God with us

Emmanuel is the name of the God

who calls to us in the giggle of a baby

in the crash of waves against the coast

in the melody that captures your heart.

 

We can see his love in rockpools

See it in the mountains stretching towards the sky

We see his love in the stars

and see it in lights still on at home, waiting.

 

He is the God who writes his love letters

in a meal shared with family

in a coffee shop with friends as it rains outside

in the endlessly changing colour of the sky.

 

We can smell this God in brownies,

straight out of the oven; in coffee,

in the freshness after the rain has fallen.

Smell him in the scent of a Christmas tree.

 

He touches us when we link our arms with friends,

in a hot bath after a cold day,

when you stroke a dog.

And when you are hugged, tightly.

 

(This little reflectiony type thing was inspired by and takes its form from a poem by Ulrich Schaffer in Joyce Huggett’s awesome, wonderful book ‘The Smile of Love’.)

Blogs are like buses

oh oh oh, I know I literally just blogged, but I just thought about a whole lot of stuff that I want to write down. It kinda helps to write stuff, because that way you can’t forget it, all the dreams that burned in your heart late at night are there in black and white every time you open your journal, or look at your blog. And, also, my roomate has a couple of guys over and they’re eating takeaway, and the walls are pretty thin, so I’m probably not going to be sleeping anytime soon.

So here are these dreams. First off, I’ve been looking for a house to live in next year, with two of my most amazing friends. And today we think we found one, which has everything we were looking for. And it also has a spare room. One of my friends has this plan for dinner night; to invite some people round every week for dinner and love. And so our immediate thought was to turn the room into a dining room, and then that got me to thinking now about hospitality. What about turning the room into a hospitality room? We can have our dinner nights, and also have people to stay. Could we invite people who really need a room and a warm place to sleep? Could we open our spare room to anyone who needs it? To the poor and to the needy and to the broken? We have a group of friends who are also living in our road, who also have a spare room, and they’re turning theirs into a prayer room. How amazing is that? It feels like a time of dreams beginning.

The other thing is that I lent my mum ‘the irresistable revolution’ by shane claibourne. Its a dangerous, dangerous book! And I was on the phone to her the other night, and she was talking about the book and then she asked me how I’d feel about my family fostering some kids. I can’t even remember the last time I was so happy about anything! To be able to give kids family and love and a home? Nothing stirs my heart like that, nothing makes me feel like God is closer.

I’m just so excited to see what happens next….

and now the guys (and my roomate) have left…so maybe I should take the opportunity to brush my teeth. Night x

The meaning of ‘Life’

I’m not too sure I really like the title of this post. Maybe its a little bit of a lie…perhaps I should state at the outset that the meaning of life is not about to be revealed in the next few words I send spiralling out into cyberspace. Perhaps that’s already obvious.

Anyway. Its been a while since I last posted. Thanks so much to you people who gave me some answers to my questions, questions, questions. I was amazed to have such lovely responses. And you guys helped me a lot. I think it would have taken me a while to figure out some of that stuff for myself. So I’m still thinking it all over…but it was really cool.

So…the meaning of ‘Life’. My friends and I were reading Zephaniah the other day, and we were thinking a bit about idols. God’s anger, the ‘fire of his jealousy’ is a result of the people’s sin, especially in regard to idols and other gods, the fact that they ‘bow down and swear by the LORD and also swear by Molech.’ So in typical Bible-study fashion, we moved on to asking each other about the idols in our lives. Honestly, I’d planned this study, and I wasn’t feeling too worried. I was thinking of mentioning a few things like money, boyfriends and girlfriends, popularity, and then move onto some prayer time. But soon we got to talking about where we put our time and our energy and what that reveals about our worship, and somehow (and I hadn’t planned this part) we ended up deciding to keep diaries of the way we spend time this week.

And as we talked we kept using words like exhaustion, and rushing, and boredom, and waste. Somebody said to me this week that worshipping anything else than God is self-damaging, because God has created the universe around himself, so that worshipping Him is the ultimate experience or way of life there is. And I’m thinking that if worshipping God was the central goal of my being then my experience of life wouldn’t need those words to describe it, right? I think I’d be using words like joy and peace and purpose and excitingness. That last one may not actually be a word.

So I think this week for me and my friends is going to be something like an experiment in  living intentionally. Not just letting the moments slip by, but choosing who to give our worship to. I think that in my diary so far I can see that I’m worshipping God a lot less than I thought I was. And if I’m pushing God to the periphery, if God is just for the moments when I need something, or I’m bored with facebook, or I’m at church, and the rest of the time I’m loving other things more, then I’m doing what the people of Judah did in Zephaniah right? Swearing by God one minute (say, in those worship songs I sing at church) and then by some other god the next.

I’m really interested to see how this looks in my everyday life. What does it look like and feel like to ‘love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’?

So we have this concept: ‘life’. And when we think about it, it suggests some things to us (‘life is a journey’ ‘life is a struggle’ etc). Its interesting, I think to reimagine the concept. What is ‘life’ when God is at the centre?

Questions, questions, questions…

Why is it that whatever you say about God, someone will find some way to challenge you on your assumptions? Why doesn’t there seem to be too much consensus on who God is? This is an honest wondering, I don’t have a blog titled ‘answers to all the questions you’ve ever asked about God’ to come. And I don’t mean this in a global sense, like why don’t all religions agree about God. But over the last while I’ve had a sense of…anxiety, or something, a vague unease. And today I realised (while I was praying, so I hope that God was in this realisation somewhere) that it all stemmed from this question: why is there so little consensus within the church about who God is?

If we can’t agree on what the gospel is (is it that God loves the whole world and is eager to save everyone, or that Jesus’ death accomplishes salvation only for those chosen by God, and so God therefore doesn’t love the whole world) does this affect the way in which the church shows Jesus to the world?

Do differences over doctrine affect our unity as the body of Christ? 

Is there an ultimate right or wrong answer on the issues we debate? And if there is what are the consequences for those who believe the wrong ideas?

And is there anything which every branch of the church could agree on?

 Hmmm….its interesting stuff. I don’t have any answers right now. But does anyone out there have any ideas? Let me know!

Gardens and God. More thoughts on Genesis.

Adam and Eve tried to hide from God – from the LORD God, Yahweh, the Blessed One, the all-mighty, the all-powerful commander of the angel-armies.It’s like a child hiding from her mum under the duvet, obvious because of the child-shaped lump on the bed. God knew where they were hiding – of course he did, and he knew what they hiding from; the shining shame of their shattered selves. And he knew that in time – literally, in time – he would send the Son to take the shame away. For all time. So God knew and it must have broken his heart to see them try to hide from the God who sees, to see how naïve they were, to see how little they understood the spiritual cosmology, to see how little power they had against the ravaging force of sin. To see His children run, and to see the terror they were running into.

And so when God calls to them ‘where are you’ he’s showing the same character we see at the cross. When the people shouted ‘Let God rescue him if he wants him’, at the same time, at the very same moment as God, hung on a cross is demonstrating conclusively how much He would give because he wanted man, Jesus doesn’t get down from the cross. He took the blows, he carried the weight, he wore the humiliation. He was humble, obedient to death – even death on a cross. And as God walks in that garden in the beginning, watching the premiere of a film that is going to play again and again across the millennia, he humbles himself – he humbles himself, he reveals his heart, he asks for what he wants, he won’t take it by force.

He calls to them “Where are you?”

Where are you? What are you doing? Where is this path leading? How did you get so lost?

Love is not self-seeking. God walked in the garden, in love with man, seeking him out. His love was offered in perfect humility.

I think God is into gardens. The Genesis story tells us that God walked in the garden in the cool of the day. I love the pleasure that implies; that God enjoys the feel of a garden after a warm day, the smell, the shadows, the breeze.

There’s another story about God in a garden, Gethsemanae this time. Again God is walking in the garden, again he walks alongside sinful man. Jesus says to the disciples ‘watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation’. Echoing down the centuries, it’s the same heartcry of God – where are you? Don’t hide Adam, don’t sleep Peter. Don’t fall into temptation. Please keep watch with me, please stay with me. And, of course, the outcome was the same – it’s grindingly familiar to anyone human, it’s the story that I’ve lived out everyday – tempted, deceived, disobedient, sinful, fallen. Adam ate the apple and tried to hide. Peter fell asleep and didn’t pray, didn’t watch for Jesus that terrible night. And for us all its around too – disobedience to the call of God. Its in our lies and gossip, in our nastiness and self-righteousness, our prejudice, mean-spiritedness, in our wars for power and for money. In our abuse of the powerless and our exploitation of the poor.

And Jesus’ prayer in the garden, the prayer that Peter and the disciples couldn’t pray? It’s the opposite of that. It’s the opposite to disobedience. It’s let your will be done – not as I will but as you will.

It’s the prayer of humility again, it’s the vulnerable God. Jesus is the Son of God – name above all names –and yet in that garden he fell face to the ground. He told his friends about his agony – he reveals his heart, just as in that other garden God the Father called out to that first disobedient man – where are you?

Beauty. A few thoughts on Genesis.

I think our hearts instinctively stretch towards the beautiful – beautiful words, beautiful songs, beautiful places – because our hearts cry out for the one who is beautiful. Full of beauty.When things align, when form echoes function in glorious continuity, when my words match the beat of my heart then we see Glory.And sin? Sin is the opposite- clashing notes, sarcasm instead of friendship, most of all a jarring sense that this is not supposed to be like this. God created – and it was good. The stars were good and the trees were good and the seas were good.

The beautiful seems right to us and ugliness seems wrong because from the start, (which of course wasn’t the start, but the start of the human story, a blink in God’s infinity) from God’s breath in our lungs we were beautiful. We were made by the one who is beautiful and we were made in his image. He looked at us and said:

‘That is very good.’

You did not create yourself. I had no control over my birth. One day we were born, squinting and screaming in a rush into a brightly coloured world. We were beautiful. Oh yes, we were beautiful. What Adam and Eve wanted was to be like God. They wanted to know the difference between good and evil, between beautiful and ugly. And the ugliness that lies within us all now is that desire to undermine God’s judgements, to make the decisions, to choose between good and evil.

If you look around you will see the absolute horror and desolation of our pride. (Pride, as they say, comes before a fall; or in this case The Fall). Because we are, let’s face it, not God. We can’t tell the difference between beautiful and ugly. We see the outside not the inside – we see an apple, we don’t see temptation. It’s how we can build ‘beautiful’ buildings as our churches and neglect, ignore, forget the glorious, wonderful, God-designed temples who die daily in gutters, or alone deserted, with a needle in an arm, or by the million of lack of food all over this ravaged earth which was once beautiful and good.

Jesus is beautiful. The Son of God, seated with the Most High, he is beautiful. Capital letters, underlined, in italics. And yet when He walked our streets, in our neighbourhood (let’s repeat that,– when He walked with us) he had ‘no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.’ He is beautiful. And he shows us what beauty actually is. Our attempts to get it, to tell the difference between good and evil, ugly and beautiful, have failed, haven’t they? So Jesus walked, offering us redemption, the way back to the garden, to show us what beauty is.

It all starts with God. The beautiful one.

Life is wonderful, right?

Well, I’ve been prevaricating and procrastinating and praying (less than I’d like maybe) about how to start this blog, wondering what it really was ‘about’, thinking how great it’s going to be when I finally get it started…and not actually writing anything. And today I was sitting at my computer, and out of the corner of my eye I saw birds flying out of red-gold trees, in sky the colour of a bruise.  It was a pretty picture-perfect moment. And later, as I stirred hot chocolate in a mug I thought that Jason Mraz is right, you know, life really is wonderful. If you stop and look at hot chocolate and birds and the sky then you can’t help but think, however bad you feel, that life is wonderful. And, I think, that this is what this blog is going to be about. I think that in the everyday routine of life on this planet, are moments which reveal God. The idea that God - infinite and glorious – would enter time and space as a man, called Jesus, would walk and talk and laugh and cry and be ironic and get frustrated and  read the Scriptures and want to be friends with people and attend wedding receptions and have dinner, do all the normal things of life shows us that God and everyday life don’t live on separate plains. That in our lives, however mundane, the glory of God can shine and does shine. Life is wonderful – because it is infused with the One who is Wonderful. So this blog is about life - a life that finds is source and reason in romance with the divine. About what it means to have a real life. I hope you want to join with me on this journey – there’s no need to buy a ticket, I won’t inspect your theology on the way in, everyone is welcome. The thing that excites me most about the internet is the possibility of a global conversation; that together we can explore this thing called life.