Category: Devotion

Rowing a boat alone across a lake

Behold the terror and the joy

 

Lonely BoatingImagine rowing a boat on your own across a lake. The fears and joys are yours alone.

We are always alone. People may sit by our fireplaces–as it were–over many wonderful evenings and years. They may hug us and hold us, accepting each other as completely as two humans can.

But no-one knows us quite fully or quite truthfully. There are always veils. We are not entirely as we present ourselves, even to those we love the most.

Thanks to faith in Christ, though, I’ve discovered I’m never alone.

When I’m rowing alone across a lake, also known as living, Christ knows with me all the terror and the joy. Other loves may kindly watch, from the shore or other boats. Other loves may cheer and blow kisses. But he knows it all and we share it together.

 

A touch of the hand-done

Creation is a bit bodged together

A biologist friend of mine, a Christian, was telling me that what he saw through his microscope was … well … a bit ramshackle. It was a challenge, he said, to the idea of a Creator.

You would think a Creator would do something altogether more slick and wonderful. And of course, many biologists peer down their microscopes and do see shades of the beautiful and even the elegant. Perhaps biology is both wonderful … and a bit Heath-Robinson.

My friend and I were talking in our local Anglican church.  And when I think of the words “bodged together” and “still a bit wonderful” the words “Church of England” follow quite naturally. The C of E did not spring, intricate, interlocking, gently humming with purpose, from its Maker’s hand, like an expensive watch. Nor, it appears, did Life.

We serve the God of cuckoo clocks.

Day #3: KerPlunk marble tube and CD dominoes

*

Here’s my comic novel Paradise, which takes the themes of “redemption” and “ramshackle” to new heights, or possibly, depths. Free on Kindle as a gateway drug to the next ones in the series.

The God of small things

The case for being on the back row, third from the left

‘Though famous speakers and evangelists today can reach thousands of people with one telecast, discipleship is done one relationship at a time by those we will never read about. Their legacy is seen in the lives of those they touched. Perhaps I will never find the spotlight. But my value to the kingdom of God is not determined by my ability to attract or hold the spotlight. Instead, it is determined by my willingness to listen, learn, and be used by Jesus, whenever and however he desires.’

(Losers Like Us: Redefining Discipleship after Epic Failure
By Daniel Hochhalter)

I’m grateful to my colleague Miriam Cowpland for (reading this book and) digging out this quote.

 

Frustration, difficulty and pain: God’s gifts to us

icu wordcloud
This particular wordcloud came from a coma-survivors’ focus group (of which I am a member)

Here’s a quote about what it means to stick with our friends while we also try to follow Christ.

‘Frustration and pain are essential features of incarnational ministry.’

It goes on:

‘If we are to truly identify with our people, we must expect frustration and pain. If we don’t, we may be taken by surprise when we encounter it and be tempted to leave this work for an easier path or be so disillusioned that we lose the joy of ministry. I think many people are suffering unnecessary pain in ministry today because they did not fully anticipate the suffering that ministry inevitably involves. This pain has caused them to be discontented when actually they should be rejoicing in tribulation.’

‘As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ (John 20:21)

‘That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’ (2 Corinthians 12:10)

(Quote from popular Sri Lankan evangelist and teacher Ajith Fernando in his his book Jesus Driven Ministry. I’m grateful to my colleague Miriam Copeland for digging out this quote.)

Ajith Fernando has presumably enlarged on this theme in a more recent title:

A question for us

Scattered‘Do you love me?’

Inside all of us–I guess and hope, because I’m surely not the only one–is a red-faced, awkward, sweating, small and ugly person.  It’s when that person and Christ talk together the real work is done.

Peter and Jesus had that conversation. Ignore their history, their beards, the sound of lapping waves and crunching footsteps, the barbecued fish in their teeth. Ignore their age and size, big blokes, rugby team blokes. Ignore Peter’s  secret tears, recriminations, justifications, sleepless nights, self-doubt, arguments with himself and despair.

Here’s the conversation:

‘Do you love me?’

‘Lord–you know.’

‘Tend my lambs.’

Walking the space between what we have to do and what we love to do

Don’t seize up or blow up, fill up.

Footprints

It’s kind of basic to being a Christian. We want to know God’s will and follow it. You can’t call Christ ‘Lord, Lord’ and then go off and ignore what he says. We have to pursue obedience.

But for me the Christian life only works when we pursue joy as well.

My experience is that we try to do things faithfully and obediently but without joy we can manage to a certain extent—and we have to, because we all have to do stuff we don’t particularly like doing.

But if that’s all we do, and we do it for a long time, we start to run out of steam, get cynical, feel trapped. We may not know how it happened—we never wanted it to happen—but we know it has happened or is currently now happening. Externally we can look fine but internally, we know things are not so good.

(Of course the other side is true too. If we merely pursue pleasure and happiness, that too becomes rather empty.)

A kind of repentance

Somehow—it seems to me—the fruitful place is when we are under the influence of both faithfulness and joy. We obey Christ. But we lean towards, move into, preferentially choose, those tasks and roles that seem to answer a deep longing in our hearts, those things that nourish us, those things we love. ‘I have food’ said Jesus to the disciples, ‘of which you know nothing.’ He found joy and nourishment in his obedience.

Choosing joy as well is obedience is a kind of repentance. Why? Because it is turning away from a focus on jobs to be done and gaps to be filled and turning back to Christ himself. It is realizing, again, we have an audience of just One, and everything we do we do for him. It is seeking to have him re-create us again, a bit more in his image. It’s admitting our need and helplessness, not looking to him for a medal.

The Rock that is higher than we are

And we don’t quite know how we get there

Rocks, Sedona“Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
― Frederick Buechner

So stirred by this quote. I think we can pray in many ways. Sometimes it’s good to lift up people we love and situations we care about, working through our lists.

Sometimes we can worship.

Sometimes we work our way through a psalm, or a liturgy.

Some of us like to use the Lord’s Prayer as a set of headings or jumping-off points, a kind of road map to guide our thoughts.

But I wonder if this best sort of prayer is beyond all of these. It’s to do with unpacking our problems before Christ until we come to a place, not necessarily of understanding, but of peace.

Or clambering up an impossible problem in prayer, scrabbling for a foothold, until again, Jesus reaches down and gives us something to hold onto, something that holds us and gives us quiet, happy hearts. The view all around may be terrifying,  but we are safe and snug, supported by some promise or gift of trusting that is beyond our understanding.

We have stumbled onto the rock that is higher than we are: Christ’s own trustworthiness. We don’t know how it happens, but it happens.

When I cannot read, or think, or even pray, I …

But it’s enough

“When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust.”
― James Hudson Taylor

Paradox, and what to do with it.

stormy photo
Photo by Karsun Designs Photography

Paradox can be a happy place, and leaving it for a simpler place just leads to trouble, I think.

Paradoxes are like the edges of our known world. We sail out to them. But however far we continue to sail, we realise we aren’t getting any further.

Is it true that in all the big questions, if you keep asking long enough, you reach paradox? Suffering and a God of love. Free choice and fate. Healing and sickness. Success and failure. Knowing things and not knowing things. Death and life or judgement and mercy. How can they both exist together? What happens at the place they meet?

This is the place of paradox, where we stand in the cross-winds. Or perhaps the cross-hairs. Or perhaps just in the shadow of the cross itself, where Christ resolved paradoxes by becoming one.

I think the place of paradox is a bleak, empty place, or a full, contented one, depending on whether we stand and complain, or fall and worship.

 

‘Don’t die with your music still inside you’ – revisited

Fresh thinking on an idea that changed my life

on ne regrette rienIt’s not actually a Biblical idea; which is a problem.

I was galvanised when I first came across this phrase. Actually, since galvanised means ‘using electricity to coat something with zinc’, I wasn’t literally galvanised, but you know what I mean. The electrodes sizzled and cracked and I sat up sharply. A burst of electricity, and I had a new resilience.

Don’t die with your music still inside you. This was a sustaining thought during the dark period that followed my month-long coma in 2013. I tried to get back to health, for two reasons. To enjoy time with my family again. And to write the stuff that had been going on in my heart all my life. That phrase about ‘my music’ and ‘not dying’ was a sword for the fight.

I did recover, and it’s wonderful, and the stream of books I wanted to write has started to dribble. (See the sites for my fiction and my non-fiction.) I encourage everyone everywhere to take that phrase to heart and do something about it, whenever they can.

But as an idea, it isn’t quite true. It chimes with many Biblical themes: gifting, vocation. Everyone serving each other by doing what they love to do most.  But does it account for the obstacles and traps? For the stumbles in a broken world? For the person who gave themselves to caring for others rather than expressing the deep longings of their heart? For the child you lost or never had? For the fact that sometimes in our lives the night-time blinds are drawn in the middle of bright day?

Is it true that, for love’s sake, some people do ‘die with their music still inside them’?  Or does the brokenness of the world sometimes prevent it?

In truth, I think, everything in this pre-death life is just a preliminary. It’s just the starter for the eternal meal, and we don’t always even finish the starter. Our ‘music’ is not just for this life, but for eternity. Let’s hope some will emerge now, but anyways it will emerge later. It will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright now, that means it’s not the end.

Eternity isn’t just about marvelling over the unfolding creativity of God. We were built in his image. Through the  unravelling ages we will be creating—letting out the music—alongside him.