Advent and Christmas Journey
This day a few years ago I was down. Way down. Weighed down by worries and stresses and cataloguing my anxieties in a litany of self pity. I was making pizza, rolling dough, cutting toppings, listing all the reasons why life was just too hard...
Memory is an interesting thing. Many years ago I had a time that was, at the time, the most challenging season I had been through. This was not long after I had moved to Jamaica to be fully dedicated to the ministry in the inner city. I can clearly remember many of the moments that were so challenging … but just yesterday I was looking through some old notes I made at that time, and was shocked by what I had not remembered. None of my memories were false … but every single one of the challenges had ended up turning out so much better than I remembered. Some of them miraculously so...
Jesus’ words on this mountainside, they sound like good advice, like a comforting mantra to live by, but Jesus isn’t giving us advice or a mantra to chant: He’s giving us eye surgery! Jesus is declaring… change the way you see! He is operating on the way we human beings view the world because we’ve been seeing it all wrong all along.
We learn fear. Life teaches it to us blow by blow. Sometimes by a trauma, sometimes by the slow drip of disappointment corroding courage, usurping hope. We tried. And failed. We got bitten. And bled. We got knocked down. And lived there.
Sometimes life can feel like a storm. And sometimes like a drowning. Like a flailing about without much to hang onto. Like a slow death by silence, soundlessly sinking in the waves of life.
I closed the well worn, well loved Bible picture book and put it on the bed. My four year old son beamed up at me, eyes bright and alive, “Mummy” he said importantly “I’m gonna fight Goliath! Because God and me are strong!”. You can guess at the story we’d just read and probably guess at my mothers-heart response. I smile still as I remember this moment. The moment this tiny little boy, barely up to my waste in hight, named a truth larger than any giant.
Belief matters. Because our beliefs create the world we live in. And unbelief creates a world without God. A world of loneliness and despair. A world of hustling to survive. A world of anxiety and fear...
Why was Jesus sleeping? Who can sleep in a thunderstorm? Who can be anything but thrown about by a raging of emotion? Who is this that just doesn’t seem to feel it when the world is falling apart? Who?
