surrounded by masses of starving people. But think of all the lonely people.

7. Think of one of the fruits of the covid pandemic. In the UK, local authorities started trusting churches to do community things decently and well. It has always been happening to an extent (it isn’t new) but covid was a kind of crash course for the nation.

8. Think of the need in our day for social prescribing. How many doctor’s surgeries are plagued by the lonely? How many ills (mental ill-health but much else also) can respond to the balm of community? In how many ways can community complement all that the state attempts to provide (housing, cash, healthcare)? Why can’t GP surgeries prescribe community in the same breath as they’d like to prescribe exercise and diet? Why are their options limited to applying chemicals or knives to human bodies?

9 Churches have premises, a certain facility with tea-pots, and a tolerance for the misfitting people whom every congregation anyway hosts.

10. Community heals. Humans are a herding species. Churches have the plant, the location, the resources, the opportunity and — best of all — the moment. We can built the connections. Every community in the West. Think of it.

Worship. Aaah.

Sometimes it’s the only thing that will do.

Ely Cathedral — Image by Diego Echeverry from Pixabay

It isn’t controversial to think that politics or the World Situation or whatever are disturbing right now. I don’t have enough of a historical perspective to see exactly how disturbing. (Remember the 1970s: petrol ration coupons, IMF loans for the UK, so many strikes that you couldn’t bury your dead? But I was young and shielded from all that.)

The true patient revolutionary still has somewhere to turn. We can do our small acts of grace but it isn’t all we have. There’s someone else on our side, the true master of history.

This is why we worship. This is why places of worship, often situated on good land that could be sold and cleared for social housing, do and should dot our cityscapes.

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
    love and faithfulness go before you.
¹⁵Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
    who walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
¹⁶They rejoice in your name all day long;
    they celebrate your righteousness. (Psalm 89:14-16)

Never mind that the context of this 89th psalm is defeat, retreat, discouragement and loss. The truths are still true. We can step back from the news cycle, and make ourselves small, and adore, and hope.

Obscurity

The engine of revolution.

Photo: Author’s own. ‘When you ripe fields behold’; just near our home.

‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed’ (attributed to science fiction author William Gibson). Nowhere is that more true than when you think of the subject of obscurity. Today, somewhere, some group of students or ex-students is hatching something that one day will be mainstream, part of the landscape. (Think Microsoft or Apple, which were startups one day. I believe Apple is worth more than all the FTSE 100 companies added together.)

The Christian Church has its fair share of that which is obscure becoming mainstream. Think of twelve in an upper room… or the handful of ‘enthusiasts’ called ‘Methodists’ in the early 18th century, or worldwide Pentecostalism (now 600m strong) tracing its roots back to some rustic, chaotic meetings in Los Angeles’ Azusa St or to Charles Parham’s Bible school in Kansas. Or think of Robert Morrison, early Protestant missionary to China, in 1807 having to take a ship from San Francisco because nothing from Europe was suitable, being asked by a shipping clerk, ‘So, Mr Morrison, do you expect to make an impression on the great Chinese Empire?’ ‘No sir,’ he replies, ‘I expect God will.’

The Bible mainlines on the obscure. Especially when twinned with faith. Think of the virgin Mary, a teen who believed, or Abraham, whose descendants became more numerous than the stars in the sky or the sand on the beach only because he believed what God said to him. Thousands or millions of other nomads passed into history: this one alone became revered as the father of many nations.

There is incredible romance here. I wonder if faith is largely the possession of the obscure. I wonder if there is some woman somewhere, packing her shopping in the cupboard, and then getting alone with God and trusting him for … what? a mass turning to Christ among Gen Z, for example, new churches in every town? Or some mass political change that opens a nation or a people to spiritual change? No-one will know her, but heaven will know her. The anonymous prayer-er, the unknown soldier.

Extend that even a little. What if there’s a clamour of prayer and faith rising from obscure people — as there is — day and night towards God. What if in that spray of prayer are droplets of mountain-moving faith? What if all that is shaping history as much as any of the documented historical events which (on this analysis) are merely the outworking, processed by God, of all that asking and believing, of all that straining towards heaven? There’s a hymn famous in some circles:

Wherever you ripe fields behold,
Waving to God their sheaves of gold,
Be sure some com of wheat has died,
Some saintly soul been crucified;
Someone has suffered, wept and prayed,
And fought hell’s legions undismayed. (A S Booth-Clibburn, There is no gain but by a loss.)