Category: Devotion

Patience

Dialling ourselves down to the pace of God is hard. It would, perhaps, be harder still if God didn’t himself hold all the cards. When it comes to prayer, or matters of seeking justice, or applying hope, we don’t choose to wait. We would rather we didn’t wait. But waiting is thrust upon us.

God is a wait-er. Adding weight to this is the understanding that God is himself somehow a superposition of Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If one is Three, one of the Three might wish the other two would hurry up. Or one might want to hurry because of the sufferings of one of the other two. But no: the Three are perfect in patience as in all else and they are agree together so much that really they are One.

So what we call patience is actually learning to move with the pace and perspective of God. We pray and wait. We struggle and wait. We grow restive and… still wait. Our dinghy, blown by the wind of God, isn’t sailing very fast. But we set our sail and carry on at the pace supplied by the breeze, eyes on the destination.

The danger with all this waiting is that your love grows dulled or your hope withers. So we have to keep our eyes on the prize,renewing the reasons for hope, even while we contine to wait. But there’s more.

Paul E Miller in his excellent little book A Praying Life points out that waiting periods are not just the dead zones between things actually happening, but the realm of love: he writes, ‘the waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship.’ It is the place for trust, intimacy, thanksgiving and holding each other’s hands. It is the place where things come to their full flowering, or their heavy crop of fruit.

Waiting is also quiet. Those who wait are not put on stages, not admired for their achievements. To wait is to be obscure, to be chipped away at, to be refined and seasoned and mellowed and reshaped.

So it’s a gift. Like others of God’s gifts (singleness, endurance for example) it may not be what we would initially want. But it has the consequence, other things being equal, of making us what God wants, God-fashioned. Which is plenty worth it.

Creating beauty when ugly is all around

The restoration of Notre Dame cathedral, which opened in December 2024 after the fire in 2019, involved 2000 craftspeople, 250 companies and around US$900m.

Rebuilding the destroyed roof (which was nicknamed, The Forest) and was made of oak, involved a national call for oak trees. Many needed to be perfectly straight, 20m long and 50cm in diameter. A thousand trees were ultimately selected and harvested.

Then they needed 1300 cubic metres of limestone; and using ancient crafts, the structure was rebuilt (some restoration continues even after the cathedral was opened). As large projects go, it was a great success.

A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

“Each day we have 20 difficulties,” Philippe Jost, who headed the restoration task force, told me. “But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”

I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the pressure to finish on time, or one filled with quite the same quiet air of joy and certitude. When I quizzed one worker about what the job meant to her, she struggled to find words, then started to weep.

(quoted by Diana Butler Bass in her substack.)

Despite being a secular country, France rightly took pride in the restoration of this iconic building, the spritual heart of Paris. It may have contributed to winds of fresh interest blowing through Catholicism. Last Easter day (2025) 10,000 adult Catholics were baptised in France, twice the number of 2023 and the highest number since records began to be taken 20 years ago. Seven thousand teenagers were baptized, ten times the number in 2019.1.

‘Beauty makes everything easier’: fascinating.

Bouncing in the kitchen

One of my favourite passages in the whole Bible is the meeting between Mary, the mother-to-be of Jesus and Elizabeth in some unnamed Judean village (Luke 1:39-56). Mary (single, teenage, pregnant and claiming God did it) was presumably in hot water and it is perhaps no wonder that she went ‘in haste’ to her relative in the hill country.

And so we have two women, or a woman and a girl, hugging, laughing, crying, bouncing around inside Elizabeth’s house.

In AD1, according to the all-knowing artificial intelligence, there were the following empires:

  • The Roman Empire
  • The Han dynasty in China
  • The Parthian Empire, rival to Rome
  • The Kingdom of Aksum (East Africa)
  • Maurya and Stavahana Dynasties (Deccan region of India)

All proud empires and in the case of the Romans under Augustus and the Han, in something of a golden age. But the bouncing women in the kitchen, and the children growing inside them, would surpass and uproot them all.

And the women knew.

I think prayer is like that. That even now, amid children and shopping and figuring out what’s for dinner, people in prayer are receiving promises that will re-landscape the world. The proud will be humbled, the mighty brought down, while the humble are treated, by God, like royalty. Prayer is the ultimate slow activity, lowly, hidden. Receiving and bearing promises from God is lonely. That was why the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth was so happy: two people weighed down with God’s promises each met and recognized a sister in the believing and in its burden. Their acts of prayer and faith were acts of lowly love that rocked the world and outlived its empires.

When prayer changes history

Sometimes it happens

A high wall is cracked open by a growing tree
Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.

  • Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
  • The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
  • Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.

So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.

I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.

Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution2: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.

Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

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.”

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.
15 Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
    who walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
16 They 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.

Why not me?

Healing seemed to come quickly in the New Testament

Photo by Johannes Roth on Unsplash

Today (yesterday as you read this), my wife and I listened to the Pray as you go app as we often do, a little daily dose of Ignatian spirituality. The passage was about the person with leprosy who said to Jesus, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’ and Jesus’ reply, ‘I am willing! Be clean.’

My body was still upside down after our very recent and lovely holiday in Singapore. We had arrived back three days earlier. I was extremely breathless, perhaps exacerbated by jet lag. The previous evening it had taken me many minutes and several stops to walk the 200 yards in the dark and cold to our post box and I was frightened.

My first thought on hearing the passage was ‘why not me?’

But this was followed by a second thought: ‘It is you, and has been you.’

This lifted my spirits as I realized it was true. It was true in the larger sense 12 years ago when I recovered from a coma in which I was expected to die after my church held a 36-hour prayer vigil. But it was also true in the lesser senses of other bad times and fears negotiated. It was true in the smallest sense of daily acts of grace and goodness to my life and soul. I am a child of the kingdom! What a thing. I am a beneficiary of the power of Christ! Goodness and mercy has pursued me all my life! The (remaining) light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory to be revealed. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

This time of year we are also putting away the cards and letters received over Christmas, and I see these tendrils of love and faithfulness extending into lives all over the place. So many grateful! So many restored, or maintained, in life and health!

Why not me? It is us. In the midst of the shadows all around, it is us.

Dethroning anxiety

I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting this wonderful blog from Nadia Bolz-Weber. On the face of it, her circle and mine (hers is much bigger) do not much intersect: ordained, tattooed, a former addict, divorced, remarried and probably further over on some theological spectrum than I, but she writes and thinks so beautifully that I would recommend her corner of the internet to you and anybody. Here’s the link that should enable you to sign up. And here’s something she wrote a couple of weeks ago, about anxiety:

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn’t think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

… worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe … It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week –

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn’t have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

The gospel industrial complex and the big drummer in the sky

Photo by Caleb Toranzo on Unsplash

(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)

You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:

  • A parts list
  • Step-by-step instructions
  • Hazards to avoid
  • Useful techniques for greater efficiency

Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.

It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:

  • Babies
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Societies
  • Economies
  • Medicine
  • Education
  • Business

You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )

Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.

Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.