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Living the Life

Celebrating the light

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“No, not the nightlight Mummy!  Turn on the big light, the nightlight makes shadows”

So runs the conversation with my seven-year-old at bedtime (nearly every night).

I’ve been thinking about that this week.  A little bit of light goes a long way to dispelling the darkness, but a 100 watt light bulb is much, much better.

Our world is full of little nightlights.  Little bits of God’s beauty and goodness breaking through in smiles, sunsets and hugs, in love, truth, joy and laughter.  Every single piece of goodness and beauty in our world is a gift from the heart of our heavenly father and it gets rid of much of the darkness.  But even the light of all those little night lights is not enough. It makes shadows.

This weekend a lot of people are, one way or another, celebrating the shadows.  I really, really, really don’t want to offend, but I won’t be. I know that making fun of the darkness takes way some of our fear of it.  I know that for most people it’s just lots of fun and pretending to be scared.  But I won’t do it… I can’t, I just want to look into and celebrate the light.

Because the truth is that turning on a 100 watt light bulb in your life is better than having nightlights and trying to train yourself to not be afraid of the shadows.

As Katie says “when you turn on the big light it’s different. All that darkness runs away, all at the same time and there’s no room left for any shadows”

So today, as every day I’m going to do my best not to hang out in the shadows, and I’m celebrating the light.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”

Happy victory-over-the-darkness day everybody – have a good one 😉

Living the Life

First rain day

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It’s an unofficial celebration day here on the island.  After a very long hot summer today we have the first proper rain.  All around you can feel the dry, dusty patches of land drinking it in.   Cracks in the earth are being filled, dust is being washed off. People are smiling as the air feels fresher and cooler.

Of course there are inconveniences – drains that have spent a summer accumulating dust and leaves take a while to get back into action, my car isn’t entirely waterproof, and I’m not at all sure where I packed away the umbrellas…

But it feels good.

And I suddenly realise how much I need to step back into the rainy, overflowing, soaking presence of God again.  It’s been a long, hot dry summer and I am so ready for some rain.

rain

This rain is embroidered in backstitch.  A skill I spent rather a lot of time trying to teach to some eager ten-year olds at camp recently.  In fact, I repeated this phrase so often that I can still hear myself saying it, over and over again:

“first you have to go ahead of yourself a bit, in as straight a line as you can, and then you have to come back to the place where you see the last stitch go in.  Ahead of yourself and then back, ahead of yourself and then back, ahead of yourself and then back…”

“Ahead of yourself and then back”

We go ahead of ourselves all the time, striking out in the things we think, or hope God is asking of us.  But there are times where the thread is loose, the way forward is unclear, we no longer seem to be attached to the line of what has gone before.

Life is backstitch

We need to learn to keep going back-

Going back into the arms of Jesus,

going back to resting in his presence,

going back to the last thing we heard him say.

I wonder what the last thing was that you ‘heard’ Jesus say?

Choose to remember it.

sink your heart deep into it.

Let it soak into you, fill you up and then give you the direction to stretch out ahead of yourself again.

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I’d love to know how God speaks to you through this (or other postcards). Please leave a comment below, Ellie x

Living the Life

Harvest in Unexpected Places

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It’s that time of year again when the kids are rifling through my cupboards trying to find not-out-of-date tins to take in to school for Harvest.  It brings back sharp memories of carrying a shoebox full of rice pudding and tinned carrots and leaving it at the front of a chilly church  amongst piles of similar offerings and wondering which mother had time to make bread in the shape of a bushel of wheat.

Harvest Festival for me is a time not only of being thankful for all that we have, but also of anticipating future fruitfulness and harvest in my life.  It’s reminded me of this postcard from last year and I thought I’d share it again today – hopefully it will inspire you too to expect a harvest in unexpected places.

It was 1917 and as blockaded Britain was slowly running out of food, the government announced that everyone needed to start growing their own supplies using whatever land was available. Suddenly, in cities all over the country people began digging up lawns, roadside verges, parks and other bits of unused land and turning them into allotments.   What had been ornamental or neglected or not-thought-of became places of harvest that produced food for a hungry nation.

Perhaps most of us have areas of our lives where we might expect to be fruitful.  But there are times when God turns those expectations upside down.  Sometimes when we feel like we are all out of resources, God produces a harvest in unexpected places – places we wouldn’t even have considered looking for it.

The garden fork in this postcard is a tool for turning over the earth.   Transforming a neat tidy lawn into a vegetable patch is a job that requires a lot of digging; turning over; planting of seeds and patience.  It strikes me as quite a challenging process!

It’s not an easy statement to make: “yes Lord, come and dig me over”.  You can’t pray that quickly or without some thought.  It’s a deeply courageous prayer.    But I know that without a doubt that a moment of surrender is the beginning of the process of new fruitfulness.    A veg patch never looks ‘finished’, it doesn’t have neat edges, may not be approved of by the neighbours, but it does something wonderful – it provides food for the hungry.

Today might be a good time to ask God what part of your life he wants to use to grow a fresh harvest in (and what that harvest or provision might look like!).  It might be a talent, a gift, a place, a group of friends, an opportunity… or something else altogether.  It may surprise you what He says!

Perhaps you look at this picture and recognise that you are already ‘in the process’ – that earth is being exposed and turned over,  stones being sifted out.  Or perhaps you are aware  of your area of your life which have been dug over and planted with seeds, prepared for something – but you’re not sure yet what shape that harvest is going to take.  Ask God about it today, but rest in the truth that He is the Lord of the Harvest, and that if we surrender to the process, He will bring it about.

Jesus
Lord of the Harvest
Be with me today
as I offer you the land of my life
the fields, gardens, paths and verges
Show me
the places I overlook
break up old soil
and plant new seeds
so that I may see your harvest
in unexpected places.

A Harvest from Unexpected Places

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Butterflies

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I’ve got butterflies on the brain!  This weekend I’m off on a butterfly themed Guide camp and have spent the last fortnight immersed in butterfly cakes, butterfly songs, butterfly games and butterfly badges.  I can even tell you the word for butterfly in 8 different languages…

In and through it all, as ever, God has been whispering his own message, a story that is so much more beautiful and important than anything else that’s going on!

When I look at butterflies I’m drawn in to the extraordinary hope of becoming.  The caterpillar has all the potential to become something beautiful and beyond itself, all wrapped up in an ungainly, flightless body.  It goes through a time of slowly feeding and growing, and then an incredibly tough season of transformation, but in all that time it is becoming.

One of the most glorious things about being a follower of Jesus is realising that who I am now is not all I’m ever going to be.. That I can expect an onward journey of becoming more like Jesus, with more hope, love, faith and grace being released into my life.  Even when ‘everything is NOT awesome’ I am still becoming.

And in that time (and this is the bit I really love) I’m not travelling away from who I really am – I’m actually travelling towards the person I was always meant to be.

In this world obsessed with self-actualisation, I’m letting go of my need to know myself and choosing to try to know Him; letting go of my right to be myself and choosing to be who He calls me to be. And beautifully, gloriously, amazingly, this actually leads me to a place where I become more deeply and truly myself than I could ever have been.

Beautiful.

IMG_1778

I’m becoming.

Have a great weekend my friends, and if you read this on Friday, pray that it doesn’t rain too much in Cyprus this weekend!  x

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Mango tree

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I hate waiting…

Since I moved to an island I’ve realized that they way to get the very best fruit is to eat whatever is currently in season. Strawberries appear in May, cherries in July, figs in September, and clementines in December- fresh and delicious, and at their very best in their own season. But if you want cherries in September, well, you’re probably just going to have to wait.

I’m a bit like the cheeky children in a story I heard from my friend Bron.
In the front yard of their old house in a remote town in Mozambique they had a wonderful mango tree. It was heavy with fruit and they were looking forward to sharing a bumper harvest with their friends and neighbours. They patiently waited and watched as the fruit grew, happily anticipating the day when they were sweet enough to eat and dreaming about jam, pies and fruit salad!

Unfortunately, the children of that neighborhood are not great at waiting. Much to my friends’ frustration, these kids would sneak into the yard and eat the mangos while they were still green, hard and sour. That first year, most of the fruit never had the opportunity to ripen!

God’s word for me this week has been simply this- to eat fruit in the right season.

Eat fruit in the right season

Sometimes we can see what God is growing in our lives a bit ahead of time. But if we are in a hurry to harvest what we see growing on the tree, if we push into something ahead of God’s timing, we risk missing out on the sweetness it would have had if only we had waited to the right time.

Don’t eat fruit that isn’t ripe yet

On the other hand, I don’t want to let caution, laziness, or lack of awareness stop me from bringing in the harvest when it’s ready.

but don’t leave ripe fruit to rot on the tree

That’s all very well, I thought, but when it comes to the opportunities in front of me, how on earth am I supposed to discern which ones are ripe for picking and which aren’t yet?

I stumbled across the answer on Wikipedia while I was looking for a picture to paint from:
you can tell when a mango is ripe because it smells really, really good.

Pray this week that God would give you the nose to smell out which ‘fruit’ is ripe so you can be aware when you are tempted to jump ahead of God’s timing, or when you’re being too cautious to reach out and enjoy what’s in front of you.

Enjoy whatever is on the tree this week. May it one way or another be a blessing to you.

Living the Life, Surviving Tough Times

Dust days

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I glanced out of the window at church on Sunday morning and realised we can see the mountains again.

The beautiful Kyrenia mountains are the permanent backdrop to life in this city.   If I get lost (which still happens even after four years here) I look for the mountains to get my bearings; when we’ve been away, the sight of them makes me feel I’m home.

The sky in Cyprus is nearly always blue, so we can usually see those mountains as clearly as can be.  Occasionally we have some haze or cloud so they are harder to make out, or even partly covered – but it’s always obvious where they are.

Last week though, an extraordinary cloud of dust descended on the city and we could barely see the buildings down the street let alone a range of mountains 11 miles away.  For almost a week, our mountains were completely hidden.

In life there are days when the sky is clear, when you can see God’s face as clearly as your own reflection in a mirror.  In my experience there are many more days where it’s cloudy or misty, and you struggle a bit to be aware of his presence or hear his voice.  And then, every once in a while there are thick dust days.

No-one has a relationship with God that is easy-breezy mountain-top-experience all the time.  Everyone has misty seasons and even thick, thick dust days where it’s hard to breathe and harder to see.

On Sunday morning, as I was struggling to worship after my stressy week of sick children, overdue speeding tickets, broken down cars and general tiredness; feeling guilty and confused because I just couldn’t feel God’s presence as clearly as usual (or as much as everyone else in the room seemed to) I looked up and realised I could see the mountains.

And I heard him whisper:

“Look at those mountains…

Was there one moment, in all of the week that you couldn’t see them, or in any of the times when they’ve been partly hidden from you, has there ever been a moment when you’ve doubted that they were there?”

(And of course, I never have. Mountains don’t just cease to exist because I can’t see them. I have faith in the existence of those mountains!)

“Well then,” he said, “trust me that I am here, whether you can see me or not – you just have to turn to where you know I am, keep walking towards me, and wait for it to rain”

So I’m doing that my friends.  I’m turning to where God is, because I know he’s there, even when the outline of his face is tricky to make out.  I’m declaring to my heart that he is where he has always been.  And it seems to me that this isn’t lack of faith – it’s faith made solid, faith you can walk on.

‘Faith is being sure of what you hope for, and certain of what you cannot see’

If you’re walking blindly towards where you know God is just now, my heart is with you.  Take courage. One day it will rain, the dust will be washed away and your view will be clear again. Until then – He is still with you.

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Nametapes

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At this time of year, as I prick my fingers sewing nametapes into the children’s clothes, I ineveitably come back to thinking of this story. It’s one of my favourites, so I thought I would post it again for those who didn’t see it the first time around, and for those who did, but need to hear it again..

This is how I remember it… like a page in the much-loved story book of the children’s early lives… a moment that God used to touch my heart.

It’s more than ten years since my firstborn started school, but I still remember the day when I was battling through the pile of freshly-bought school uniform, dutifully sewing in the little white woven name tapes, and my four year old came to ask me what I was doing.

Now, I’ve read that the average four year old asks around 200 questions a day, and mine was maybe even a little above average in this department, so I cast around for an answer that would pre-empt any further questions and maybe even send him back to his lego:

“I’m sewing in little tapes with your name on them, to show everyone that these clothes belong to you; and then no-one can take them away from you and they can’t get lost.”

It must have been a good answer, because he just looked very thoughtfully at me and then disappeared upstairs to his room again.

A minute later though, he reappeared, dragging his much beloved (and slightly gruesome) Blue-Blanky. This worn and grubby cot blanket had been at his side constantly for the past three years (apart from one heart-rending moment in a motorway service station and some late-night under-the-cover-of-darkness trips through the washing machine…) and was a great source of comfort to him, and occasional stress to me!

“Sew my name on Blue-Blanky Mummy,” he said earnestly, “then everyone will know it’s mine, and no-one can say it’s not and it can never ever be lost, or taken away”

So I did.

About a week later I was reading Ephesians when this verse caught a hold of my heart:

“Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession- to the praise of his glory” Ephesians 1: 13-14 NIV

I suddenly realised that the Father has done the equivalent of sewing a woven nametape onto my very heart and soul – he has marked me with a seal.

Isn’t that marvellous?… isn’t it wonderful?  The Holy Spirit is the irrevokable royal seal on your life that declares to the earth and to the heavens for ever and ever:  “This soul is MINE”.

When I look at this picture, I hear God whispering:

“Everyone will know you are mine, no-one can say you are not, and you can never ever be lost, or taken away”

I wonder if you do too?

cashtape

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Once upon a time…

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Storytelling can damage your health.

I realised this a week ago, in the shower, often the scene of epiphany moments for me.  I was getting ready for a lunchtime flight back to Cyprus and while I was washing my hair I let my mind wander off for a bit..

A few moments later, my heart pounding and feeling slightly sick, I realised that I had been telling myself a very stressful story about a security guard at the airport deciding my ipad was dodgy and trying to take it away, my older daughter melting down and the six year old pulling one of her disappearing acts…

In the space of a few minutes I’d gone from feeling fairly relaxed about my flight to having butterflies in my stomach and a racing pulse.

And that was my epiphany:  I was getting stressed about something that was entirely imaginary.  My brain was making up a story and yet my emotions were reacting as if the story was real and true.

I’ve always known that stories are powerful.

A story can explain something difficult to grasp beautifully simply, it can lodge in your mind and keep whispering its message for years to come.  The news that millions are suffering can pass us by, but the story of one family, or one child can awaken the compassion that leads to action.

And I’m a story-phile: I love, reading, writing, collecting and telling them.  But usually I think about the postive ways a story can influence someone. In my shower-epiphany I realised that these  little stories I tell myself, the ‘what-would happen-if’ stories, are making me stressed when I don’t need to be, and that’s really not good.

Of course it’s not just the what-would-happen-if stories that I need to take control of and force into the shape of the truth.  The even more dangerous ones are harder to spot..

Those stories that start ‘he thinks….’ or ‘she thinks’ and never have a happy ending. When someone does something that hurts or offends me, my brains tends to freewheel into storytelling… “He did that because he thinks I’m not important”,  “She did that because last week I forgot to phone and she thinks that I am not a good friend and…”, “Because I did that, he is going to feel really bad and then…”

Experience tells me that those lines of thought provoke a load of negative feelings- sometimes the really powerful kind that leave you in the bottom of a hole for a few days.  I wonder if some of you reading this also sometimes end up expending a huge amount of energy thinking about, worrying and feeling bad about something which you wrote yourself and isn’t even true.

Of course, as well as making us feel bad and messing up our relationships with people around us, all these stories also occupy us very nicely and distract us from the many things that God would like us to be thinking and caring and feeling and doing something about.

Or some other stories that need rewriting (particularly just now): more or less any that begin ‘that person doesn’t deserve my compassion because…’ or  ‘they don’t deserve the freedom, safety, stability or shelter that I have because….’

All stories that need rewriting

I’ve decided that this week’s challenge is to stop reacting to those imaginary tales and to learn to stop telling myself them.

So, here’s my plan:

To ask God to show me every time I’m telling myself a story.

To ask him to show me the truth – what the real story is.

Finally to spend some time thinking about this:

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.  2 Corinthians 10:5

 

Dealing with Change, Living the Life

All about change

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August seems like the perfect time to send a holiday postcard, so here’s one from the week my family and I spent traveling through Shropshire, Cheshire and the West Midlands on a canal boat.

Water doesn’t like to slope, so when the great engineers who built the canal systems encountered a landscape that needed to be climbed, they built amazing water-filled lifts called locks. Each lock is a chamber with heavy gates at each end which can be filled up or emptied of water so that the boat can rise up or lower down to the level of the next stretch of canal.

To fill the lock you use a turning handle to wind up heavy paddles in the gate which let water into (or out of) the chamber at a tremendous rate creating a huge amount of noise and splash. We quite enjoy working the locks but there’s no denying that it’s really hard going! Pushing the gates open against the weight of the water, closing them again, winding up the paddles, waiting for ages for the lock to fill then pushing the gates at the other end open is slow and heavy work, but it’s amazing to witness the extraordinary power of all that water moving from one place to another.

And it’s necessary: without these powerful level-changers it would be impossible to travel through the ups and downs of the British countryside.

I’ve written before about the seasons we go through in life, being a child, being a parent, being a parent of children who have grown up, living in one place or another, working, retirement…

Often it’s the shifts between seasons that are the hardest to deal with. The parts where you’ve said goodbye to what was, but haven’t really stepped into what is next. Those times, like the minutes that the boat is in the lock, can be turbulent, a bit scary and slow in passing.

The locks reminded me this week that change, even good change, like getting married, having a child or starting a new job, can be really hard work.
Like traveling through a lock, there is a cost to change which is measured in effort and in unsettling turbulence but there is also a sense something incredibly powerful is going on somewhere below the surface. The other hung it’s reminded me is that change is also really necessary if you want to continue on with your journey.

I often describe myself as being change-intolerant, a natural settler. But I also really want to keep pressing onwards towards what’s ahead and like water, life doesn’t slope, so there are bound to be locks ahead.

The challenge to me is to willingly step into times of change, to accept the turbulence and scariness with faith, because I’ve realized that even if the only way forward is through locks, that’s the way I want to go.

Remind me of that when I’m complaining about it 🙂

Surviving Tough Times

Full of holes

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There have been times this past week when I’ve felt rather like a colander, full of holes.

It’s all very well standing before God and asking him to fill me up again when I feel like a bucket. Even if I’ve run completely dry and empty I can gather together the faith that the Holy Spirit is good at filling me up with his presence, peace and power.

But this week it was harder. We’ve been camping at our church stream’s Bible camp and although the teaching, worship and fellowship were great, the weather was a bit challenging! Putting up an enormous tent in driving rain was not ideal, lying awake and shivering in our sleeping bags at 3 am was a bit wearing, but when rain gave way to gales, and the marquee housing the prayer space that I and others had worked hard to put together literally blew away, it was quite a struggle to keep hold of my sense of humour!

We salvaged stuff and rebuilt the space somewhere else of course, but I was left feeling just like this picture – like tiredness, stress and disappointment had knocked out lots and lots of little holes. And asking God to fill me felt a bit hopeless. I mean, how do you fill a colander?

His answer was simple.

Call on me more.
I can fill you faster than you can leak.
Even on colander-days.

Actually I suspect that I’m a bit colanderish on more days than I realise. I get the impression that God is not as surprised by my state of leakiness as I am.

So if you’re feeling full of holes today, ask God to fill you to overflowing. Don’t fall for the lie that there isn’t really any point because you’re a bit broken and full of holes. He is more than able to fill you faster than you can leak.

*sorry to all those who have noticed I’ve been a bit less regular posting over the past few weeks! Canal boating is a great get-away-from-it-all holiday, but low on opportunities for internet connection! Back on dry land again soon! Ellie x