Advent and Christmas Journey
What we see of human beings on the outside is rarely the full picture. We see behaviours, hear words and observe actions, but each of us live inside a personal history and psyche full of doubts, fears, assumptions and emotional habits all fuelling our visible behaviours, but rarely visible to ourselves, let alone those around us...
One of the things that has struck me most in writing our way through the Sermon on the Mount is the generosity of God laced through it all… ‘Don’t see with stingy eyes, see with generous eyes’, ‘Love your enemy’ ‘Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.’ ‘When you give...’.
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...
Day 25 Your Heavenly Father When my daughter was around eight years of age her imagination was captured by a lego set modelled on a speeder bike ridden by the young heroine from star wars. She started saving her pocket money towards it (which wasn’t very much) but also every night for several months... Continue Reading →
Sometimes this compass is so astonishingly upside down! How can it possibly point to true North? The directions we are accustomed to navigating life by dictate in our veins retaliation and revenge: From playgrounds to families to communities to government policy, when we take a hit we hit back. It’s a matter of pride, of reflex, of not looking weak, of saving face. This is simply (post the fall) how our world works. How we are programmed to think our world works...
God’s original plan for His creation was always faithfulness. His faithfulness mirrored by ours… like diamond-reflected-light splashing around everywhere. But we, all of us on this earth right here and now, comprehend daily that this world is not the one He created for us. We are not the human beings He created us to be. Not fully. Not yet...
December 6th He Will Come We stumbled across this cafe down a side street, searching for somewhere to have a moment together out of the cold. The cheery cafe owner took our order and we sat and waited in the corner, looking around us at the tinselled walls and festive decorations. The cafe owner... Continue Reading →
Good Friday It wasn't supposed to be this way? “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.” “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had... Continue Reading →
When God formed the first human beings into humanity He knelt down into the grit of things and let the cool clay clump between his fingers and cake on His palms. When He created humankind, He got grit under His fingernails and dust around His wrists. His hands got dirty.
Sometimes the loneliness scrapes at your skin, the longing to belong, to be accepted. You watch the others laugh and smile and bask in the glow of community and you know, you are convinced, deep in the bruised, dark places of your heart that there must be something wrong with you.
Abram, his name meant ‘exalted father’. But he wasn’t. A father...
There are stormy days when the sky weeps. And days when God is grieving with it. Days when the darkness in humankind overcomes the light that once was us...
Being lied to cuts like glass, and we’ve all felt the gash. It comes with being human- losing faith in human words. Trustworthiness is now an earned attribute, not an assumed one. And even those who earn it often fail us, falling into the temptation to let words smooth over the rough edges of life: “I’m fine”, “You look great” “It’s going to be alright, I promise”...
It’s strange how loss can leave you so emptied out on the inside and so disconnected from the outside. The outside world right there, just above your skin. Like all that’s left is a brittle shell. Echoing. Distant. The senses. They all collapse into this stormy sea of grief and the waves crash and roar and drown out all sound, drench out all touch, saturate all presence but the ever present dark. The presence of the hole. The gaping wound in reality where He once dwelt....
There were two gardens. Two gardens in this long tread of time. And God walked in them both. So did frail humanity, humanity forged in the image of God forgetting themselves and forsaking God. This is the story of the first garden, but only part of the story of the second.
We say ‘sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you’, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will break our hearts. Slowly. Eroding our God-breathed-Imago Dei with the slow drip of rejection and the corrosive power of false narratives labelling us less; names short on grace, names short on hope, names that fall short of the name God breathed into us from the genesis of our existence.
There is never really an argument between the light and the dark. Only a defeat. The dark may be tangible, but the light is unquenchable.
Grace doesn’t wait for us to grow up and earn it. It plants itself like a seed in our hearts, a seed woven into the sinews of our souls before our time begins, before all time began, and it whispers into our brokenness this lingering ancient song, a song half remembered but almost forgotten. A song first breathed over us in a garden long ago...
