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!
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? ...
No one enters into the olympics without training. That training is faith in action. The athletes believe those who have gone before them and their trainers that they have what it takes to compete, if only they will faithfully commit to their training and keep going. Olympic competitors hope to win a medal, but until the line is crossed or the final whistle is blown, that hope is not confirmed. It doesn’t mean that hope is not a powerful force however...
Hope has always been a pretty delicate spring flower until last week. A shot in the dark almost- a holding onto something vague and hoping for the best.
‘I’m pretty hopeful’
‘I have a vague hope of it happening one day’
‘I hope you have a great day’
‘I hope to see you later’
But this evening I studied and met Hope and she has been misrepresented. These are not hope. They are the human side of hope at best. Desires. Doubts painted positive. Not anchored in anything much...
What would be your two top anti-stress tips? I bet they are not the same as Jesus’ observations on what will bring true rest in Him!
My top two ideas would probably be stopping and breathing deeply and counting to three, and thankfulness...
...but Jesus’ top two are:
Yuck, I hate that sauce!
Why have you cooked pasta again?!
I don't want to go out to the shops!
I'm not doing that! No way!
Why doesn't he have to wash up too?
It's not fair!
Our lives were becoming flooded with complaints, groaning, moans and dissatisfaction from the boys (8, 6 and 4). What I hated most was that I felt powerless. I would start calmly trying to give them logical reasons why they needed to do what I had requested of them, but eventually we would end up raising out voices:
At the beginning of the year I was not in a reading mood. I think a month passed where I read nothing. Nothing at all except my Bible. Had no patience for it. And then the tide turned and suddenly all I wanted to do in any spare moments I had was to read. I love to read several books at once - I try to limit myself on my kindle to just the six I can see on the front homepage, but one or two often end up creeping in. Unless it is a fiction book I can't put down, I rarely read more than one chapter of a book before I shift into another one - round and round, filling the time I have to read.
Here are the books I have been reading over the last couple of weeks and enjoyed...
I love words. I love how they wrap up a feeling and spring-board an idea. I love how words can paint the tumultuous storms of life in lightning-strike clarity. I love how emotions can be soothed by words, like the calm of an unhurried afternoon tea in the garden where the gentle breeze blows through the bushes; or emotions can be hair-raised and roller-coastered with violent passion that makes us bold and pushy...
