Tag Archives: Christian life

Living the Life

Meandering

9 Comments

There are times when life feels like floating along a great big meandering river: it takes an enormous amount of time to negotiate a long curve and then, after what seems like an age, you find yourself back in almost exactly the same place that you were before.

Arriving back in a place that you thought you’d left far behind you can be deeply disappointing and frustrating.  Becoming ill again after a time of feeling better, revisiting a family or relationship issue, facing the same old temptation or just realising that once again you can hear God saying the same thing to you that he’s  said over and over again in the past; all these can leave you ready to give up or to yell at the Lord “but we’ve been here before!”

“All that effort and I’ve travelled no distance at all”.

It amused me this morning to read that in rivers, meanders are a feature of maturity.  Young rivers cut in a straight line to begin with,  and only as they get more mature (and more powerful) do they start to wander about revisiting old ground and seem to make only very slow progress forwards.

I wonder if life-meanders are more likely to be a feature for us too as we become more mature in faith? When I first became a Christian, so much seemed to be easy and obvious,  life and discipleship was much more of a straight line.  It felt as though I was quick to learn things and deal with things. As time as gone on I’ve realised that there are deeper things, ground-in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that seem to need a different treatment.  Revisiting the same issues and challenges, each time armed with a little more experience and grace seems to be a part of that process.

If you understand this experience of having travelled the long bend of the river and found yourself, unexpectedly, back where you started, this is God’s word for you today:

It’s not about the distance travelled, it’s about who you’ve become while we travelled it together.

Because even if today you’re arriving back in the same old place, you are not the same old you.

On the journey to get here you will have changed, grown and learned. You don’t actually have to respond in the same way you did before.  You probably won’t.

And while you are back in almost the same place, this time you’re approaching it from a different direction and with grace and experience in your backpack.

So don’t get frustrated and lose heart my friends, when you find yourself back in old places, don’t believe the lie that you’ve travelled nowhere. Instead, remember that journey, and all the things that God taught you while you were travelling and then look down at the new you that Jesus has helped you to become on the way.

meandersreflect greens

Living the Life

On being open

2 Comments

This picture takes me right back to the first year of high school, sitting at a long bench on the top floor of the science block in a lab coat and goggles and nervously lighting a bunsen burner for the first time.

In case you’ve never used one, a bunsen burner is a very simple and common piece of laboratory equipment used for heating or burning things. It runs on gas and has an open flame which can be controlled by moving a collar at the bottom so that a little hole opens and closes letting in more or less air.

We soon got over our ten-year old nervousness and used them to burn all sorts of things we shouldn’t have.. but that’s another story. That evening’s assignment (my first ever science homework) was to draw two pictures of a bunsen burner: one with the collar closed, preventing air from mixing with the gas and producing a yellow flame; the other like this one, with the hole completely open, letting in lots of air and turning the flame blue.

The science is along the lines of the flame needing oxygen to make it burn more efficiently.  The hole-fully-open blue flame is much much hotter. If the gas is mixed with pure oxygen as in an oxy-acetylene torch the blue flame it produces can cut through metal!

The bunsen burner in today’s picture is burning much hotter because it is open to the air.

It’s made me think about my openness to the Holy Spirit and the work he wants to do in me and through me. I so much want to be open so that God can breathe into me and my flame burn hotter!

What I notice is that it’s really easy to let that collar slip round and become slightly (or very) closed to the Holy Spirit’s breath on me.

For me the killer is busyness: not taking the time to turn my face towards God and let him breathe, not taking the time to sit in the sunshine of his presence and be warmed.  But there are other airhole-closers…

Sometimes fear, fear of being hurt, fear that God’s power might overwhelm you, fear that you might look silly, fear of what he might ask you to do, even fear that he might reject you if you are that vulnerable to him, will drive you to close your heart off a little… or a lot.

For some people anger over what has happened (or not happened) in the past will lead them to punish God by turning their faces away. Just as we can punish other people by not talking to them, or not being open to them, it’s easy to fall into doing the same to God when we feel like he has let us down.

And lastly of course sin, whatever shape or form it takes can cut us off from the oxygen of the breath of God until we repent of it and receive his forgiveness.

For me, this picture is a call to be open, to be vulnerable to, the Holy Spirit and his work, so that the flame of our passion and ministry can burn hotter.

Today I’m going to ask God to show me how open I am to him and the breath of his Spirit, to show me how far the collar is twisted around on the bunsen burner that is my life and to show me what I can do to be more open to him. This week why don’t you find some time, make some time to be open to God and ask him to breathe on you again? Bring him your fear, your forgiveness, your pain, your sin and your hope, and in return ask for his life-bringing oxygen-carrying Holy Spirit.  It sounds like a good swap to me.

Burn hotter my friends, and who knows what you will be able to cut through…

Identity, Living the Life

Time to put the kettle on?

4 Comments

When I hear the word ‘kettle’ my first thought is of the cordless, white plastic jug-style one that sits on my counter and which I boil to make tea at least seven times a day.  But this week God has been speaking to me about a different kind:   A huge copper kettle sitting on the edge of lamp-black coal-fired range, straight from a Victorian kitchen.

This kind of kettle had an enormous capacity and was kept filled and warm on the edge of the range at all times so that it could be boiled and poured out at a moments notice.  It served the needs of the whole household, providing not only tea (vital for life in Britain you know) but also hot water for cleaning, washing up and for bathing.

These days you’re more likely to find one in an antiques shop, or polished up and on display somewhere.  And it is lovely to look at, mostly because of what it’s made of, but there’s no mistaking that it was made for a purpose -to serve the needs of the family.

Big family range-top kettles used to be made out of a variety of different metals, but in the poshest houses they were made of copper like this one. Copper was used not because of its beauty, but because it has an amazing ability to conduct heat.  Not only that, but also it doesn’t corrode (rust) and has a very high melting point.  The perfect metal for the job.

My plastic kettle has an element inside it that heats the water, but this kettle has no capacity to heat the water by itself. Instead it relies entirely on being in close contact with the heat of the range.

But we are each like this big, copper kettle.

We are designed to serve the family, the body, of Christ each in our own way.  Being shined-up and visible on the shelf of the household is much less important than doing the job I was made for.  This is not necessarily something I find easy, but it’s true.

We are like this kettle.

We need to remember, to keep remembering, that we don’t have the capacity to power ourselves.  I am entirely dependent on him for the power I need to do the job I was made for.  And in order to receive that energy I need to be close to him.  The only way for this kettle to come to the boil is to rest on the hotplate.  Every single time it needs to come to the boil it has no choice but to come back into that place of rest.  To be always ‘ready’, so that it stays warm all the time and can be brought to the boil quickly, it must keep coming back to resting on the hotplate regularly, and never venture very far away from it.

I am like this kettle.

The way I behave, the choices I make, matter.  Character matters because it matters what you’re made of.  Someone chose to make this kettle from copper because it was strong, able to take the weight of the water, wouldn’t corrode and fall apart, wouldn’t melt onto the stove and also because it is fantastic at conducting heat.  I need to be good, not only at resting in God and absorbing ‘heat’ from him, but also at passing that heat on to others.  I need to have a character that will not corrode over time, or lose strength and melt.  It matters what I’m made of.

We are all like this copper kettle.

We each have the capacity to serve others in a myraid of different ways.  We are each important to the household in hospitality, in comfort, in keeping clean, and in sustaining.

But we can do none of those things unless we stay close to the source of the heat.

reflect white

kettle2

Living the Life

Down the back of the sofa

7 Comments

This is just a theory, and as yet not scientifically tested, but I think our sofa (couch/settee/whatever) might actually suck loose change out of my pockets when I sit down. It’s probably a swedish furniture company conspiracy.

A brief investigation this morning revealed not only a pile of coins, but also an array of pencils, hair bands, guitar picks, earrings, polly pockets, barbie shoes, teaspoons, socks and the TV remote (which was what I was actually looking for!) And it got me thinking about how in the middle of everyday life stuff gets lost down the back of the sofa, and we don’t even miss it.

This picture makes me smile because I once received (rather publicly) a slightly unflattering prophetic word that I was like a spaniel tearing a sofa apart to find a bone that he could smell there.  I’ve often wondered what on earth it meant… but today’s postcard is casting a little bit of light on it for me.  Because God is talking to me about things that get lost down the back of the sofa, and which are actually pretty easy to find again, if you take the time to go looking.

I read this recently from Romans 4  (v 18-21)

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”  Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God,  being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

It made me think about how Abraham had held on to that promise that he had heard from God, not letting go of it even in the face of strong evidence that it wasn’t even possible. He kept hold of it through years and years of waiting and held on to it even when it became clear that he had seriously messed up.  He held onto that promise, and kept giving glory to God for what he was going to do.

Abraham didn’t let the promise of God go slipping quietly out of his pocket and into the forgotten realms of the back of the sofa.

I on the other hand, do.  When people share a prophetic word or scripture with me I often write them down and then pray about them for a month or two.  Then somehow they slip away quietly into some dark part of my memory, not completely lost, but dusty and out of sight.

But, it’s very easy to find things that have slipped down between the cushions… you just have to look.

Today my friends, is a great day for searching again for the things God has said to you, for the promises he’s spoken.  It’s a day for holding those promises up to the light and blowing the dust off of them.  It’s a day for choosing to give glory to God for what he has promised and for being ‘fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he [has] promised’.  I’m not saying that today is necessarily the day that you step into the fulfillment of all those promises. Faith shows up in the waiting. And although Abraham, man of faith, waited a long, long time, he did so with the promise of God in his hand.

sofa

reflect blue

Identity

Tangerine lanterns

5 Comments

Have you ever made one of these? It’s actually terribly easy to cut around a tangerine or clementine, pull out the fruit and pop in a candle. As you can see, it makes a beautiful little lantern, with the added bonus of a sweet orangey aroma.

As I made the lantern with my sweet girl I learned a few things, and today I’m hearing the Spirit speaking through them…

One is that putting a light inside a tangerine peel makes it very, very beautiful. Something which I would ordinarily throw away, consider worthless, has its deep beauty revealed by the light that shines out from within it.

The second was that if you fit the two halves together and attempt to seal the light in, it is very quickly starved of oxygen and the flames go out. I needed to cut a hole in the top to make it able to keep burning. The hole iets some of the light and heat that the flame generates out without spoiling the gorgeous effect of the light breaking through the thin places (and the scars), and the flame stays alight.

We also realized, after we’d made our lantern, that to really appreciate it in all its glory we needed to carry it outside into the darkness and watch it glowing beautifully there.

You can probably already see how the Holy Spirit has been speaking to me through this picture.

It totally fills up my heart to think that God can use me to bring light and joy to others even (or perhaps especially) when I feel ready for the compost heap; it delights me to think that even those places where I’ve been deeply wounded can become beautiful as his light shines through them; and it’s good to be reminded that although without God I am not much to speak of, his light inside me can bring out deep beauty that might otherwise never be seen.

I’ll be thinking about those other things too..  About how it’s really not possible to have a hidden, private faith, concealed completely from the world because that hidden-ness would stifle the flame and perhaps even put it out. And also that places that are already full of light don’t always need a lantern or appreciate its beauty, and that there’s a good reason we are called to take that light out into dark places, however challenging that might be.

Whatever else, when I look at this picture, I am amazed at the transformation that takes place when the candle is lit, and I want to cry out to God to shine brighter inside of me, and to tell myself again never to be quietly conned into thinking I can do without him,  not even for a moment.

I don’t have anything to ask you to pray about this week, but I do have a challenge for you…

If you are in a part of the world where it’s possible to get hold of a tangerine, a box of matches and a tealight candle – make yourself one of these.  My painting really doesn’t do it justice, and seeing and smelling it will speak to your heart.  Then take it and sit with it in a dark place for a while and see how God speaks to you through it.  I guarantee it will be ten or twenty minutes well spent, and I would love to hear what he has said to you.

Be blessed.

tangerine lantern

Identity, Living the Life

A silver locket for my love

Leave a comment

I have a silver locket just like this one that I have had since I was a teenager.  They’re supposed to have a memento in them so special that you want to have it near to your heart at all times.

I used to wear this little heart-shaped locket a lot, and I can remember as a teenager ‘updating’ the photographs fairly frequently as I changed my mind about who was most important to me! So when God reminded me of it this morning and went hunting for it I confess that I had completely forgotten whose photograph was inside.

I found it eventually in the necklace-tangle at the bottom of my jewellery box, badly tarnished and stuck shut. It seems I haven’t worn it for a while.   Having finally managed to prise it open with a hair clip, I was quite surprised to find tiny photographs of myself and my husband, taken before we were even engaged to be married and looking improbably young!

There are two simple truths in this picture of a locket for me.

One is that God wears me (and you!) close to his heart.  Every single one of us that call him Father are so precious to him that he holds us like this, near to him at all times.  Even if we in our own hearts have wandered away through pain, confusion, doubt, anger or just our own ridiculous busyness and forgetfulness, he holds us near.   It’s a mystery, but it’s true.

The second was something God whispered quietly when I found my locket forgotten and abandoned in the box.

‘Don’t forget your first love’.

God is jealous for your love. For me that’s an invitation to invest in my relationship with Jesus, my first love.  For while I know my position next to his heart is fixed, I’m also aware that my focus and my own heart do tend to get distracted!

Maybe you’ve read the article that’s been doing the internet rounds this week on what it takes to fall in love.  Apparently it can all be achieved in a matter of hours by going through and honestly answering a list of searching questions together and then staring into one another’s eyes for four minutes.   Interesting. (although you must be predisposed to fall for someone if you’re prepared to do all that in the first place!)

What it tells me is that perhaps what it really takes to fall in love is to take the time to understand yourself and to share that openly and honestly with someone, and to take the time to really listen to them in return. And then to look at them, for a long time, without hiding.

The same must apply in my relationship to God. ( I am a human even if he isn’t).  His love for me never wavers for an instant, but mine for him can be decidedly wobbly.  Time, honesty, vulnerability, trust, listening and an intention to become closer to the other person.  I wonder if these aren’t exactly the same things we need to continually invest in our relationship with God?

 

Whichever one of these things speak to you; the truth that with all your failings and imperfections, you are still his beloved, or the call to come once again to the fountain of life, to look into his eyes, to spill out your heart and to allow  his truth to flow over you; whichever one it is,  or both, you can choose to receive it today. That’s the point of this picture,  it’s a gift, for you.

 

 

Living the Life

A Christmas Card from Postcards from Heaven

4 Comments

I’ve been in conversation with God for some time now about what picture should appear on the front of your Christmas postcard… A scene of Bethlehem? Something tinselly? But no, this odd little bauble-bottle is what keeps coming into my head and there’s no getting away from it…

it doesn’t have a name, as far as I know it doesn’t even exist and I can’t imagine it would be useful, but Jesus often doesn’t follow my rules and I always eventually realise it is easier just to go with what I think he’s showing me! So this is it: A two-chamber bauble-bottle that holds more one type of liquid.

Christmas is just like this.. Christmas is a container that holds more than one thing..

I really love it.  I love the kids’ excitement, the preparations, the sense of specialness, the time with friends, the family traditions, the special food, the random animals in nativity plays and even the theologically-challenged carols.  I just love it.

and yet…

Yesterday was my Dad’s birthday, and this will be our sixth Christmas without him. And at this time of year, I miss him more than ever. I can’t enjoy our traditional family singsong without missing the sound of his voice, I can’t watch my kids in a recital without thinking how proud he would have been of them, and I just can’t do Christmas day without missing his energy and sense of fun.

And I’m guessing for many, if not most of you it’s the same. Along with the joy comes an acute awareness of what has been lost.

Christmas is a container that holds both joy and sadness, and somehow they can only be poured out together.

For me, it’s not possible to experience the joy without also walking through the sadness.  To not allow one of them to be released from the bottle would be to stifle the other as well.  And I really want the joy…

It seems to me, at this time of year, that the world is conspiring to show me a perfect Christmas.  One with perfect, complete families where no-one gets sick, or forgets anything, or worries about money or falls out over the rules of a board game.  Where teenagers leap with joy at the idea of a game of charades, the roast dinner is all warm at the same time, the whole family gather around the piano to sing carols (in four-part harmony) and above all, no-one feels sad, not even for a moment.

It’s not true of course, there is no ‘perfect’ Christmas.  It’s just another impossible standard for me to fail to reach. Not everything has to be perfect anyway, and I suspect that the fact that the joy always comes mixed in with sadness just makes me normal.

For those of you who are similarly normal: Know that God understands.  He understands great joy and deep sadness.  And he reaches out to carry you through both.

So on this festive postcard I will wish you a Happy Christmas, but because that on its own doesn’t seem quite real enough:

This Christmas

May you have enough joy to soften your sadness

Enough peace to calm your storms

and enough hope to look up into the eyes of the Saviour of the World and to find yourself covered by his love.

Living the Life

A Crucible for Silver… or Steel?

3 Comments

The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the Lord tests the heart.

Proverbs 17:3 NIV

This week’s postcard had a particularly unusual beginning!  A friend walked up to me on Sunday morning and asked me if I knew where in Sheffield the World Snooker Championships are held.  Predictably enough I had no idea.  So he filled me in – “The Crucible”, he said.  And then walked off.

You may conclude from this that I have some rather odd friends, but later that day when my poorly 6-year-old requested a pantomime on TV, and I picked the first one on Youtube, the opening shot was the word ‘Crucible’ up in lights on a billboard and the words ‘live from the Crucible theatre in Sheffield” at the bottom of the screen.  At times like this, I start to pay attention…

This postcard of a crucible in action might be making you concerned for tough times ahead, a fire that will heat you up and draw impurities to the surface so that God can skim them off.  Probably good, definitely terrifying, possibly true;  and the way people often interpret this verse.

But the journey God has taken me on while praying about this picture has led me to some other places, and I’ll share them with you now, in case he has something to say to you in them too.

The first thing I’ve been reflecting is another verse from Proverbs, which casts a light on how the Lord tests us for purity:

The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold, so a person is tested by being praised.

Proverbs 27:21 NRSV

So it’s not the oncoming stress of Christmas that’s going to test your heart in the crucible; or people yelling at you over the things you did or forgot to do; or grumpy teenagers, or any of the many genuinely difficult things you face.

No.

It will be the praise of men: the pats on the back, the applause, the people telling you what a great mum, cook, crafter, house-decorator, work colleague, singer, teacher, father, pastor _________ (fill in the blank) you are, that will be the heat that drives the impurities to the surface and shows you up for who you really are.

Of course, I’m not saying it’s bad to give or receive encouragement or praise, I think it’s great.  But just be aware that it will test you.  When people praise you, notice what rises to the surface, how you react and feel.  It may be an opportunity for revelation!

The other thing I felt God say when I looked at this picture is:

“Don’t think you’re always the silver, sometimes I am calling you to be the crucible“.

So I looked it up. A crucible is a container made of a material that is able to withstand very high temperatures.  It can be used to melt metals to make tools or beautiful jewellery, and also to create alloys – a combination of metals that can’t be reversed – like bronze or steel.  The reaction that needs to take place to create these strong, important, useful materials can only happen in a container able to cope with very high heat.

Some changes, some miracles, can’t take place without a crucible, a person willing to carry the miracle, a person willing to take the heat

And at this time of year, when I’m thinking of the ultimate miracle of the incarnation, this reminds me of the extraordinary faith and courage of a very young woman who looked into the heat ahead of her and said: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38 NRSV)

This Advent, may you each have the faith and courage of young Mary, and if God calls you to be a crucible for your miracle, or someone else’s, may you be able to say with her, “Yes,  let it be as you have said”.

Living the Life

Apple Chunks

3 Comments

Today I felt God saying that for this week’s postcard I should paint an apple.  So here it is.  My favourite kind, a sweet crunchy Gala. Yum.

Shortly after I painted it, my youngest asked if she could eat it, and as she is still a bit short in the front teeth department, whether I would mind cutting it up for her.

I wonder if what God is trying to say to me today is in there somewhere.  The good news about Jesus is the sweetest, most beautiful, healthy ‘food’ we could ever have the joy to taste.  But it’s also easier to eat if it’s cut up into chunks.

The advent season is a wonderful time to talk about Jesus, about the extraordinary miracle of God becoming a helpless child, about that tiny baby who was also the Saviour of the World, about the stories of shepherds and wise men and how they responded to him, and about how we choose to respond to him.

Advent is a time when faith conversations naturally start, so watch out for opportunites, and when you see them, don’t be ashamed to catch the moment and join in with what God is doing in people’s lives.

But, (and here’s where my picture comes in) don’t feel like you have to give them the whole apple.

Cut it up and hand out some slices. The gospel is biiiig. It’s much easier to digest in little chunks. And it’s also possible to share it out while remembering to eat some of it ourselves!

And, you know, when people taste that sweetness, many of them will come back for more.

I don’t know about you,  but I like this picture.  It takes the pressure off a bit, and I need that at this time of year!

But it also helps me to think that it might just be possible to join in with the conversations God is having with my family and friends this advent, and to have some conversations with God of my own in amongst all the pre-Christmas chaos. And that would be good.

Living the Life

Carried Away…

4 Comments

You hardly ever meet anyone from the UK who is ambiguous about the contents of the little black jar with the yellow lid.  Personally – I LOVE it, but Marmite (yeast extract, for the uninitiated) is one of life’s dividers, and as they say in their ad campaign – “you either love it or you hate it”. There’s no middle ground!

Here’s my revelation for today:

God is like Marmite.

When I first decided to follow Jesus I was fifteen, and I remember my grandfather saying to me at the time:

“Ellie, a bit of religion is OK, but you don’t want to get carried away”

Funny, the things you remember.  He was a good man, my Grandfather, but on this occasion, absolutely wrong.

The God who gave his only son so that the world could be reconciled to himself; the God who invites me to call him Father, and calls me his child; the God who created the glorious expanse of the universe with his words, and uses that same voice to whisper his love into my ear; this God who is unknowable and yet allows himself to be known by us..

deserves everything.

All my passion.

All my time.

All my energy.

All my trust.

All my dignity.

Everything.

God is Marmite.

You can’t be ambivalent, easy-going, under-control, take-it-or-leave-it, calm or cool about him.  You can’t be half-hearted or hold back to keep yourself ‘safe’.  That’s not what he deserves and it’s not what he’s calling us to…

So this week my friends, when you have the choice, choose to be passionate, choose to be abandoned, choose to be all-in, choose to be wholehearted in your pursuit of our amazing God.

Get carried away!

He’s more than worth it.

marmitefeatured