Tag Archives: Christian life

Living the Life

Pray First

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Have you ever tried cutting fabric with children’s paper scissors?  Or worse still with plastic-blade safety scissors? Actually – why would you ever choose to make life that difficult?

If you do try – it’s just possible that it can be done, but with short blunt blades it’s likely to be time consuming, difficult and very frustrating.  And those short blades will mean you can only take short snips (or hacks!) so chances are your line will end up ragged and wonky. It will be hard work and take ages.

What a difference it makes to use my special dressmaking scissors (woe betide any child who ‘borrows’ them to cut paper!).  These are the tool for the job – large, sharp-as-can-be and heavy enough to take some of the hard work out of cutting even thick fabrics.  If you had the choice, you’d never go back to the plastic version. These beauties can eat fabric for breakfast.

The picture for this week is really simple.  I felt God say to me that every job I do without taking time to pray first is like trying to cut fabric with paper scissors.  Sometimes they will be enough, and I can struggle through alone. I might not do a brilliant job, but it will be OK.  Sometimes, however, it will be all but impossible. I will give up frustrated and exhausted by the task.

But if I ask, the Holy Spirit can transform my ‘enough’, my little scissors, into dressmakers shears that can cut easily, fluidly and well.  Prayer makes that kind of difference: It can make the difficult easy and the impossible achievable.

I can keep going (with my little paper scissors) and face every challenge all by myself, but…

…why would I choose to make my life that difficult?

So there are only two words written on the back of this particular postcard.

They’re transforming my week.

I hope they transform yours too.

“Pray First”

scissorsfeat

Identity, Living the Life

Wallpaper

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Sometimes you just become so used to things that you can’t see them anymore.

After we took down the old cooker hood in our first home we were left with an ugly taped-up wire sticking out of the kitchen wall. In the beginning it really annoyed me, but after a few months I stopped noticing it and after two years we were discussing jobs that needed doing and I genuinely thought we had already had it fixed!

Even gruesomely patterned wallpaper like this one can eventually become so familiar that you no longer notice it (or no longer find it offensive!).

Whether or not we notice it, most of us have wallpaper inside our heads:  The background messages of the things that were spoken over us, or that we said to ourselves, when we were kids and trying to make sense of the world.  Messages like ‘I’m not important’ or ‘it’s not safe’, ‘I’m lazy’ or ‘I’m not good enough’.

Many of us have come to faith in Jesus and have valiantly tried to paste the truth he has to say about us over the top of the words of the past, covering up the old messages with the new ones that know in our heads are true.

I don’t know about you, but my trouble is that the wallpaper of my past is definitely of a 1970’s variety – Bright bold patterns and made of shiny vinyl.  It’s a big job to get any new wallpaper to stick over the top of a decorama vinyl like this one… and even if you do get it to stick, chances are that a pattern this bright and bold will show through whatever you paste on top!

When this happens to you, it’s not a sign that you’re not a good enough Christian; that you’re not ‘saved’ enough; or that you’re not believing hard enough… It just means you need to do some redecorating..

If this was a wikihow, there would be pictures… but:

Stage One: Notice what’s there

Ask God to show you what it is your believing about yourself, or Him that is not true.  Even if you’re so used to it that you don’t really see it anymore, ask him to show you the wallpaper.

Stage Two: Look at it

Admit that what’s there is not the truth about you.  Even if you’ve got so used to it that it feels kind of comfortable and familiar, if it’s not what God says it has to go…

Stage Three: Get rid of it

Now you’ve seen the ugly truth… Don’t just try to cover it up again! Start stripping it off. Confess to God that you believe a lie about yourself, or Him.  Repent of it.  Choose not to behave as if it’s true.. Ask him to reveal the truth under the layers…  Just as it takes steam to melt the glue that sticks the paper in place, so it takes some prayer (yours and maybe someone elses) to loosen the grip of old lies in your life… but it can be done.

Well doesn’t that make it sound easy.

Honestly?… Anyone who has stripped off Vinyl wallpaper will tell you it’s really hard work, but not impossible.  Be kind to yourself… do a bit at a time!

And finally- Whenever we take down old wallpaper in our house in England, I’m always afraid that the plaster on the walls is going to come away with it, like actually it’s only this sheet of wallpaper that’s holding the wall together, and taking it down is probably a really bad idea.

If you’re afraid of taking down your wallpaper, because of what you might find underneath – know this: The moment you trusted in Christ, and handed over the reins of your life to him, the plaster, the part at the core of who you are, underneath all the messages you’ve papered on, was made completely new.

Perfect.

Spotless.

Without bump or blemish.

New.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

wallpaperfeat

For your Journal:

Ask God if there’s a wall that needs a bit of attention in your heart.  Ask him to show you if there’s a lie you are believing about yourself or about him.

It might not just ‘fall into your head’, but at some point this week it might be that the Holy Spirit draws your attention to something you think or feel, or an incident that hurts you or angers you more than you think it should.  If you have one of these ‘aha’ moments, choose to look at the wallpaper and see it for what it is.  Then start to take it down.

Living the Life

Rolled-up Walls

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I have tents on the brain this week.  Next weekend I’m taking my Girl Guide unit camping for the first time, but not, thank heaven, in one of these!

This is the kind of tent that I used to camp in back when I was a guide.  It had two very sturdy wooden poles supporting a ridge pole and was made of a heavy green canvas that always smelled slightly damp.

In the picture God showed me this week, the tent was set for daytime, with its doors unlaced and tied back and its walls rolled up to let air circulate all the way through and blow away the dampness of the night.

I’ve been pondering and praying today about what God might be saying to me through this picture.  Perhaps you could tell me what it says to you, but this is where I’m up to:

In brick or block built house, all the strength is in the walls, the boundaries.  take them away and the floors and roof would fall, leaving no house…   In this tent, all the strength is in the centre, on two posts and the ridge, and in the main guys, which hold those poles in place.

Because in this kind of tent the walls play no part in holding the whole thing together, it’s possible to roll them up and store them out of the way.  So in the daytime it’s possible for people to crawl into the shelter of the roof from any direction, not just through the doorway.  The walls are just not as important as the poles.

I wonder if God is saying to us that some of us are treating our lives (and our churches) as though they were brick built houses, with all the weight being carried by the boundaries.  We fear that if we shift those boundaries, or roll them back to allow more people ‘in’, the whole thing will come tumbling down.  But in this picture all the weight is carried at the centre.  And as long as those weight-bearing poles are held in position, the walls are actually optional.

A lot of the Christian writing I’ve read lately seems to be more concerned with the walls than the poles.  Who can be ‘in’ and who not. I wonder if we all want to draw a ring around a group of people (with ourselves near the centre 🙂 ) and say “inside this line is OK, acceptable.  Outside, well, I’m afraid not.”   We want there to be walls – they make us feel safe, reassure us that we are ‘on the inside’.

And yet we also all know that none of us are ‘acceptable’, except through the sacrifice of Jesus. None of us earned the right to be on the inside by believing the right bit of doctrine or by toeing the right line.. Our position was (and is) beautiful, extravagant, undeserved.

I don’t know exactly where I’m heading with this one folks,  tough meat takes some simmering, and this might still be a little underdone in my head…

…but, I think the important thing must be to decide what bits of our doctrine, our rules for living, our limits of ‘acceptability’ are part of the ‘posts’ and which bits are ‘walls’.  What is really weight-bearingly important and what isn’t.

And then?

…Then we humbly lay down our need to be ‘right’ and roll up the walls in order to welcome more people in.

rolledupfeat

P.S.  Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to you at all.  Maybe you were most caught by the idea of the warm wind of the Spirit blowing away all the dampness of the night.  If that’s the case,  then maybe he’s just calling you to open up more of your edges to him. To let him blow through parts of yourself that you’ve kept closed off, and to know that it’s OK to roll-up the walls… the roof can stay up without them. x

Living the Life

Frogger

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Ever feel stuck?  Like there’s no way forwards?  Like you’re living in the consequence of decisions made a long time ago, and that the dead end you’re now in is inescapable?  You need to think about Frogger.

Frogger was a game I got mildly addicted to a long time ago when my teenagers were still toddling.   It mostly involved hopping a little frog around on lily pads and getting it to the other side of a road or a river.

The picture I had today was of a frog who had hopped out along a particular line of lily pads, and then got to the end of the line.  He looked across and saw other frogs hopping along another line of lily pads and thought ‘oh well, that’s it then, I went the wrong way, I blew it’.

It’s easy to feel that one choice you made or that was made for you has messed everything up… that you’ve gone off on a diversion from the main route and can never go back.  Like somehow you will never be able to live fully in the goodness of what God intended for you because of one foolish/stupid/scared choice you made and there is no way to get back onto the right track again.

Of course we do often have to live with the consequences of our choices… but the truth about frogger is that there’s always an alternative route… even if it looks like there isn’t.  Any moment now a new lily pad will pop up, or even better, a floating log will come along to hop on to and take us somewhere completely new!

When we get to one of these ‘dead-end’ places, we have another choice: We can sit on our lily pad feeling sorry for ourselves, wondering if God has forgotten us, berating ourselves for the decision we made that has got us into this place, putting all our faith in our stuckness or we can call out to God and trust that he is able to do something about it.

And of course- he can.   There’s never only one route across the river, and as I was thinking about last week when I wrote this, our God is a the master of reversing impossible situations.  He isn’t just creative -he is Creativity.  Finding new ways to get you to where he wants you to be is as natural to him as breathing is to you.

‘You are stuck, it’s hopeless, there’s no way out’ is one of the regular often-used lies of the enemy.  It’s designed to paralyse you, to stop you from realising that there never was one perfect, easy route across the river; that everyone either makes stupid choices, or encounters obstacles and that our creative father constantly builds new routes for us.

If you’re feeling stuck today, like you hopped off the main path and onto an inescapable road to nowhere, take a real step and ask God to help you let go of that lie.  Reach out and catch a hold of the truth that he has never for one moment forgotten you, and ask him to help you grasp the truth that your life is a constantly growing ‘new creation’ and that he has more enough power to build you a new route across the river and into the places he has called you to be.

My problem is often that I want to see the path marked out in front of me.  I want to be able to think, “oh I’ll hop there, and then there, and then there and that will take me to where I want to be”.  My life just isn’t like that.  I often cannot even imagine how God is going to take me into the things he’s spoken to me about, let alone plan the route!

So my struggle is to choose to trust in the God of floating logs and suddenly growing lily pads instead of trying to plot my own course all the time… frogfeat

Whatever your struggle is, I pray that God would speak to you today and that he would open your eyes to trust in his extraordinary creativity and love for you.  It will be worth it.

 

Living the Life

Everything changes

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But now…

Do you know, I think those might be two of my favourite words in the Bible.  For me, those two words capture something wonderful, beautiful and essential about the Gospel that it’s easy to lose sight of the wonder of..

They also remind me of this card. It’s from one of the games that we used to love to play endlessly and noisily with the youth group we led in our twenties, back when our idea of a great way to spend a Wednesday evening was to fill our living room with teenagers and talk to them about Jesus.  (Actually that still sounds like a pretty great way to spend an evening to me, but that’s another story)

The card means change direction.  If anyone plays it, play stops and then goes back the other way, instantly and without question. It turns things around, reverses them – changes everything.  And I love the picture because in it I see what Jesus came to the world (and to me) for: to turn things around, to reverse them and to change everything. You can just imagine what the ‘cardboard testimonies’ of people who met Jesus in the gospels would have been like:

“I was sick for years and years, but now I’m healed”

“My brother was dead, but now he’s alive”

“I was an outcast, but now I’m a treasured friend”

“I thought I knew everything, but now…”

So, back to my favourite words, so that you too can whisper them to yourself and feel their power pulsing in your veins.

But now…

They actually come from the first chapter of Colossians, and they tell you exactly what happened the moment that God looked at you and me, and through Jesus decided to play the ultimate change direction card onto our lives:

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.  But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.

Colossians 1: 21-23

You were alienated, cut off, at a distance, separated, but now –  you are brought near.

You were an enemy, but now –  you are a friend of God.

You were a foreigner and an alien, but now –  you are family.

You were stained, dirty, marked, grubby, but now –  you are washed absolutely clean, without blemish, but more than that, you are Holy.

You were guilty, but now – you cannot be accused.

It’s an extraordinary card that God has played in your life.  The ‘but now’.  Costly, powerful and irrevocable… and yours to accept.

LIke many of you, I’ve known this is true for ages and ages and ages… But somehow I still struggle to confidently live in the reality of it.  I still fall into thinking about myself as grubby and stained and failing, as I was before Jesus rescued me from the dominion of darkness, brought me into the light, hosed me down, gave me a new place to stand and new song to sing.

So, if you’re like me, and you need reminding – take five minutes now to remember it again… breathe it in…  feel the glory and the power in those two little words:

But now

Living the Life

Running on empty?

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This is my fuel gauge this morning. I’m not actually sure how far I can drive with the fuel light flashing, but I do seem to test it quite regularly…

Stupid, because I really don’t want to run out of fuel in the middle of a dusty nowhere or worse, a noisy junction… But there are some jobs that you just keep putting off until ‘there’s time to do them’.

It was what happened next that ‘winked at me’ though, (in the way that things do sometimes when God wants to tell me something through them).   Although the little light had been flashing angrily at me all the way to school and back early this morning,  when I got back into the car after leaving it for five minutes sitting on the driveway the needle was back up to nearly a quarter full and the accusing light had gone out again!

I know why of course –  the driveway slopes. It happens all the time, the slight incline pushes fuel into the tank at the back of the car and gives a false reading. It looks like I have plenty of petrol to make it to pick up the girls and back, but probably I haven’t.  Fortunately, on this occasion I’ve been paying attention, so I know that the truth is that I’m down to fumes and need to go to fill up.

What I feel like God has been saying to me today is that there are things in our life that can give us a ‘false reading’ about where we are in our relationship with Him.  Ministry and busyness especially can keep the gauge reading high, when actually the tanks are running empty.  How many of us have found ourselves running dry in the middle of serving the Lord?  The answer of course can’t be to just give up being busy, or give up doing ministry (The church would suddenly become a lot less effective if we all did that!) But we perhaps need to accept that those things can leave us with a malfunctioning ‘fuel gauge’…

When I was a student I had a car which had a completely broken fuel gauge (amongst other complaints).  Until it was fixed the only way to keep it running was to choose to top it up every other day!  I wonder if for similar reasons that it’s necessary for us to keep coming back to Jesus for a top-up of his forgiveness, grace, love and Spirit as often as we can.  I’ve sometimes rebelled against the ‘daily quiet time’ idea as it seemed like legalism, and although I don’t think the time of day matters and believe that some people hear God better outdoors, or indoors, or in a church, or in silence, or with music on… I have realised that finding a way and a time to meet with God EVERY SINGLE DAY, although it isn’t a rule, is just really sensible advice.

Great journeys are made of little steps.. So here are mine.  Today on the way to pick up the girls from school I will leave the house early enough so that a) I can stop at the garage and get some fuel  and  b) I can sit in the park next to the school with my Bible for 20 minutes and chat to (and listen to) Jesus.

What about you?

Fuel Gauge Feat

 

 

Living the Life, Surviving Tough Times

Landrover Choices

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Which of these should go first?  Fairly obvious answer?  It will be if you’ve ever tried reversing a car with anything at all hitched to the back of it!  The caravan is a bit like one our family owned when I was a kid (at least, it had a red stripe) and I well remember the slightly stressy summer-holiday moments of trying to reverse it into little plots on French campsites.

The Landrover goes in front.

A very very long time ago I did a Discipleship Training School with YWAM (A kind of year-out programme) and this picture dates back to one of those lectures.  I’m not even sure who was speaking, so I can’t give them the credit…  But the image has remained in a corner of my imagination, and God has been reminding me of it a lot in the past few weeks.

The Landrover is my will and the Caravan is my emotions.

In my case, the caravan is fairly large in proportion to the towing vehicle. (It may actually be more of a smart car/6 berth van kind of a relationship).  In different people comparative sizes will vary enormously, and both are important… but it’s still clear which one of them needs to be out in front and in charge of the steering!

I love this quote from CS Lewis:

“Faith is the art of holding on to those things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods”  C.S. Lewis

Isn’t that great.  One way that this works is hearing what God says, and then choosing to act like it’s true (however you’re feeling) and I wrote about that here…

Another way to think about it is a  determination to do what I know to be right, even if I really really don’t want to, and hoping that my emotions will eventually line up.  Right now I’m calling these Landrover Choices.

I’m sure you can think of a million times when your emotions (hurt, pain, fear, jealousy, anger…) have been shouting loudly at you to run, hide, blank someone, yell *delete as appropriate.  And yet maybe in those moments, your reason, or your knowledge of the choice God would have you make has been telling you that there’s a better way to handle this…

I once nearly missed out on a wonderful friendship because I was jealous of the young woman’s gifting and opportunities.  On that occasion I managed to put my will in front and override the envy and choose to get to know her.  I am so glad that I did.

Today I’m asking you this:  What is the Landrover Choice that you have to make this week.  In what decision do you need to choose to make your feelings run behind and let your will be in front?

landycaravan

Dealing with Change

Gappiness

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This is my beautiful nearly-six-year-old’s new smile.  Gorgeous isn’t it?

I’ll admit though, that when she ran to me yesterday, yelling with excitement that the wobbly front tooth was finally out, I did have a little moment of grieving for that pearly toothed little-girl-smile that I will never see again.

And then, before I knew it I was wondering what her big teeth will be like: Will they come through straight and strong? Will they look too big for a while in her little mouth? Will she still look like my Katie?

I was stuck there for a moment in an emotional whirlwind, caught up between grief about what has been lost and worry about what is ahead…

And then… she smiled!

…And I heard God whisper  “Gappiness is just so beautiful, isn’t it?”

And it is…

A long long time ago, when I was an architecture student, we spent a month or two talking about liminal spaces: porches; walkways; vestibules; corridors; thresholds; all ‘in-between’ places. We talked about how important it was to help people realise that they are making a transition, to sense that a change is taking place, and to prepare them for space they were about to experience.

I often remember those lectures as I see people around me passing through liminal life-spaces, passing over the threshold between what was and what will be, moving and adjusting from one season to another and travelling the gappiness in between. It helps to recognise the liminal spaces for what they are: temporary places of rest, or refreshment, or preparation.  Gaps where God can prepare us for the next season.  They will pass.  And although they can seem awkward or uncomfortable, they do have a beauty of their own.

Kate showed me this morning that she can just see the tip of the new tooth poking through… before I know it she will have her big-teeth smile… but it will take a while, and for now, I’m going to lean back and enjoy the gappiness.

gappiness

Living the Life

The Bouncing Ball

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In case you don’t know (having had the sense to avoid all sing-along movies for the last eighty-nine years) the bouncing ball is a little animated dot that bounces brightly along the words of a song to keep the sing-along-ers in time (and on the right word!)  It says – THIS IS WHERE WE ARE – PAY ATTENTION.

In my extensive research 🙂 I read just now that when the bouncing ball began life in September 1925 it wasn’t even animated, but a studio employee bounced a tennis ball on a long stick merrily along the words of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean. Wikipedia even tells me that on the latest sing-along version of Disney’s Frozen the little ball has become a bouncing snowflake… *shudder* As if there can be anyone left in the world who doesn’t already know all the words…

Enough history… I don’t think God gave me this picture this morning so I could celebrate 89 years of sing-a-long movie technology…

The ball is all about focussing your attention on what needs to be done right now, on what is happening right now.  As I said – THIS IS WHERE WE ARE NOW, PAY ATTENTION.

It helps avoid confusion between that and what’s coming next, or what’s just gone. And it makes you keep a steady time.   Someone put it there, on purpose, to help you stay in the right moment.  And let’s face it, the whole thing sounds better if the vocalists are in time with the music!

To follow the metaphor, I am the kind of person who rushes ahead to the chorus instead of letting the verse play out. And although the chorus often has a better tune, the words of the verse are nearly always more interesting.

But the message I’m hearing through this week’s postcard is: Focus on the now. Don’t get distracted by the just gone and the not yet. Learn. Keep time. Find me in the present.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do.

I’m cheating a little because I wrote this poem for my very first post… but I’m all for recycling… and since I seem to need to hear things more than once, I’m going to assume that it might help you too…

I search for you:
I strain ahead to look for you
to see where we will go together
Longing to know, longing to be there, longing to see
and I just glimpse your face through the mist.

I turn around to look back
at the place I saw you last
felt your touch, saw you move, joined the dance
but it's gone.

and yet
when I open my eyes
I see you are with me now

bouncing ball feat

What about you? What is God saying to you through this picture? Do you need to rewind or fast forward to get your focus on to what God is doing now?

Living the Life, Surviving Tough Times

When climbing a mountain…

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Intrigued?  Well, I’m not surprised.  I didn’t know what one of these was called either (had to google it 🙂 ).  It’s a piton.  Mountain climbers hammer them tightly into crevices in the rock face so that they can attach their safety ropes through the hole.  A vital piece of rock-climbing kit.

When God showed me this picture, I imagined what it would be like if, exhausted from a difficult climb, beaten back by the weather, you were to come across one of these, already firmly in the rock face and ready to clip your harness on to.  What a relief I would feel if it were me, and how grateful to the climber that scaled this wall before me and left me something to take a hold of.

So today’s postcard is an encouragement to start nailing in some of these beauties, both for those who scale the walls you’re climbing after you, and for your own benefit (just in case like me, you have a tendency to revisit the same challenges).

The first time I really noticed how this could work was when I was in a tiny church choir.  One day the choir leader played us a piece he planned for us to sing. It was extraordinarily complex and difficult with solos and harmonies and even a rap(!), so we reacted in some disbelief!  But he believed we could do it, and as a group we somehow just chose to take his faith and believe it.  It was as if we reached out with our Karabiner clips in our hands and clipped our harnesses onto the faith he was holding out.

Our faith in God is like that, we have the ability to hold it out to others and say “here-  hold on to mine, I’ve scaled this wall before you”.

I can’t tell you exactly what the pitons you put in will look like, they might be a word,  an action, scripture glued to a mirror, a testimony, a song, a journal entry, a book, a blog post, a status update, a tweet. But I do know that when we start to hold out the faith we’ve gathered to others it will multiply.  Whatever they say about problems, faith shared is faith (at least) doubled!

While a piton has to be strong, the real strength is in the rock.  The job of the piton is simply to enable someone to anchor their heart to the Rock of Ages, into the ultimate strength and safety of the Living God himself.

piton feat

If you’re climbing in a storm,  look out for what others have left for you.  When you see it – choose to reach out for it and clip yourself on!

If you’ve taken on a difficult face and made it to the top.  Look for the faith that you grew on the journey and then choose to find a way to hold it out for others.

And please, please comment below about the ways God is speaking to you that you could hold out the faith you’ve collected to to others and then comment again about the ways you’ve done it and seen faith multiplied in other people.  In the words of the Lego Movie – that would be awesome!

If you’re interested in more of what I think faith is and isn’t you could read this:  Faith and the Flying Fox or this: Ready to Walk on Water