Drama, drama, drama...

Part of me wants to delete yesterday's post, or at the very least hide it away, so that only I know where it is. It seems an embarrassment, a weakness, to be seen to be vulnerable. Allowing myself to be vulnerable is one of the things I'm worst at; I avoid it, and hide my vulnerabilities. I have a compulsion to appear perfect at all times. No one else should have to deal with my mess and brokenness, right? Right? My pastor's heart will always, always have time for someone in need. But, OH the cost to my pride when I need someone there to look after me. 


When my head becomes as messy and confused as it has been for the last couple of days, I try and hide. I'll hide in a trashy novel, I'll hide with a DVD, I'll hide on the internet, or I'll just plain fall asleep. I have yet to learn the discipline of always running straight to God. Somehow, I struggle to dive into His Word, or just simply be and hang out in His presence. To complicate things further, I pile guilt on myself, knowing that He should be my hiding place and wondering why exactly I'm not going there. But God speaks, even in the midst of all my hiding. He comes to where I am, and speaks through the places that I allow to speak into my life. Yesterday, He spoke to me through this. The excellent and wonderful Jamie the Very Worst Missionary is aware of where she's not sorted, of where she makes mistakes, but in the midst of that she knows her identity. She knows that she's a child of God, and that her Heavenly Daddy is the only one who has any right to judge her actions. And she has found freedom in that. The point she makes here is that in Eden, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. God calls us to be who He created us to be, and to be unashamed in that. As Jamie says, 'Who told you to be ashamed?' Not my Daddy. No, sirree. 


I am broken and I am unworthy, but nonetheless I am loved. Jesus bought my freedom, and who am I not to live in that? 

Of Bad Days, or, Loving Too Much

Today, I find I cannot believe that I can change the world. Is that sin? It's definitely unbelief.


Today, I began to believe that the boy who loves me does so too much. Would it be better for him not to love me at all? I cannot work out if the loving me or the not loving me could break him more.


I am not having a good day. I am struggling to hear my Daddy's voice in the midst of the maelstrom.

Momentum

So I've just come back from a week in a field with friends and Daddy God. It's a sign of how tired I am that, as I wrote that first sentence, I expected my laptop to do the same predictive text wizardry that my Blackberry provides. It's been an incredible week of some immense teaching and worship, and realising that I was hanging out with 5000 people who could see a generation changed through their passion for Jesus. It's been a week of beginning to believe that little me could be instrumental in seeing injustice banished and captives set free, freed from slavery, the sex trade, addictions, abuse, depression, fear... You name it. 


'For I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.' (Phil. 4:13)


At the same time, there has been a realising of the cost of being sold out to Jesus. There has been a laying down of certain could-have-beens, and grief as a season ends. But as one season ends, another begins, right? 


This is a woefully incomplete post, but I wanted to write something in the immediacy of returning home. Something that might have to serve as a spark if my fire goes out.

A question of labels and body parts

So today I spent time with a family I love - a guy, a gal and a baby. Great.


They are a family from a church that a falling-in-love-with-Jesus ago, I would have called home. He was a priest, but fell in love and did the brave thing of stepping out of a church that wouldn't let him marry her. They are trying to build a life but because of the labels attached to him, they are struggling. There is joy in their family life, but there is also a strain, some of which is evidenced in the way the guy cannot find a job. His past as a priest is keeping him out of employment, both in ministry and out of it. He has so much to offer, but refuses on principle to consider a position in the Anglican church. He is being kept from his calling, from being the person he was created to be by labels and semantics and warped perceptions. 


This is one of the things that gets me cross with church, and makes me want to turn my back on it. I can see so much brokenness within the Body, and on my bad days it makes want to disassociate with it entirely. I'm only little, just a kid, a baby follower of Jesus - what am I supposed to do? But then Daddy speaks, and reminds me that the Body needs its eyes as much as it needs its feet. It needs its heart and its kidneys and its hands and its nose and... Everything else. I can no more leave the Body than I can expel any part of it. 


Better to be a force for love from within, than a detached eyeball left on a dusty road, right?

On wanting to fly away and hide

From the wonderful Rob Ryan

Maudlin

I am in great danger of giving in to a fairly spectacular bout of self-pity today. My head aches, my joints ache and I am developing an impressive smoker's cough (I don't smoke.) So far today, I have had no one to talk to as my family have either absented themselves from the house or locked themselves in their bedrooms (and the aforementioned aches make it impossible for me to leave the house and go in search of people. Naturally.) And then beneath these surface irritations lies the fact that my city, my country currently exist under a cloud of fear of riots and looting and fire and violence. Beyond the fear, there is rage and the advocation of the death penalty and the desperate question of Why? Why is this happening? 


I wish I knew. There is no single easy answer, but a lot of hard ones as we see scenes across Britain that are being described as the worst since the Blitz. We are living in a war zone and where is God? I will admit to feeling cross and angry and frustrated at the futility of prayer as the violence did nothing but escalate. I barely slept Monday night, feverishly refreshing Twitter and BBC News for the latest updates. The scaremongering on Twitter got to me and I became fearful and despairing. That tapped very nicely into my anxiety issues from the past, and could have stopped me leaving the house for a week that would have seen me sink ever deeper into a black hole of gloom and depression. I was focusing on the storm, which is far too easy to do. It felt like Jesus was sleeping and everything was hopeless and nothing happy would ever happen again. But then...


Then then, oh glorious THEN, riotcleanup starting trending on Twitter, and thousands took to the streets to clean them. Something of love in the form of community and helping one another came to the fore, and I received a stern lesson in not giving up hope. In the face of that, what am I doing feeling so sorry for myself?

Beautiful Secret

Your secret from Jean-Sebastien Monzani on Vimeo.

Living with a broken heart

There have been boys (and men) who have broken my heart through not loving me the way I wanted them to, but that is not the kind of broken I am writing about here. There is a line in one of my favourite worship songs where we say to God,


'Break my heart for what breaks yours.'


Isn't that a terrifying incredible prayer to pray? We are asking the all-loving creator of the universe to leave us weeping in the face of all the injustice in the world. It's a tall order, and one I struggle with. I mean, I'm just a kid with a heart for intercession. How can little me make any kind of difference, when I get caught in the thing of having family members with cancer or being in rehab, or a friend's dying mother, or a friend who lost a baby, or a divorce-broken mama? And then I turn on the news, and hear about famine and war and oppression and murder and a girl with a bomb strapped to her neck. How can I make a difference? Because I want to. So much. I want to see the world changed and redeemed and learning how to love. (Can something break your heart if you don't love it? That might be a question for another day...) I get caught in the lies and the self-pity of being too small to change a thing. 


Thing is, it's not up to me to save the world... That's not an abdication of duty, but a fact. Jesus already saved and loved the world. He is the ultimate model for living a life of radical love, and changing the world simply by loving it. So He's the one I'm going to follow. I'm going to continue to refuse to believe that I'm too small to change anything, and love the world one person at a time, and pray the big prayers, and see what He does with me. 


Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
   Love doesn't strut,
   Doesn't have a swelled head,
   Doesn't force itself on others,
   Isn't always "me first,"
   Doesn't fly off the handle,
   Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn't revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end.


1 Cor 13:4-7 (MSG)