Humility knows that all it knows is sometimes half the story, and all it sees is sometimes half the picture, and so is open to hearing more. Seeing more. Living more. With God.
Radical Humility
De-railed
When heaven seeps into our plans, sometimes our plans are derailed and sometimes our tracks are changed in surprising ways, but always our direction becomes more than anything we could have imagined.
Disruption
Sometimes saying yes to God is saying no to safety, security, and the future you'd always thought you would have.
The Path of Peace
When you hold a miracle in your arms anything is possible.
Silence to Singing
December 17th Silence to Singing Listen to the reflection here... (also available on Spotify HERE ) The silence in Elizabeth and Zechariah’s house must have felt so loud. But perhaps not as loud as Zechariah’s own thoughts as he processed the Angel Gabriel’s words. Words that left him speechless. He hadn’t believed in... Continue Reading →
Magnify
What this world truly needs is this song once sung by this insignificant teenager from Nazareth.
Yes…
December 13th Yes Listen to the reflection here... (also available on Spotify HERE ) What we say yes to forms us. One way or the other. Mary. She said yes. To God. She gave Him all she had. “I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May your word to me be fulfilled.’ Then the... Continue Reading →
Kingdom Revolution
In taking on skin and sinew and pulsing veins, in becoming an infant held by an inexperienced country teenager, God was declaring war on all the pretensions to power, all false kingdoms of the world.
His Name
This insignificant teenager from this nothing-town of Nazareth, she is first to hear His name spoken into earth’s round atmosphere...
Two Stories
There are always two stories at work. The story we see with our eyes and the deeper story of God at work...
The Whole Story
We can live in the world our eyes can see, but it will only ever be half the picture...
Absence and Presence
It’s not more work or more money that fills the void and provides abundance, but the active presence of God...
This is the Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah
Jesus came into the incredibly messy human story of ancient Israel, a story full of brokenness, frailty and failing. He didn’t just take on skin, light enfolding in tissued flesh, He took on a history and a story full of the foibles and flaws of a fallen, falling people...
Unfurling Hope
If you run your finger over the lines of your life, what story does it tell?
Prince of Peace
This promise of a Prince of Peace begins with a people caught in the dark. Like us. Here on this spinning earth. This earth beneath our feet right here and now...
Immanuel
This one word: Immanuel sums up the entire story of scripture, the entire story of human existence...
The Coming King
He ‘shall come’ . That was the promise all along. He shall come. The One to stamp on the serpents head (Genesis 3:15), the one to whom the sceptre belongs (Genesis 49:10), the one who will establish His throne in love (Isaiah 16:5). He shall come! This King. Because He has always been coming. From before all time began Jesus was on His way journeying to find us, woo us, search us out in grace...
Ask, Seek, Knock
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...
How to See Clearly
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...
Do Not Judge
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...’.
Do Not Worry About Tomorrow
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...
Love Your Enemy
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...
Faithfulness
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...
Good Friday
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 →
Wholehearted
This flower this day, it stopped me in my tracks.
I hit the breaks in my car just to pull over and draw closer. This bright flower, it was growing right there in the hardened road, its roots tucked deep beneath the unforgiving pitch, its frail leaves stretching bravely above, its golden petals curling courageously, extravagantly, unabashed reaching toward the sun.
Questions, Answers and the Stories in Between
This man, this day, he thought he had the answers: easy. He was an expert in answers. But he was about to learn: God is in the questions.
Drawing in the Dust
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.
Weightless
Words weighing nothing, as light as breath can drag a soul down, pinning the human spirit to the mat.
We know this because we’ve lived the truth of it in our hearts. The truth that words are anything but weightless. They build. They tear. They lift. They crush. We know the feeling. The feeling of the weight of words on our shoulders. Pressing. Pushing. These welting words of others can become the caves we dwell in. Our broken hearts rebuilt. Into prisons. Into caves.
Imago Dei
The world has its ink and we are a page, and every stroke creates in us the script lines of our selves, a biography constructed by the words and actions of others: I am loved. I am unloved. I am capable. I’m a quitter. I am smart. I am dumb. I am beautiful. I am nothing… I am, I am, I am, I am. I am the result of a thousand words, ten thousand messages, twenty thousand looks, telling me who I am.
But who am I really?
Sunrise
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....
Good Friday
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... Continue Reading →
Empires, Kingdoms and Truth on Trial
Who is the true King of this world? Who is it you want? As King?
Gethsemane
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.
Wholehearted
This one brave heart. The one who wasn't wondering what others might think. She had thrown all caution (and all cultural propriety) to the wind and thrown herself at Jesus feet.
Drawing in the Dust
Breath. How do you restore it when it's been strangled out of a soul? How do you help a breathless world catch its breath in wonder?
Weightless
Sometimes our brokenness is easy to see, like a broken leg, or an open wound, but broken hearts are less visible to the eye, unless of course that eye is God’s...
Triumph
God has all the power Satan tempted Jesus with and more. He could dominate, He could take the world by force as Satan offered it. But He doesn't. Instead of coming with an army to control us, He came as a vulnerable human being to woo us, to walk with us, to win us. With love.
The Doorway to Freedom
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.
Friend
God wants to walk with us, partner with us, bless us and care for us, threading together the tapestry of all the thousand ways He loves us, a tapestry woven in gold and goodness, grace and givenness, justice and righteousness. All the patterns of grace in a life.
For You…
Welcome Friend, Whether you just stumbled in here or were invited by a friend, you are most welcome. Kick your shoes off, make yourself a cup of tea, and make yourself at home. I know this looks like a website, but actually it could also be called a road of sorts. Well, a journey really.... Continue Reading →
