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Living the Life

Happy New Year – Hill walking

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I’m quite partial to a long slow walk in the countryside, especially if it’s between tearooms. And I particularly love walking (very slowly) up hills.   I often come to a point in the walk or climb where I’m ready to have a little sit down.  I’m very British, so it’s a joy to me to sit down somewhere sheltered-ish on a fold out mat, get out a flask of tea and a sandwich and just sit for a while and look.  And I think the first couple of weeks of a new year might be the perfect time to do a good bit of looking.

Looking should be savoured. In my opinion it’s better than the actual walking… I like to look back and congratulate myself, remember the pain and the exhilaration;  look at where I am now, enjoy the view;  and look ahead to where I’d like to get to, when I feel like I’ve got the energy to get up and move again.

It’s good to look back at where you’ve been.  To remember that stretch where the walking was a joy and the scent of the flowers around you almost carried you along; the slope that seemed a particularly hard climb; the part where you slipped and fell into the thorns and came out limping and bleeding and yet somehow got up and carried on.  If you look back at the journey of 2014 there will have been different kinds of terrain, injuries, happy times, and people who came and walked beside you in it all, it’s worth taking some time to reflect.

It’s even better to sit next to Jesus and ask him to show you where he was, how he helped you, how he felt as he walked beside you on that climb. Joys and struggles, triumph and disaster.  Don’t judge for yourself, ask him to show you what you did well, what you learned, how you’ve grown.

And while you’re resting with Jesus at the very beginning of 2015, you might choose to have a quick look through your back pack for any rocks you might have accidentally picked up and carried with you this year. Lumps of unforgiveness especially have the ability to slow you down.  It might really help to get rid of them now and not carry them through into the next year!

Looking ahead is harder.  The view back is always clearer than the one in front.  It’s probably better not to second guess it,  and if you’re like me you’ll be in the thick of January before you have time to ask too many questions.  You might just ask for one word or picture that says something about what God wants you to learn or be in the next year and then, if you’re brave enough, look up into Jesus’ eyes and say “I’m not sure where I’m going, but I trust you to lead the way”.

 

Living the Life

A Crucible for Silver… or Steel?

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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

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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…

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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

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

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