New Adventures

I have been thinking about the challenges ahead in this New Year. I would very much like to play the ostrich with them and stick my head firmly in the sand and hope they just go away. That’s not likely to happen though.

I occasionally do some of the Facebook quizzes but rarely post the result unless it really impresses me. A recent one was about abstract paintings and you were to indicate the colours which most attracted your attention, an emotion you sensed or some such thing. It was supposed to explore your subconscious mind.  Apparently my character trait turned out to be “courage”.  Quite how they come to these conclusions I don’t know and for the most part I take them with a pinch of salt. I could run a hundred scenarios through my mind that would demonstrate the lack of courage – but deep down there was a resounding “Yes, I am courageous!”

I thought back to my move up to Inverness.  It was more than 25 years ago. I had taught abroad for a number of years, returned home to discover the education system had gone through too many changes for me to feel I could catch up. I wasn’t a happy beanie.  I was in a church where the women were all mothers and met in the afternoons for Bible studies and prayer meetings.  Their lives revolved around homes and husbands and babies and – nothing whatsoever I could relate to. I though the solution was to find a husband and have lots of babies and become a proper woman! Sadly that is how some churches deal with women.  Find them husbands. That wasn’t God’s plan.  A year spent on a gospel outreach team was His plan – not mine at all.  Door knocking, street drama, days of intense prayer, fasting – not my cup of tea I thought but it turned out to be totally me for that one year. The rest of the team might have been full of angst and soul searching and deep repentance or whatever, but I was having a ball.

The outreach year began at the end of September with a team-bonding week in a stately home mid-way between Newcastle and Jedborough. Our team was one of a half dozen or so. After that we all piled into minibuses and headed off to various towns and cities around the UK. My pastor at the time, Steve Petra, had recommended I be placed in Inverness – the furthest north he could place me. He wanted me to be as far away from Rugby as I could go, so I wouldn’t keep coming home when things got tough. He severed the spiritual apron strings and kicked me north.

I thought I was making a big mistake. I wasn’t a sociable being – still aren’t. I wasn’t particularly vocal about my faith. I had heaps of baggage from the Plymouth Brethren Church I had been attending for years and had issues about the role of women. It just seemed such a bad idea but I’d handed in my notice at work, raised the relevant funds to get on the team and I was carrying the best wishes of a church I had been a part of for barely two years.

We stopped somewhere along the A9 – possibly to let me out of the van to be sick.  I have never been a great traveller by bus. It was night time and the middle of nowhere.  It’s quite possible we did the holy thing – praying before arriving in Inverness and giving the year over to God – like you do on gospel outreach teams.

There was no light pollution.  The sky was cram-packed with stars. I remember looking up at them and being able to identify the few constellations I knew. They were like familiar friends.

“Just as the stars in the sky never change, I never change either,” said God. “I am the same God, yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

My life was changing.  My place of residence was changing. The things I would be doing each day were going to be different from anything I had ever done before but God was still the same. I felt courage seep into every bit of me. I squared my shoulders and stood up tall – as tall as someone who was four foot eleven inches could be – and I climbed back into the minibus with something approaching joy.

Years later I wrote a poem. I find the words are speaking to me again, reminding me that whatever the challenges ahead I am fixed to the truth of an unchanging God.

New Adventures 

Broad sky above her

Peppered with stars.

A road winding northwards

Empty of cars.

Uprooted and moving

To pastures unknown.

Friends left behind her

Feeling alone.

She traces the patterns

Of stars in the sky,

Fixed in their places

Shining so high.

Some things are certain

They always will be;

Like sunrise and sunset

And tides of the sea.

God never changes,

This much she knows.

Fixed to this truth

Onward she goes.

My Mission Field

I write poetry.  I hang about with people who write poetry, or read poetry or listen to poetry being read.  It’s a very precise group of people. That’s my people, my place and my message is conveyed in poetic form – it's my mission field I suppose, which is not to say it’s my only mission field.

A month or two ago I spoke at our local Women Aglow meeting about digging up the gifts God has given us and shared with them my own discovery of poetry.  Something seemingly random tipped me onto a path that I didn’t plan for. I shared some of the landmarks along the way.  Through the generosity of my church I was able to publish a collection of poems – “Wider Than The Corners or This World”.

One of the ladies in the group shared an encouraging testimony regarding the poetry book.

Her father-in-law was very ill and in the final weeks of his life.  He was a lover of poetry but perhaps not such a lover of God.   No one wants to feel that they are being hounded into the kingdom but there was a sense of urgency as the days went by.

Knowing he loved poetry, my friend read some of the poems from my book. They don’t pretend to be anything other than poems about faith.  God isn’t hidden behind vague metaphors and deep symbolism.  You would have to read the book to see what I mean.  Some of them are full of gentle theology that bashes no one over the head.

She said that he smiled and held her hand as she read one poem after another. There were opportunities to talk about the truth in the poems, but mostly she let the poems speak for themselves. He found comfort in them.

It was a few weeks later that another friend shared with me that she had just returned from the man’s funeral. 

In the final hours before he died the family were gathered around and taking their turns to have a last conversation, a final embrace before saying goodbye. 

He sent one of the family members to fetch his daughter-in-law although he had seen her earlier on.

His request - “I think I am ready to meet Jesus.  Will you pray with me?”

The prayer they said together was possibly the last thing he said before he passed away.

My friend believes the gentle poetry was the turning point. The gospel presented in the poems did its job. 

Words are powerful things.  How they are lined up - one beside another – to convey a truth and stir an emotion inside – it doesn’t get better than a good poem.  Without the church’s encouragement it’s unlikely I would ever have found the finances or the confidence to get the book printed.  The poems would not have been in a book to read to anyone. 

God moves people and draws out of them the gifts He has first birthed in them. He chooses the people and the places where those gifts are best demonstrated.  Sometimes the planets align and something wonderful happens.  Sometimes someone is nudged just a little closer to God.

"I Get It!"

Last weekend there was an article in one of the papers debunking the idea that scientists didn’t have a sense of humour.  They included a whole column of jokes.  As I read through them, the thought going through my head was, “I don’t get it!” I chortled at one or two that I did get, but many of them needed a little more scientific background than I possessed.  Had I been at a scientist’s joke convention I would have felt very much disconnected and unable to relate to anything. 

There was a bit of that last night at the Woman Aglow meeting.  I think I didn’t glow!  The people sat around my table, for the most part, were Street Pastors.  They talked a little about the people on the streets that they had met and exchanged stories about different people on drugs.  They discussed why someone who had been on drugs and then came off them would then slip back into drug addiction.  Once you have discovered freedom, why do you then give it up?

I am aware that some of the young people that I deal with dabble in soft drugs.  They have smoked a joint or two…or more in some cases.  When my brother was in a hospice in Spain his friends baked dubious ingredients into cakes for him.  Towards the later stages of his life, the doctor didn’t exactly encourage these drugs but made it plain that disguise was no longer needed.  If it helped ease my brother’s pain and discomfort then they were permitted.

For the most part I am ignorant of city’s drug scene. 

Later on in the meeting we listened to the testimony of a woman who organises the Inverness arm of the Food Bank.  Supporters were out in the supermarkets last week handing out shopping lists and encouraging people to buy one or two items.

It was a very powerful and a very heart breaking testimony. There were moments when her life paralleled mine, but then went off at very different angles.  She talked of a poverty stricken background where she would have benefited from help from a food bank.  My mother held down a number of part time jobs to bring in enough money to feed six children, my dad having died from cancer.  She could have drowned herself in a bottle but she never did – not to my knowledge.

The speaker talked about her church experiences.  We both have Spring Harvest in common and the changes that it provoked in our lives as Christians.  I went to Spring Harvest in 1982.  My encounter with the Holy Spirit was awesome.  I knew the FEAR of the Lord – not respect and reverence but FEAR.  I fled from God from that point.  My faith up until then had been safe and to some extent lived on my terms.  Having a sense of the presence of God so powerful that it pushed me trembling to my knees – I wasn’t sure I wanted that.  I may not have wanted God, but He wanted me so he pursued me.  He chased me down!

Once caught, I realised that the church I was in at the time was not leading me where God wanted me to go.  She called her move a stepping stone – a necessary place to go before god could take her where he wanted her to be.  I had my own stepping stone church too.

The opportunity for her to work with the Food Bank came.  She didn’t think she had the qualifications necessary to do the job – but who better qualified?  Having been through the kind of life that she had experienced, she knew the heartaches and the challenges of the people who were coming to the Food Bank.  She had trod the same path and could say to them, “I get it!”

I went home thoughtful.  I sat in the car and thought about all the events in her life that had led her to be exactly the person God needed for the job he had ear-marked for her.  I couldn’t help but think about my own life.  The word that comes to mind is “charmed”, but it isn’t charmed at all.  I had the childhood I had, free from any kind of abuse, because of the hard work of my mum.  I had a certain combination of genes from a clever father that meant I wouldn’t fail in school.  I worked hard, sometimes, because I had supportive teachers.  I remember we were hounded by social workers – we looked on paper the perfect cocktail of factors for failure.  Looking back I can see that God put into place the right people at the right time to steer our family in a right direction. 

As I sat in the car it was as if God said, “You are of no use to me unless you are flawed and broken in some way.”

Did I qualify as flawed and broken?  I didn’t have an alcoholic mother.  I wasn’t abused.  I didn’t come across drug addicts in my daily life.  Was I any use at all to God?

It didn’t take long to trawl through my memories to find the flawed and broken bits of it. I have my scars and my wounds which are not the same as others.  I can speak to people in some areas of life that others can’t.  To those people I can say, “I get it!”

We are all flawed and broken.  Some of us know it and have taken the bits of our lives to God and put them into his hand to make something new out of them.  Others haven’t worked it out yet.  Some learn to live with the bits, or cover them over with…with what?  There are probably more than a few covering over the brokenness of their lives with church meetings and a Sunday morning ointment.  There are others that are just waiting for someone to tell them the Good News.

The Un-Persecuted Church

It might have been just a week ago, maybe a little longer than that, when I was invited to join a day’s fast for the persecuted church in Asia.  There were other issues heavy on my heart at the time, and it seemed the ideal opportunity to bring them before God.

There was a Facebook page with lots of encouraging Bible verses.  People were also posting their prayers.

The only verse that came instantly to mind was Matthew 5:10-12 - “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

What a privilege the church is Asia was being given!  What an opportunity to deliver a powerful testimony!  As much as I could say Amen to all the prayers people posted about God’s hand being on the believers there – what caught my spirit was “How blessed!”

Where did the church lose its courage?  We seem to put a very strong emphasis on safety and comfort.  We want people to like us.  We want them to bow to our superior knowledge about God and allow us unhindered freedom to demonstrate our faith.  When someone is sacked because they wear a cross, or because they pray for a patient in hospital – they don’t feel blessed but hard done by.  When we read news items that mock and ridicule our faith, we write a letter of complaint and seek to silence the dissenter.  We feel ourselves to be victims but we don’t feel blessed.

I was reading an article on the internet this morning about a mega church in the USA.  Apparently it was common knowledge that a worship leader was having an affair with someone else in the church.  It was only a worship leader, so no one expected anyone to kick up a real fuss about it.  Chances are it might have been more serious if it had been an elder.  Indiscretions were often swept under the carpet rather than acknowledged and dealt with. 

The article went on to talk about how stagnant some of this church had become.  They had started life as something new and original and people flocked to them but now something newer and more original had come along.  There was an exodus of people leaving to join the new movement. If they wanted to halt the exodus they needed to do what the newer churches were doing and let go of out-dated ways of doing things.

If I was God I would be very disappointed in a church like that.

What they really need is a healthy dose of persecution!

I remember being weaned as a baby Christian on testimony books like Nicky Cruz and “Run Baby Run”.  One of the books I read might have been entitled “Sergei”.  It’s a long time ago.  The story was about an underground church in the Soviet Union as it was then.  One of the soldiers was Sergei.  He had the job of tracking down the church’s hiding places, arresting the believers and “persuading” them that being a Christian was a bad thing.  One church member, a girl, was arrested on three different occasions and severely beaten by Sergei.  The fourth time she was arrested, another soldier was about to lay into her with fists flying when Sergei stepped in to stop it.  He couldn’t understand why she was still a believer despite the beatings.  He became a believer himself through her testimony.

Isn’t it possible that the reason why the church in some places like the UK has a hard time attracting people is because it appears to have nothing people are looking for?   Make no mistake, people are looking for something – and it’s not something new and original in terms of worship, sermons or whatever latest fad is being offered up to draw people near.  The church has become so like the world to appeal to the world that what made it distinct from the world has been lost.  I’m not even sure the church has realised it has gone.

I am not praying that we become a persecuted church – although maybe I should.

I pray that our witness to the world would stop being so pale and insipid.

Our lives luke-warm no power or clout
So God in Heaven spits us out

A Tale of Two Houses

I seem to remember someone telling me a story a long time ago to describe what happens when a person becomes a Christian.

It’s like a person living in a house that comes under the ownership of a new landlord. Things begin to change. The new landlord for example installs double glazing, so out goes the old wooden frames, which, let’s admit it, were a bit rotten anyway. He has gets rid of the old boiler and puts in central heating. You have nice warm radiators about the place, on a timer switch. You are going to be making significant savings on your gas and electricity bills. The old bathroom suite, with the leaky taps, and the large stains are replaced with something white and gleaming, new wall and floor tiles too. The kitchen also gets the make-over. Gone are the old miss-matched cabinets and the fridge that hums noisily in the corner. He has even put a dishwasher in for you.

Sometimes the landlord consults you about the changes he is making; sometimes he just does it anyway. Like, for example, yellow wall paper in one of the bedrooms might not
be your first choice. You would prefer carpets to the wood flooring and the scattered rugs.

The place is shaping up really nicely. The landlord has invested a lot of time and energy and resources in the house and it has become a really nice place to be.

Then one morning there is a knock on the door. Don’t worry. It’s not the old landlord wanting his property back; although he has been known to shout swear words through the letterbox. The locks have been changed, and he can’t get in, and if he did, the landlord would have him arrested for trespassing. No, it’s the landlord with his arm around a stranger you have never met before.

“Come on in,” says the landlord, “Have a good look around. See what I have done to the house.”

Now this might be all well and good, if you weren’t still lounging around in your pyjamas, with your teeth un-brushed. As the stranger disappears into the kitchen to admire the dishwasher, the landlord turns to you to explain.

“When I became the landlord, the house became mine to do with as I wish. You live in the house, but it’s not really yours any longer. I didn’t make these changes just so you would have a more comfortable life. I want other people to be able to see that I’m a good landlord – the best there is. What better way than to show them your house?”

End of story. I will leave you to work out the meaning.

Early this morning I couldn’t remember what brought the story to mind. I am down to lead the meeting on Sunday and I might have been sifting through sermons I preached a long time ago, forgotten by now, that I could just dust off, breath new life into, resurrect if you will.

“What about part two?” said God, in his most obscure voice. “You know that life isn’t like that, the nice house, the make-over, the dishwasher and all that. What happens five years, or ten years down the line?”

What happens, apparently, is that one morning you wake up with a sore head. You are laying in the hall with a bruise the size of a duck’s egg. You don’t want to look too closely at the cricket bat someone hit you with. There might be blood on it. There’s been a break in.

You drag yourself into the sitting room. The television has gone the DVD player and the collection of DVDs. The ornaments off the shelf, which may not have any value to anyone but you, have been smashed one by one. The sofa has been disembowelled. Offensive graffiti has been sprayed over the walls. In the kitchen, all the cupboards have been emptied, the plates and cups smashed to smithereens, the packets of flour and sugar opened and emptied on the work tops. The microwave is missing and the door of the dishwasher has been wrenched off. The bathroom is bad. They have taken a sledgehammer to the tiles, and that brown stuff on the walls has a particularly foul smell. It’s definitely not brown paint.

There’s another knock at the door. It’s the landlord. Looking through the spy glass, he has a stranger with him. It’s not the man from the insurance. Actually, now you think about it, you know the man. He was the visitor you saw earlier – when you hadn’t had time to dress.

Are you going to open the door this time?

You see, that is my life right now! I had a break in (not in real life). The old landlord perhaps, or a gang of thugs he knew, couldn’t get through the door, so he bashed in a window. I didn’t invite him in, put the cricket bat in his hand and invite him to knock me unconscious. He just did it. He wreaked havoc. He destroyed things that meant nothing to anyone else, but everything to me. He left destruction everywhere.

The temptation is to lock the door. How can it help anyone to see me amidst all the damage?

Yesterday, a friend of mine was brave enough to unlock a door and invite me in to her heart. She had suffered a spiritual break-in and robbery. Her “house” had been ransacked and she was left in tears. She didn’t put a cloth in one hand and a bottle of detergent in another, but I found myself starting to gather up the fragments of the broken ornaments.

It’s what you do in those moments where a powerful testimony lays. I wish we never experience the break-ins, but we do. Let’s not lock the door, to each other, on our messes.

Feet of clay

Joe asked me earlier on this week if I knew what was wrong with Jonathan Edwards. He was stepping down from his commitment to “Songs of Praise.” He didn’t know whether it was a problem with the “Songs of Praise” set-up or whether it was a faith issue.

Years ago, Songs of praise did a Jonathan Edwards special. He was such a big name – an Olympic hero – and a Christian too. He talked about his family, his achievements and how God had been with him.

I knew nothing, but made it my business to find out. It is a faith issue. He is not convinced anymore that God exists!

How does that happen to a person – shining brightly one moment and snuffed out the next? Except that it never happens that way at all – the light dims gradually over time, until there is no light. You don’t go to bed one night believing in the reality of God and wake up next day not believing. It is a process. There is a beginning, a middle and an end.

I think the beginning it is about who you perhaps spend your time with, and who you don’t, or about what you spend your time doing and what you neglect to do. The world of work, the people that you meet every day in the work place, can erode away at your faith, ever so slowly. In the Song of Songs it mentions the little foxes that eat away at the vines. The times when I feel most fragile are times when I have started to listen to the cynicism around me, and poke holes in the things I know to be true! What stops me from progressing too far down that road is making sure that I have fellowship with people who will build me up and repair the damage done.

Other times when I feel fragile it has been down to being too busy and not spending enough time with God. I know that I can get so immersed in writing that all else gets put to one side. I don’t soak in God’s presence because I see a deadline looming over the horizon. I do my mathematics and don’t think I have enough time to do what I need to and have the quiet times with God.

I think that for Jonathan it must have been an added pressure to be a Christian hero to many. Why do we need to do that people – put them up on a pedestal like that? We all need to be heroes of the faith in what ever walk in life we find ourselves, so that people like Jonathan Edwards don’t have to shoulder all the responsibility.

I taught for a while in a private school in Cyprus. Some of the pupils were boarders, and I lived in the same building. The school was a Christian school and many of the boarders were not Christians. It would appear to be an ideal situation – a real Christian living among them. A living advertisement as it were before their eyes! It didn’t work out that way. I was immature in the faith, and not really sure of what I believed.

I can remember saying, “Don’t look at me. Read the New Testament and see how Jesus lived his life!”

How sad! It was so the opposite of what God wants to say, “Look at her! Then you will see me.”

We seem to be so busy pointing to someone else and saying “Follow him – he’s got it right.” That we don’t say, like Paul confidently said, “Imitate me, because I am imitating the Father.”