I was really hoping that today would be a good day, I was hoping to go for a swim, had planned to do stuff, as it happens today will be another day of sitting on the sofa sipping tea. Yesterday I walked until I felt my body telling me to stop, today I need to rest. Tomorrow is busy so swimming will have to wait, but I stubbornly refuse to give up my gum membership, and there will be good days when I can swim and for £7.00 per week I have decided it is worth it even if I only go twice.
A few weeks ago along with others I prayed the Methodist Covenant prayer, I get to do this several times and am deciding wheter that is a perk or a draw back of being a minister. In that prayer we pray the words "Let me be exalted for you or brought low for you", and I find that I have been brought low. I have recently been diagnosed with ME, which is some senses is a relief because it makes sense of years of struggling with ill health and depression, but it has also become very clear that this is not a condition that I can fight, I need to learn to go with it. I am fortunate because it is not entirely debilitating for me in the way that it is for some so I am having to learn to be gentle with myself. I don't do gentle very well.
I have been brought low in other ways too, life is like that, sometimes our own hopes and dreams and plans are simply swept away from us by circumstances. So I am reflecting on that prayer, a prayer that I remind folk every year is a dangerous prayer to pray, not because we are inviting God to bring us down, make us ill, inflict us with unemployment, and I certainly don't believe he does these things to us, rather it is an acknowledgement that God is with us in and through it all.
Here perhaps is the mystery, that God is with us, chooses to be with us in the low times, that he is with us seems to me to be a reflection of his incarnation, how in Jesus he came to a hurting world and still comes, present in Christ- his creative and recreative spirit at work in and through us. That God suffers with us is only a reflection, an echo if you like of the cross, and in this there is hope for the cross points us forward to the resurrection.
We are wrong if we expect the Christian life to be a bed of roses, to find a path smoothed out before us, and wrong if we make the ridiculous claim that bad things happen because we are not living in line with Gods will. I have heard and been subjected to this teaching too often, and seen others have their faith destroyed because they come to believe that God does not and cannot love them.
The mystery is that s/he is with us whether we are brought low or celebrating, recently I have been reading Richard Rhor's book Falling Upwards, he believes that there are two distinct parts to our spiritual life, and in the second one our task is to let go of our ego, the safety structures we have built for ourselves and fall upwards into the hands of God. Letting go means that we come to accept oursleves as flawed and broken and accepting that God loves us anyway, in accepting ourselves we are then drawn to accept others because we understand in a fullet, deeper way the love of Christ who has given and is giving all for us. We know our imperfections, in fact it is those imperfections that draw us closer to God, and in that drawing closer our boundaries and need to be right are blown away by the one who loves us more than we can possibly imagine.
Anyway I am going to stop rambling now and start painting...
Image mine: Title "Falling Upward"
