Advent and Christmas Journey
In Jamaica, for many years (over a decade) we ran many programmes in inner city communities. Its a tough context and these programmes varied in effectiveness but we battled on, committed to being there and shining God’s love into these communities. But then one day God stopped us in our tracks...
Day 34 Good Fruit We, all of us long to feel like we are not alone in this world. Indeed the one ‘not good’ thing in all creation before the fall was for us to be alone… “The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make... Continue Reading →
Our son Oliver doesn’t sleep well. He has a very creative imagination and a world full of ideas whirling in his mind. Between this and all the natural worries fuelled by moving countries and struggling to adjust, he’s very often up at night...
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...
I hope this little letter finds you resting in His presence and enjoying refreshing time with the community He has placed you in. Here is a little printable gift ... some of the most clarifying words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. See you on the mountainside tomorrow, Liz The printable PDF... Continue Reading →
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...’.
There are a lot of things in this world vying for the human heart, so many calls enticing our eyes, our time, our lives… so many convincing claims calling us to give our story over to their ‘sell’...
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 →
I have to confess. I love charity shopping. The thrill of the hunt, the thrill of discovering buried treasure. I love searching through the eclectically laden shelves of charity shops looking for that one bargain, that one thing that is useful or pretty or special in some way.
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...
Today, as I write this, a young man I have known since he was in his early teens, Deron … a young man who has served as a team member in Fusion’s ministry in Trench Town … a young man with a young family … can not safely live in his own home...
We were created for trusting authentic relationships connected with threads of truth, trust and intimacy with each other and with God. In the beginning we knew where we stood and who we were as children of our heavenly Father...
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...
On moving to our new house I have discovered an underground network of stinging nettles in my garden beds. During winter, soon after we arrived here the nettles disappeared and I couldn’t see them, but now as spring has begun to arrive they have pounced and begun to fill my garden with stinging weeds that choke out other plant growth. The issue isn’t the soil. It is what has been hiding beneath the surface of it all along...
It is not just what happens to us in life, but the story through which we interpret what happens to us that matters. The story we live (often subconsciously) manifests itself in our behaviour and choices...
For just under a decade, our family lived in a small rural community on a hillside, overlooking the constantly buzzing city of Kingston, Jamaica. The brown boards of our rustic home were faintly visible from the city, but whenever we left the small one-bulb verandah light on at night, we could see it shining bravely, clearly visible from way down in the city. Light travels. Far and fast...
The message Jesus was communicating to His first hearers on that hillside under spreading skies that day (and to all of us here today, wherever we are in this world) is this: This world will have it’s challenges and we will have battles in it... but the Kingdom of God is here. Now. Blessed are we when we navigate life with God's compass and live like we belong to a different Kingdom. Because we do...
Did the grass crunch under His feet as He ascended the hillside that day? Did pebbles slide and roll between His dusty sandalled toes? Was the breeze warm against His cheek, or did it prick His skin with a chill?
