Living the Life

Bigger on the inside.

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I don’t often dig out old posts out of the archives… But I think this one deserves another airing.  If like me you’re already drowning under tinsel, star-shaped cookies and costumes for the Christmas show, you might find this helps restore some of the wonder!

 

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If you’re reading this in the UK you probably don’t need me to tell you what this postcard is, or why I associate it with Christmas… but for those of you that aren’t:

This is the TARDIS. It’s from the long running UK TV show Dr Who and it’s a time-travelling spaceship. It’s become something of an iconic image and because of the unmissably excellent Christmas Day special episodes, it doesn’t seem entirely out of place in the jumble of jolly santas, cherubic angels and sprigs of holly.

Apart from that, all you need to know is this: It’s bigger on the inside.

On the outside it’s the size and shape of a 1960’s British Police telephone box (a regular sight on UK streets when this series started, ten years before I was born!), but on the inside it is apparently vast (there are even rumours of a swimming pool.)  Ask any Dr Who fan to describe the TARDIS and that’s what they’ll tell you – ‘it’s bigger on the inside’.

Think of how you would gasp in awe and wonder if you were to walk through that little blue door and discover that it is so much more than it appears to be.  Think of how you would run outside again to check and double check what you were seeing.  Think of how much your mind would be expanded!

Wow!

Awesome!

That really would be amazing.  To see something that so defied my understanding of how things are, how they work, of what is possible.  I’m pretty sure that I would be bursting to tell people about it but might also struggle to find the right words to describe how that discovery makes me feel…

All this reminds me of another image I associate with Christmas day:

A new-born baby.  Small, soft-skinned and helpless. Wrapped in a cloth and lying in a straw-filled manger.

And when I look, I hear God whisper,

“Can you see it?… Can you see what the shepherds saw, what the wise men travelled to see?”

“He’s bigger on the inside”

This is the extraordinary miracle of Christmas for me, perhaps even more amazing than the Easter-miracle of the resurrection:

Our God who spoke the universe into the existence and holds every part of it together; our God who said “let there be light” and who is the light;  our God who is infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely creative, infinitely loving, infinitely big; everything that he is is somehow contained inside that tiny cloth-wrapped package in the manger… Astounding.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him

Colossians 1:19

Take a moment today to let that sink in again.

Take some time to be awestruck,

to marvel.

and don’t be fooled by the tiny, helpless, sweet-smelling, soft-skinned baby in the manger…

He’s so much more than he appears to be.

Seriously bigger on the inside.

tardisfeat

Identity

A New Name?

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Should I be Brown Owl or Fluffy Owl?  I need a new name as I become a Brownie leader, and I apparently I get to pick my own…

Names.

The thing that keeps rising in my mind is that the Bible gives so much weight to names.  They matter, and not so much the names that parents give to their children, but especially the names that God chooses to give to people… names that mark out something of their identity and destiny. And I especially love new names.

Abram- exalted father, became Abraham – father of a multitude.

Sarai – quarrelsome, became Sarah – princess or noblewoman

Simon- God has heard, became Peter – the rock.

I’ve known for a long while how important it is to step away from  negative names that other people sometimes ‘give’ me.  Even if they’re occasionally true about the way I behave – they’re not my name, and they don’t define who I am or who I’m going to be. Walking free of those names is important. But God isn’t just in the business of taking negative names away, he always wants to replace them with something new and better!

A while ago I started asking God what his names were for me.  I’ve waited a while for an answer and then tried to step out and live in the truth of what I’m hearing.  Some of those names I share with all of you who follow Jesus : Beloved, Precious, Righteous, Daughter (or Son), Princess (or Prince) and many others.  They’re our family names. Our shared identity and destiny.

But I believe that God also has personal names for each of us, and that it’s OK to ask him about them.  For example, one of the names he gave me, surprisingly through someone who didn’t really know me at all, is Map. It seems that one of my roles in the kingdom is to be a treasure map. Hunting out treasure and directing other people to where it can be found.  Knowing that Map is one of God’s names for me has given me the courage (and sometimes the determination) to keep writing and painting this blog.  It’s sometimes been about choosing to live in the truth of that name.

Thinking about and praying about and journaling about this name and others has been really powerful for me.  So my question for you to ponder this week is: What new names does God have for you? You can make a list of ‘family’ names and ask him about them, and you can also ask him about personal names.  Of course the only way to find out those is to ask him and then to listen!

 

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The other names that are on my mind this week are from Isaiah 6 –  The the names of identity and destiny that God the Father gave to his son, hundreds of years before he was born on Earth, but which resonate with so much of what our world is longing for right now.  Miraculous wisdom, strength, love and peace. Come Lord Jesus.

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given

and the government will be upon his shoulders

and he will be called

WONDERFUL COUNSELOR

MIGHTY GOD

EVERLASTING FATHER

PRINCE OF PEACE

and of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Identity, Living the Life

Cactus Flowers

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Let me first admit that flowering Cacti always make me giggle.

My husband once gave me a tiny flowering cactus for an anniversary gift, cheekily claiming that it was a much better picture of his love for me than a short-lived bouquet of greenhouse-grown shop-bought flowers.  He also told me his choice had nothing to do with the fact they were on special offer at the petrol station, or that he hadn’t remembered the date until after the florist was shut.

Flowering cacti make me smile because just a few days later I discovered that the bright pink flower – the living parable of my beloved’s love for me –  was in fact a dried straw flower, stuck onto the tiny baby cactus with a glue gun.
Apparently I’m not the only one to a have fallen for this trick! The dried flowers can even sometimes still open and close as humidity levels change, giving the impression they are alive.  It’s only when you turn them upside down that the big blob of glue gives the game away.

This picture speaks to me about choosing not to join in with the worldwide game of pretending to be something you’re not.  Cacti are amazing, they can survive the heat and drought and make use of the rain when it comes. It may take years and years for them to come to maturity, but when they do the flowers are spectacular, eye-catching and extraordinary. Every bit worth the wait.

I found out about the great flowering cactus scam while listening to a special edition of Gardeners’ Question Time on the radio.   It was then that I reached out, turned my love-cactus over and discovered the glue-blob of truth.  (Sometimes it takes a moment of revelation and the willingness to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question to make us realise where we’re faking it.)  After I’d recovered from the shock I listened to the rest of the program to see what I could do to get my cactus to produce a genuine flower.

According to Bob Flowerdew, the answer is to give it as much sun as you possibly can, and then wait… maybe for years…

Don’t settle for faking it.  You are a person who is meant to flower.  In your own way, and in your own time you will unfurl into a hand-designed, individual bloom. And that flower, whatever it looks like, will bring glory to the one who created it and has always known how it will be.

Until then, sit in the light.  Know that every ray of it you absorb will go into producing an incredible bloom.  Much better than a stuck on dried flower could ever be.

 

 

 

 

 

Living the Life, Surviving Tough Times

Three Bears’ Prayers

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I was in a prayer meeting one morning last week with a few other Mums from the girls’ school.  We pray for a lot of different things in that meeting, from strength for the teachers to protection from illness to air conditioners lasting for one more season. But at this point we’d been talking about how hard the middle school years can be and were praying together especially for the christian kids in year 7, 8 and 9.

A prayer was forming in my head along the lines of the kids surviving those years with their faith intact when next to me my friend Shannon started praying for something altogether bigger and more beautiful.  She prayed that each of those kids would grow to have their sense of identity, of self, so grounded in their identity in Christ that they would be immune to the pressure to be anyone or anything else.   Wow! Even as I write it again I can feel my faith stretching.  How great would that be?

As I sat there in the prayer meeting and felt my faith grow and expand to fit the bigger vision of Shannon’s prayer I thought to myself, ‘we just went up a size’.

It felt as if Shannon had prayed a big brother prayer to the one in my head.  Not one that was more important, but one that stretched my faith to the next size up.

And just in that moment, this postcard popped into my head, with the words:

‘Now go for the Daddy Bear Prayer’.

For once, I understood exactly what God was saying to me – Baby Bear has a little bowl, a little chair and a little bed; Mummy Bear’s things are middle-sized; but Daddy Bear’s bowl is huge, his chair is huge and his bed is huge – so, a Daddy Bear prayer must be huge.

Sometimes we need to get hold of our faith and pull at it until it fits something bigger.  Fortunately, faith is stretchy and it grows when it’s under tension like skin for a skin-graft.  So I asked myself, ‘what would be a huge, faith-stretching prayer to pray for our year 7-9s look like?

So, I let my faith spread out a bit and I prayed that they would be not only protected, with their identity rooted in Christ, but that they would become equipped and empassioned for mission, transforming the culture they live in, seeing their friends and teachers come to faith, changing their world. Not individual beaten-up survivors but a strong united victorious army.

Now that, for our little beleaguered bunch of Christian kids, is a faith-expanding prayer… I’m so going to keep on praying it.

The point of this postcard wasn’t to get you to pray for middle-schoolers (although please do, they need all they can get, bless them), but to ask you, ‘What are the three bears prayers for your situation?’

What’s the little prayer that is easiest to pray?

What’s the medium sized prayer that stretches out your faith?

And what’s the massive Daddy-Bear-Prayer that your faith only covers a corner of, but which puts it under the tension it needs to spread out and grow?

Write them down now, then get out your faith, give it a stretch and pray some big prayers into your situation, and into others’ situations.

Let’s release a volley of Daddy-Bear-prayers and see what our faithful God might do.

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.

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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.

Words and Pictures to help you hear from God