...silence falls slowly,
slow-ly, slow--ly,
+
slowly the dis-ease within me
clamouring for attention ebbs & ebbs away...
until the gentler pounding of my heart
keeps time with the rhythm of the universe,
as the waves beat upon the shore...
+
...at last I am still
still,
still...
+
... there, in the silence
I find my truest face reflected,
and
I am awed by love...
+
The centre piece of a recent painting ( mine)
I have nothing to give,
nothing to share,
I am nothing,
all is empty,
I survey the horizon
and see nothing,
my heart craves love,
my mind craves truth,
but nothing,
there is nothing, nothing of myself...
BUT there is you,
and when I dare to lean on you,
dare to trust you,
dare to draw upon you
I become more,
I am freed,
I am me
hidden in Christ with God,
a new creation,
transformed,
loved,
known,
one,
filled,
confident,
me...
with God...
I want to savour life,
to taste the moment,
to be awake to its
blessings and pains,
to know myself,
to be aware of my reactions,
to be willing to hold them
as treasures or a dross,
to grow, to be
transformed, inwardly
transformed,
able to love and to give,
to heal and to hear,
to celebrate and even
to mourn...
+
so I pray for grace,
for an inner well of
stillness,
a centering source
of truth,
a connection to the holy,
where the chatter and distractions
of my days
can be sifted and sorted
in loves kinder light...
+
Image Centered
S. Coleman
I am not sure why they made it a competition, but the meddling of the Scribes and Pharisees were too much for him, he was not in the mood to be pitted against John, as if he didn't want to overshadow him, as if that weren't the point at all. We headed back to Galilee, which of course meant travelling through Samaria.
We moved quickly but even he could not bear the fierceness of the mid-day heat so when we came to Jacobs well we stopped, he looked so weary, and we were all hungry, so we set off into the town leaving him to rest, it seemed his heart was as weary as his feet.
We weren't gone for long, maybe an hour maybe just a little more, but when we returned he had completely changed, his face was shining and alive, all weariness seemed to have left him, he didn't even notice us at first he was so deep in conversation with the woman. We were shocked of course, we knew he often challenged conventions but to be alone with a woman, a Samaritan woman... I guess the shock must have shown on our faces, because she soon turned and ran leaving her water pot behind.
He looked at us calmly, but his face was still alight, and he smiled, I "am still thirsty" he said, and he picked up her abandoned water jar, filled it and after taking a long drink passed it to us. We unpacked the food then and sat on the ground together to eat. He took the bread and broke it, blessed it and shared it with us, and as we ate he told us of his encounter with the woman who we had so easily dismissed. Every meal with him was a holy moment.
He told us of her questions, and of his, how he'd challenged her to bring her husband, and how she had bravely told the truth. He told us of how her questions had drawn from him the image of living water, the Spirit given as a life giving spring to flow through any who asked for it. True worshippers he said were not confined to time or place, true worshippers entered into an intimate and organic relationship with the one who was the source of this life giving stream.
As he spoke it was as if living water began to flow within each one of us, we were connected to the source, deep flowed to deep, and no barriers of race, gender or creed mattered in that moment. Soon though the intimacy we were sharing was broken open, the woman returned running, and with her came people from the town, now eager to follow one they had previously shunned. He shared with them all then, taking time to teach and bless and heal. Living waters flowed, and as well tell this story they continue to all who might drink from them.
(Picture mine)
What I long for is
time set aside
for nothing much,
no plans,
no deadlines,
no hurry or worry,
no what shall we do,
or where shall we go,
but time ...
+
so why do I feel guilty,
why do I feel the need to
plan days out,
to look for activities
to fill every moment,
to search out stories
to tell, to wow others with;
"you would have loved it,
we had a great time..."
+
I have made a decision,
I am going to reclaim my
holiday as a holy
and I am going to do nothing,
I want to breathe deeply,
notice the moment,
seek wonder from a deeper place
I am going to give myself time...
+
When I speak
may my words be laced with grace,
seasoned with wisdom,
infused by love,
may my words be healing words,
challenging, lifegiving, wholesome,
may they surprise even me,
because their source is rooted
deep in you,
may they flow
as living water,
easing the soul,
calling forth active
(w)holiness...
+
save me from my own
rash and harsh words,
my foolish ill thought out
promises, promises I cannot keep...
and help me to forgive the
words of my past,
words I long to take back but cannot,
words that have made me never want to
speak again....
+
so give me boldness
to speak,
stir me and create in my heart a passion
that refuses to hold back,
speak in me,
speak to me,
speak through me...
wisdom, grace, peace, love...
and challenge
at the right time.
Picture: Silver lining. mine
Out of the depths I cry to you O God,
show me my true nature,
my true name,
take me beyond the outer things,
below and beyond the surface,
beneath and above the excuses,
set me free to be myself,
my true self,
my God created self,
my loved and beloved self,
let me hear you calling me
to be, and to become...
out of the depths I cry,
I cry to you O God....
Over the last few weeks I have found myself lost in details, learning names and getting to know people, finding my way around, sorting out who meets when and where, and filling my diary with appointments many of which will become recurring and therefore almost second-nature. Through it all I have tried to listen, tried to take in as much as I can, and to be honest it has been exhausting. One of the reasons for this is that I am a big-picture person, I like to step back and look to the horizon, to scan for possibilities and opportunities.
Knowing that I am a big-picture person helps me to understand myself, and over the years it has helped me to come to appreciate others whose gift is found in the details, people who will ask questions that require precise answers, answers that need to be found, answers that folk like me skip over optimistically assuming that all will fall into place. Over the last few weeks I realise that I have frustrated one or two folk, wonderful details folk because in many ways although we are seeking the same objective we don't speak the same language.
I have come to really value details people, in fact I admire them in so many ways, but I am also aware that we need one another, and that we need to find creative and liberating ways of working together. This last week I have valued a couple of opportunities to stop, to reflect and to take in the view from a physical perspective, once in the Lake District, and again more locally walking on the beach, both of these reminded me that I also need time to step back and survey the spiritual scenery both within myself and with the churches that I am called to serve. When I take the time to do this the gift of the big picture becomes clearer and I am able to convey it to the details folk in a way that makes sense, not only that but I am able to then understand how the details fit it rather than drowning in them. I am thankful for a meeting with my Spiritual Director today as in many ways that helped me to clarify this for myself again; it's funny how you know something and yet need to be reminded!
hope weaves
her golden thread,
silently, softly,
calling , drawing,
those with
eyes to see
and ears to hear,
take hold, take hold,
take hold
and follow,
hold on,
even in the struggles,
and the pain
I will not forsake you,
hold on,
and I will bring
you through,
hold on
for there's a blessing in
the holding,
hold on,
hold on,
hold out
for hope, for
hope weaves
her golden thread,
silently, softly,
even here...
I was chatting with a client at a drop in today, he articulated the Christian hope in a gracious and thoughtful way, seeing hope for transformation even in his darkest struggles.... and I was blessed.
Have you ever been utterly surprised by something you thought you knew well? A familiar view caught suddenly in new light revealing fresh vistas? A phrase in a well known story that suddenly leaps out and hits setting off sparks in your imagination? A song you’ve heard a thousand times, and yet somehow you’ve never heard the underlying melody until today?
Have you ever thought to yourself, wow, this is the first time I’ve ever, seen/hear/thought that, and yet I am looking at/ hearing/reading something so familiar….
I want to challenge you to try to do that today, to open your ears and lend your imaginations afresh to the Genesis story, to come with me to the garden, to watch the scene unfolding…
Eve and Adam are hiding, they are feeling vulnerable and scared, they have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they have been forever changed, their joyful innocence has gone, they are aware of their own nakedness, their frailty is evident to them….
And God calls; where are you? Of course God knows where they are, but the question reveals a deep longing in God for his creation for something has now gone wrong, something has been lost….
Now I’m not talking about sin here, for you must note that the passage itself says nothing about sin or the fall, both of those are layers we have added to this account through the years, and it is now difficult to hear the story without hearing them…
But Eve and Adam are lost, they have lost their confidence, they have lost their open and childlike relationship with God, they are like street children thrust into adult lives too early, confused and hurting they have attempted to clothe themselves with fig leaves…
Dressed in this inadequate clothing they respond to God, and the blame game begins….
She gave it to me…
The serpent tricked me….
So what’s going on here? I wonder as I read the passages in Genesis if Gods plan might at some point have been to share the knowledge of good and evil with them, when the time was right, when they had grown in their relationship with him, when they were ready for such a burden….
For God’s plan is surely that we walk with him, in relationship with him, to grow in the knowledge and love of him. No loving parent would want to keep their children as babies, we want them to grow and to learn, to develop and to mature, and good parents allow their children to stretch the boundaries and explore new things one step at a time….
But the fruit has been eaten, their eyes have been open and Eve and Adam are lost, lost to themselves and to God in confusion, pain and shame….
And I wonder how often that is our experience, I wonder how much of our spiritual and religious life is so much an exercise in sewing fig leaves together in a vain attempt to clothe ourselves and to be presentable. How often do we hide from God and from ourselves trying to be something we are not? The truth is we are unable to cover our vulnerability and brokenness…
But God comes calling…..
Let’s leap in our imaginations now to the house where Jesus is, crowds of people have flocked to hear him, they can’t get enough of him, his teaching is new and open and radical, the God revealing ways that he opens the Scriptures and teaches have stirred in them a deep longing, an echo of Eden, a desire for healing, wholeness, and restoration, and they press in for more….
God is calling…. they are responding…
But not everyone is pleased, Jesus is drawing attention to himself and his family are confused, he is not holding to the social norms of the day, he is behaving strangely, he receives everyone, even tax collectors and prostitutes, lepers and adulterers, and they are embarrassed….
Jesus is teaching, and touching and healing, and the Pharisees, totally perplexed buy the God revealing acts they are seeing mistake the glorious work of the Holy Spirit as the work of Satan, and they declare he has a demon….
But Jesus makes clear, in the form of a parable, the scope of what he is doing in his freeing of the demon-possessed. Jesus is coming to plunder Satan's household and bring about his end, not by division from within but by stealth and force from without. Jesus' stealthy binding of the powers of evil ultimately undermines Satan so completely that even when he appears to have succeeded in destroying Jesus in the crucifixion, the very destruction of the Son issues not in defeat but in the mysterious victory of God.
Jesus will not be stopped, not by his family and not by the Pharisees, and he calls to the crowd to do the will of God, to become members of the new kingdom family….
God has come calling….
And hearing something fresh and new in his call the crowd respond, throwing aside their religious fig leaves they come as if naked and vulnerable before God who in Christ has shown himself in a new way, full of forgiveness and mercy, full of grace and truth, truth that sets them free from the rules that have bound them….
God is calling, calling to us today, for we are as vulnerable and broken as Eve and Adam, as frail and needy as the thronging crowd, and just as God did not leave Adam and Eve in their inadequate clothing but provided animal skins for them so he comes to us in Christ and offers us himself….
An animal was sacrificed to cover Adam and Eve; Jesus gave of himself to cover us, and he comes calling, calling us to clothe ourselves with the garments he supplies us with; compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Calling us to be quick to forgive an offense, to forgive as quickly and completely as he has forgiven us. And most of all he calls us to receive his garment of love, a garment so rich that it covers our brokenness when we receive it in humility and vulnerability….
The proud and the arrogant, the self righteous and the self sufficient ones cannot wear these clothes, they are given to those who know their frailty and weakness, the vulnerability and nakedness, for the clothes he gives us are the clothes of grace.
If we put on grace God comes calling through us, calling to the broken and the vulnerable, working in us so that we see our neighbour in need and offer to share the grace we have received with them, calling us beyond ourselves to touch the world in prayer, to bring out the God colours and God flavours in it, to shine a light into the dark places, to speak love and to reach out, to draw a crowd….
God is calling, calling us today to cast of our religious fig leaves and to become bearers of love and grace, to paint his picture, tell his story and sing his song…
And we need not be afraid for God knows us as we are and will cover us with all that we need, he will waken us to the Spirit within, and the miracle is that somehow our weakness becomes his strength, for he has chosen to place his treasure into the cracked clay pots of our lives and to make us beautiful….
God is calling….
How will you respond?
Dear Church,
I love you, indeed I am a part of you and have chosen to follow a call to be so, but I have to admit that there are times when I walk or drive away from our meetings and I simply want to weep. I see that we do many good things, but I weep for so often we miss the best, by refusal, by blindness or by misunderstanding, don't we know that the message we hold is a glorious Spirit fired, message of grace and love? Let me explain a little by telling you a part of my story;
I came to join you as a mixed up teenager who wanted to know God, and for years (yes literally years) I tried to fit in, to do and say the right things, to understand your practices and rituals, all the time believing that if I could only get them right then God my receive even me! It took a real crisis in my life to draw from me a heartbroken prayer and a realisation that I could not be the person I was trying to be, I would always get it wrong, make mistakes and trip over my own feet. It was in my moment of giving up and giving in that I discovered something amazing and freeing, life-giving and affirming, the amazing truth was that God had been wanting to love me, help me and support me and equip me and even carry me when necessary all along.
The scale of that revelation was mind blowing for me, and I can remember days when laughter and joy would simply bubble up inside me for the sheer wonder of it all, and I could not understand why you hadn't shared this secret with me! I looked for people who had had a similar revelation, and found some, some within my local fellowship, and some in other places, and I sought them out and drank form the life giving streams of the Spirit whenever I could.
But, and it is a big but, everywhere I went I discovered rules to be followed and again and
again I would try to live within those rules, and again and again I would find myself thinking that I was not good enough for God and would have to try harder, and when I did, the joy left me and I would find myself struggling. As I talk with you I find that we are often in that same place, striving and struggling to get it right, wanting to know God, and it saddens me to know that again and again we lay burdens upon one an-others backs.
Now before anyone gets cross or hurt please know that I don't say that lightly, I say it because I see it all of the time and I don't doubt that I too have been guilty of it. The truth is we have a tendency to get strange ideas about God into our heads, only yesterday I heard someone say that "if we truly lived as Jesus wanted us to then we would be a strange buttoned up, straight laced group of people that would confuse and repell others....."
Where on earth did that idea come from? How could anyone who has read the Gospels believe that "if we truly lived as Jesus wanted us to then we would be a strange buttoned up, straight laced group of people that would confuse and repel others....."
When I hear things like this I want to weep with frustration and anguish and anger, yes anger that we have told ourselves such lies, that we have loaded one another with so many burdens of how to and what to that we stumble around under the weight of them, and in the midst of all this confusion and stumbling we wonder amongst ourselves why we are not attracting new members! Then we feel bad and so we plan and scheme and work and strive and frankly we wear ourselves out, we take on new initiatives and struggle to keep them afloat....
It saddens me that we are like this so often, and I wonder if you'd pause with me for a few moments to listen to the words of Jesus, spoken on a day of frustration in his ministry (go and read the Chapter, and the Chapter's around it and you'll see what I mean);
"16-19How can I account for this generation? The people have been like spoiled children whining to their parents, 'We wanted to skip rope, and you were always too tired; we wanted to talk, but you were always too busy.' John came fasting and they called him crazy. I came feasting and they called me a lush, a friend of the riffraff. Opinion polls don't count for much, do they? The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
20Next Jesus let fly on the cities where he had worked the hardest but whose people had responded the least, shrugging their shoulders and going their own way.
21-24"Doom to you, Chorazin! Doom, Bethsaida! If Tyre and Sidon had seen half of the powerful miracles you have seen, they would have been on their knees in a minute. At Judgment Day they'll get off easy compared to you. And Capernaum! With all your peacock strutting, you are going to end up in the abyss. If the people of Sodom had had your chances, the city would still be around. At Judgment Day they'll get off easy compared to you."
25-26Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: "Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You've concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that's the way you like to work."
27Jesus resumed talking to the people, but now tenderly. "The Father has given me all these things to do and say. This is a unique Father-Son operation, coming out of Father and Son intimacies and knowledge. No one knows the Son the way the Father does, nor the Father the way the Son does. But I'm not keeping it to myself; I'm ready to go over it line by line with anyone willing to listen.
28-30"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."
Jesus wants us to live and move within his unforced rhythms of grace, yes there are
boundaries and yes there are rights and wrongs, but by the Holy Spirit he will lead us gently into them, he longs take our hands and dance with joy for us...
He longs for us to know the life giving freedom and order of Pentecost, and yes I truly did say order, for just as the Spirit brooded over the chaotic waters at the beginning of creation so she broods and breathes over the chaos that is her church today longing to bring us to a new birth. That is a powerful picture, for it is not brooding in the sense of being filled with morbid thoughts but rather the sense of the Spirit as a mother hen incubating her eggs or her new chicks, warming, nurturing and protecting them until they are able to run freely...
The Spirit longs to birth her new life in amongst and through us, bringing order out of our chaos, the chaos of our misunderstandings and our stumblings, just as she did on the day of Pentecost when the disciples were filled with the power and love of God and when the message of Jesus, his birth, death and resurrection suddenly took on form and meaning transforming their timidity and placing in Peter ; you remember Peter, the stumbling, lying, denying, terrified one; well yes placing in him the a firey eloquence that drew a crowd....
So here is what I am trying to say through all of this, when I drove away weeping from a service on Sunday I saw you (us) as the crippled woman we find in today's lectionary reading;
"She had been afflicted with this for eighteen years. When Jesus saw her, he called her over. "Woman, you're free!" He laid hands on her and suddenly she was standing straight and tall, giving glory to God."
Jesus longs to lay his healing hand upon us, to set us free from our self imposed constraints and rules, he longs to give us the fresh gift of his Spirit to enable and comfort, to teach, equip and lead us, to set us free to stand tall, and to live in the light and glory and freedom of the God who does not berate us for our sins, but removes them from us as far as the east is from the west, freeing us to dance with him, to become all that he has called us to be. If we dare to do that "casting off all that hinders us" and daring to run free with him, entering into the glorious circle of love and allow ourselves to be embraced by the God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) who only wants the best for us, and has chosen to make himself known through us, if we dare to do that then our strivings will cease and we will learn to live freely, lightly, joyfully abandoned to his purposes day be day transformed more and more into his likeness overflowing with the generous generosity of God.
Quite simply dear Church, he wants to bless us that we might be a blessing to others....
Will you join me, as I join him in the dance? It is from that dance that we are set free to sing his harmonies of truth and justice, grace and peace, from there that we can invite others to join us to work for wholeness and healing as in and though him we learn the fullness of our calling and our being....
Both images mine;
Waves of Grace and Resurrection
|
|
|
|
|
|
Recent Comments