Delighting in the Divine
Yes to freedom, yes to play and yes to celebrating the moment!
Delighting in the Divine
Yes to freedom, yes to play and yes to celebrating the moment!
All in 12 months of Grace
I was in an online leadership meeting last week and Paul Maconochie who was leading the call was talking about Celtic Christianity and the idea of thin places. He was telling us that for the Celts, certain places and certain times had special recognition for the Celts as being ‘thin places’ or times when God’s presence felt more accessible. It made a lot of sense to me and so I decided to look into it a bit more...
Meeting God in creation this month is making me feel like the woman at the well in John 4. Day after day she endured the heat of the day desperate for water - the essential life-giving water. She did what was necessary to get the water she needed. I don’t know what it tasted like - was it even fresh-tasting? Did it have bits of sand and grit in it? Does it matter? It was necessary for survival.
And yet Jesus meets her at this daily routine and tells her that the water she has been enduring many a mid-day sun to obtain is nothing compared to His water. Her water is from a non-moving water source - a well. It sustains but there is nothing beautiful about it. It is hard to get and requires daily drudgery. His water, on the other hand, His living water, He compares to a natural spring - which never dries up and is always available and whose taste is exquisitely refreshing....
As a child I always preferred a swimming pool to the beach. Swimming pools were generally warmer and there wasn’t salt or sand to get into your eyes or waves to knock you over. And when you got out you weren’t covered in sand. Swimming pools met my desire to control my environment and predictability...
If you read the introductory post to a year of spiritual disciplines, a.k.a. Twelve Months of Grace, you would know that the first spiritual discipline for September is that well known spiritual discipline of ‘Creation’. Ok, maybe I haven’t found that spiritual discipline in any of the books I have looked at for ideas on spiritual disciplines, so why did I choose Creation as one of the twelve?
I believe that failure to engage with God in creation is one of the greatest failures of the church today. To engage with God only within limited spaces created by man is like only eating microwaved food. It is perfectly possible to live that way but nobody who has tasted anything else would settle for it...
My spirit adores spending time with God. Over time my spirit has become increasingly alive and finds joy and God in the smallest of things. There are nights when I cannot fall asleep because my spirit just wants to sing and proclaim His greatness, and many a day when I wake up already in communion with God, joyful and ready for the day. This is not and has not always been the case, however, but when my spirit is alive I feel like I am experiencing heaven right now. I can’t wait to spend eternity with God and at the same time love his precious closeness here. Is it possible to live a life so alive and full of heaven now? Is it possible for heaven to be a greater reality here on earth than earth itself? ...
