20/12/2016

You,

“It is all about giving.”

There is a wrong tale told frequently about giving. We are told that we give to receive but that is not completely true. It is one of those things that get you in the door but once you are in the house you will certainly not need anymore. I think it is called a ‘key’.

After a while, it all becomes a bit of divine gambling. I know people who give and give until something breaks through to them in blessed returns. I know people whose whole act of giving is a catalyst for them to do more, in ‘faith’, and believe that their Ponzi schemes and mark up prices will guide them safely home. Giving has become an investment in something else. It is not laying up treasure in heaven but padding up the nest at home on earth.

There is nothing wrong with giving, to be sure. Giving material wealth is just the bottom of the scale. When we are told giving to the poor is lending to God it is to set up the idea that we are all really giving up to God our whole selves. This is a small shadow for a massive truth. We do not put money in envelopes to any avail if our lives are not on the metaphorical altar of being in God.

There is no need to give money to God without your life being offered up too. This is not a business transaction but a way of life. It is all about giving up who you are so you might finally lay hold of the person you will forever be in God. 

19/12/2016

You,

“Absolute joy on the other side.”

There is something to being wrong in the form of a thing but getting the substance absolutely right. The best example I know of this has to be the early apostles. They knew of the second coming. They expected to see Christ again. Yet they interpreted His “soon” as our soon and though they did not all expect to see him in the flesh, I can hazard a guess that they did not think we would be waiting for Him two thousand years on. They got the form of His coming wrong but they lived the very substance of worship that was His life.

I am convinced now more than ever that God does not expect us to get things right. I think while we are obsessing with how things look, He is looking at how things are. While we are trying to frame the right words and do the right acts, He is reading what our hearts are really saying and what these acts really mean. He is trying to perfect the parts of us that will live on forever. Every single interaction Jesus had always revealed the heart behind the action or the word of the other person. He was so transparent that He laid bare not only His own soul but the soul of anyone who came to Him.

I get this wrong many times. I begin to think I ought to perfect my inside state and let everything else go. Then I look at how God with us addressed the desperate seeker. He said: follow me. He said this every time. The light burden we have now is to be honest and open to Him. To assume He knows every act and thought but also knows how to lead us to the absolute joy that is on the other side of our limited vision of the present.

We have to start small. We have to give up the pretense and posing. We have to unburden in prayer and learn at the feet of the master how to be transparent. There lies the secret of being more like we were meant to be. There lies the truth about being more like Him. There lies the start to truly changing the world.

12/12/2016

You,

“All in, let us pray for each other.”

It is vital that we pray for each other. This has not always been the way I saw it. And I did not always include everyone in it. I prayed for my friends, for my country, for the people of a similar faith and for tragedy to befall the contrary other. If you had asked me I would have said I was praying against the devil. This is not true. I was praying against those humans I considered devilish. My mouth was saying one thing but my heart was into something else.

I have only begun to grasp that there is no other ‘them’, there is only the other ‘us’. Frequent failure has shown me I am not better than the rack of humanity and all that frailty. The holy law does not require lopsided devotion or partial fulfillment. It is not a bundle of things but one whole outlook and one full heart. To fall short of one precept is to run against the grain of the spirit of all. We are all flawed that way. We do not need the self-righteous indignation of the other. We need the love. We need the understanding. We need the prayers of one another.

We live in a curious “doing” phase of Christianity. Billboards and pillars, seminars and self-help books with “Christ” as the model keep telling us about purpose and plan and strategy and kingdom winnings. We are not able to sit down and read the truth of our own being anymore. We are running the other way and making time precious to the hunger ideal of feeding the cratered human soul. But Christianity is a being thing not a doing thing. We are not here to morph the world with ‘Christian’ ideals. No one needs Christ to rule the world. This is not the world He wants. He is looking for the universe and multiverse inside every human heart. He is looking for that part of us that is able to see that everlasting light is worth momentary trouble. He is looking for the hearts that want to be set alight with the fire of eternal meaningfulness.

To do is not to be. Once you are you will know what to do. Jesus spent thirty years in absolute obscurity being. When He finally did something it resonated through all of history. The business of selling an idea or forming a government are all temporal ideals. The eternal glory of changing a life or reconnecting a heart with God makes all of heaven stand up and applaud.

I pray that we always know and respond to the difference.

09/12/2016

You,

“All in because your heart is broken.”

The thing with all of this information about broken hearts is that the process itself cannot be forced but experienced. No one can tell you your heart is broken. That little bit of heaven is something you will encounter all on your own. It is the same way no one can be born a Christian. These are things you become only by choice and never by nature. It is against the nature you presently have.

You cannot hurry to it either. You cannot fake it. You have to wait for the moment of truth to come. It will or it already has. And once you have had one you will have another. There are many moments but they all add up to truth. If I am struggling to explain it then I am sorry but it is hard to get at something so unique and personal to everyone. It connects us in its diversity rooted in one source: the human soul removed from its home.

And perhaps that is the best way to see it. Looking for a home. A place when you can safely be yourself. Where you can speak your own thoughts and live your own actions. Where you are not constantly acting and struggling to be liked or loved or both. A place where correction is in love and not in sneering mockery or callous judgement. A version of yourself understood. The human heart longs for meaning and the human soul longs for home.

This is the promise God gives to the broken heart and the fractured soul. To all shades and shapes, acts and thoughts, histories and present states, He says:

Welcome home. 

08/12/2016

You,

“All in because your heart is broken.”

The broken heart is the one most open to God. Let me rephrase that, the heart that is aware of its own brokenness is the one that God can truly use. There has always been these jokes about Christianity and Church rats and losers and humbled fools. There is an outer case of what the Christian is that always look more backward than forward. The mere scent of the ideal of Christ is enmity to the gross vanity of this world.

The rats, the losers, the humble and the fools are the sort of people God speaks to in their dark. They have lost everything but their broken hearts. They are ready.

This might seem a little anti- what we know. We have built up a culture of believing that God is looking for the best and the brightest. We have been told He likes us in nice suits and neat surroundings. That the church should be a temple and that the world should envy our take on all the things the world is doing wrong. This is utter rubbish of course. Nothing in the life of Christ suggests that. Nothing in the history of God calling people out suggests that. It is something we have made up out of our own spiritual insecurity and fear.

Instead of embracing our brokenness, instead of letting that insecurity and fear be an open wound God can heal we have done a dance and skip and turned it into a god. It has become the voice that guides us. It has made us liars and thieves and cover up specialists. We have turned the real temple of God into a marketplace for ideas that have nothing to do with the questions of the empty soul.

We have no power now because we are disconnected from source and we are acting like everyone else. We cannot tell anyone to be better because we refuse to know any better.

The kingdom is for the church rats and losers and humbled fools. The Kingdom is designed in the shape of a broken heart mending. 

7/12/2016

You,

“All in because your heart is broken.”

There is a secret you do not even tell yourself. It is the most intimate one you have. It is not something you did or some past misdeed you are hoping is never revealed. It is not even something you are aware of. You will know it when you finally tell yourself but not a minute before. I do not even know what it is. I only know of it. I have one too.

It connects all of us because we have all some version of this secret. It is very specific but it weighs the same. I am not trying to be vague or mysterious. It is hard to explain. The best I can do is say: your heart is broken.

I do not mean this in any romantic way. That exists but this is not what I mean here. I am talking of something fundamental. It is the sense you get that there is something wrong with you. It is that self-hate, self-loathing and fear that crystallizes in acts you never thought you would be involved in. It is the icy calm of when you do not care anymore. It is many things, some delicious and some ugly but all with a seething darkness and detached sort of approach to life and living.

We are always battling against our own nihilism. We are always trying to fight against the dark. We invent purpose out of that struggle. We make up goals and plans and make an Everest out of every little thing to connect ourselves to the meaningful. We make love out of other hearts and crown others the saints of our own souls. We find connections and levity and balance and light. We find religion and hope and faith and a belief in the innate goodness of all that is human trampled on by everything else. We make the world bigger around us so the voice of our broken heart can be smaller.

I know I am taking the general swing at things to see what sticks. Every heart is different. No one processes it the same way. Yet, late at night or early in the morning or whenever we let contemplation in for a bit, in absolute honesty, we find that vast space of unexplained longing for everything out of reach. We find the voice of our own broken heart and the particular way the pieces are fallen over in us.

I want to say that God is the answer (because I have found this to be true) but that does not quite cover it. Faith is not a feel good drug and you will feel this way most of your life. Perhaps, all your life.

What I can truly say is that a lifetime in God is the answer. What I can assure you of is that you are in repair.

You, beautiful soul.

5/12/2016

You,

“All in but not everything goes.”

The thing has always been this deep discipline that runs through the practice of our faith. It is a hard ask of anyone and it is practically impossible to live up to the letter of the holy word. No human being, save Christ, has ever done it without stumbling and no one after Him ever will. This of course leads to the great debate between the gospel of discipline and the gospel of liberty. The former says we are all to be steroid induced health freaks regularly pumping iron at the gym of faith or holy conscripts of the universal army getting fit for the ten-dimensional war of all things to come. The latter says nothing matters and all roads lead to God, no need to keep things in check, let it all hang out and this is good for you.

To be clear, all in does not mean everything goes. We are not called to be the same people we were before the light hit us. We are not called into the light because the dark does not matter. Nothing can really support the view that freedom means licence to be everything the faith tells us not to be.

On the other hand, this is not a battle waged in the flesh or with carnal weapons. When you count the number of hours spent in prayer and study as an instrument of the faith you are being carnal. You are pushing something spiritual with a physical fulcrum. We are not made to be mindless or clones or all the same. The riches of the Kingdom of God are individual and distinct.

None of these postures speak to the deep need we all have for God or the high call to all of us to respond to His eternal love. There is nothing robotic about our faith but there is no anarchy to it either. We have to be deeply rooted in the thing to find the…balance is not the word I am looking for.

Let us just say, to find the truth of all things.

2/12/2016

You,

“All in.”

The whole thing turns when we start to look at the inclusiveness of grace against the exclusivity of most of the groups life on earth is arranged in. There is the veneer of inclusiveness but it really means the right to stand with a particular way of thinking or idea about life. It is frequently about the one issue that particular group has found as pivotal to life and every disagreement with that puts you in enemy territory. This is true of the political right and left, social issues or economic theory and even down to religious differences. Sometimes these disagreements lead to unkindness and other times they can breed violence and death. We have never learnt to disagree without hate or anger or self-righteousness. We are never able to quite sit down and listen to end of the other sentence before we reply with the narrow understanding of our stump speech of rigid positions and no love. We miss it when we think this is what God wants.

For sure there are many examples to draw from in the Holy Book to make the point that God is black and white and friendship with Him is enmity with the world. Yet the context of that last phrase is not about people but about systems, ideas, the ruler of this present world and all his evil. It does not mean we should hate anyone. This is important in a virulent world increasingly represented as a drawn line between groups that cannot meet and cannot share a conversation. We must have the mind of Christ who came and sat with people we would call sinners today, and only that, and spoke with such kindness and affection that it shook the very foundations of the religious order of the day. His venom was for those same religious leaders who were always “putting weights on others they will not carry themselves”. We have to have the mind of Christ to understand that love is the golden rule not political correctness or political incorrectness, not exclusive clubs or reclusive aloofness from the problems of most of the world.

The grace of God is big enough to accept the burden of the whole world. It is not, as we might think or even hope, the way we may lord it over those who do not get it and put dear value on our petty ‘sacrifices’ (the famous “if I was not a Christian, what I would have enjoyed…” argument) while we look with scorn at the latecomers to the life of grace. Our whole faith begins with the supreme sacrifice by God himself, in flesh and as father. To our squabbles over who is included and excluded from a party He has tagged “all in”, His reply must surely go something like:

-who you be?

1/12/2016

You,

“All in the great boat of God.”

I am content to think of it all as a mistake. The fiery messages in my youth of sermons, the inner witness of something more, the careful laid out logic of the thing and the pull of the other thing into nihilism and nothingness. I am content, for a very brief second, to think of all it as a trick of the mind, the illusion called meaning and the desperate grasp of the infinitesimal human mind to elevate itself into galactic prominence. I would be content but not right.

The problem I always had with religion or faith was that it did not speak to me. It had a way of setting unnecessary landmarks and goals. It had ritual and ceremony. It had conscience and guilt. None of these things spoke to me. I wanted wholeness and life. I wanted pleasure and joy. I did not want the voice of man, because I knew what man was as I was one myself, speaking to me over the voice of God. It did not make sense and it still does not because man is weak and will always, always break your heart. Or put more accurately, I am weak and I will always, always  break your heart. It made no sense to me that the absolute terror and horror of the world could be circumvented by the saying of a few prayers and the placebo of a few words. The group think inherent in the blind faith of fools did not resonate with anything my body, soul or heart was into then and even now.

It had to become personal. It had to speak to the individual. And it finally did. I was close to the end of teenage years when I had an encounter with the One who is all ones at once. It was not dramatic. I was not blinded on my way to the nearest watering hole or super market of ideas. It was a gradual call finally answered. It filled me with a compulsion and an unholy rage that was just my former self fighting the coming blue. I was not myself and I was home and myself at the same time. It did not cure me of myself. It told me when I would die so the fun could really start. Decades later I still struggle with that first imprint. There are a thousand daily reversals to the life of faith. This is necessary. If we ever gauged the life of faith by anything other than character being formed, step by step and over a lifetime, then we would become our own gods and our standard will always be the outward flourishes. This is such an inward thing.

The biggest lesson of all has been my own evil. Being such a competitive git I functioned on the early presumption that I was better than the lost and sick souls around me. That has never been God’s point. He has always told me I was the lost and sick soul and all those around me are my brothers and sisters. He tells me to love them because I get a clue from that about loving myself. When I see them act in terrible ways I see my own acts refracted back to me. I get a clue of how much I must be loved beyond sin by the One who told me these things when I was seventeen years old.

It is all in. All must get into the boat of God. Because every human heart is broken and lost. Life breaks us all, the bearded suicide said. All in. There are indeed levels to the sickness and gross crimes coming from our common frame but all in for healing must begin. No other idea or person or law or position can save the human heart as a whole. All in. Grace, Love, Faith, Hope, Kindness, Forgiveness, Strength and much more are the real hallmarks of the faith. We are on a journey to these things together. It is not a race with a tape to see who gets there first. In the end it is all in or nothing at all.