22/06/2017

You,

“Follow the Water”

As I laid in bed yesterday, I found myself thinking, I could not be God. I could never take His place, not that my ego doesn’t leap a little inside me at the mere prospect. But I truly couldn’t put up with all the things He puts up with out of love and mercy. I do not have a single merciful, patient, or forgiving bone in my body. It doesn’t come naturally to me and all the love I have has been no help in covering up what I perceive as personal wrongs. Because that is what our sins are to God – a personal wrongdoing. It isn’t just an abstract thing that exists in the atmosphere. It is a direct attack against God who is in turn kind, patient, merciful, and who loves us unconditionally enough to forgive us the very moment we ask Him.

Thankfully, none of us is called to play God. Beyond the fact that we would smite the world to smithereens at every petty grievance or inconvenience, we do not have what it takes to truly carry the weight of this world on our backs. Instead He asks of us simple tasks like letting go of the things that bind us to this world in anticipation of eternity, fighting to hold steadfastly to Him in the face of loss and crippling grief, coming to surrender at His feet and accepting His love and forgiveness, gratitude, trust, honesty…

Though seemingly difficult in daily practice, His requests are infinitely easier in comparison to trying to play God. 

20/06/2017

You,

“Follow the Water”

There is a predetermined destination at the other end of this long road. That is not to say that free will counts for nothing. The choices are laid out plainly before you and you will be ending up somewhere. Where exactly you end up and how you get there is up to you.

But let’s not tie ourselves up in philosophical knots. Knowing the best destination you could possibly end up in, and knowing the best path you can take to said destination, God guides you. This feeling of being herded by some celestial shepherd seems disconcerting to us and we often fight it under the guise of freedom. But oh what freedom there is in knowing that your guide is all knowing, all powerful, all good.

There is a call to choose Him above all else, to resist strong distractions on your way, to follow the best path as He has directed. It is a path to honest living and replenishment. To wisdom, justice, righteousness, honour, longevity, salvation, empathy. 

19/06/2017

You,

“Follow the Water”

We require hasty response from God, swift justice, instant replies. We are impatient with Him. We are unwilling to wait even though He has proven time and again that His timing is unchanging and never wrong. He alone knows the right and perfect time. No amount of desperate crying or complaining will change that.

We can only ask for patience. We are not equipped to see the full picture. I doubt we would understand it even if it was fully revealed to us. We can only seek His peace while we wait, no matter how long and difficult the wait may seem to us in the short window of time we have here on this earth.

We cannot get our way by pretence or tantrums or bribery. We can only find solace in the fact that every gift He gives is good, including the gift of the wait. 

Healing.

H,

The greater wave of our time we spend trying to fix some exterior problem that is not us. We have fallen for the old trick of the blind side. We do not see into ourselves enough and so the problem always becomes other people. We have done enough but there is something left for them to do. This concentration on what the outer circle of others do is at the forefront of our deception about ourselves.

In the truest sense of the word of God, there is no change in other people that must happen before you can change. When God addresses you, it is exclusive. This is always the day of your salvation. This has always been about your healing. There is no gift of discernment to give you leeway into other lives and an excuse to bother other people about the things they are doing wrong. He tells us to remove our own blindside first. To see clearly. This in itself is a lifelong event.

Now, this may seem like a recipe for selfishness. It may seem like this is about an undue focus on your own spiritual state to the detriment of others. I assure you, it is not. What it is really, is the great humbling. It is finally admitting you do not have the tools to be anyone’s saviour. Not even your own. What you are left with is love. The good book leaves us in no doubt about what love is. It is act above feeling and character above immediate gratification. We practice ordinary kindness, patient reflection on the flaws of others and constant forgiveness because those are the things we can choose. They are the acts and the character of life as God intends it to be and, yes, you guessed it, there are part of our healing. When we look at our own soul and its care we are really focusing on how we treat others. For all our faith is to fall in love with God and when we do we are then told to focus that on others. We are told to act to others as God has acted toward us.

These are impossible acts, unbelievably hard reactions and a huge thorny crown. It is raw, it is human and it is almost unhealthy to your present state to look to act above what you receive from others. Like all other things it is impossible unless you have divine help. To fail at it, to fail spectacularly at it, to encounter depths to your own depravity that you did not know before and see all fantasies fade about your innate good and much hallowed good intentions is what should really happen.

Do not panic. You are just healing.   

“Healing.”

H,

That is where the problem begins. We think that the healing of God is some sort of magic trick over our problems. We expect to close our eyes and then open them and then have no more problems. We think there is an instant cure for the fractured human soul. The instant cure is a lobotomy. The true cure is a step into eternity.

This is the strength of a soul that lives forever. We can walk through all the things we want to run past. There is no cowardice in the God-life. We walk slowly and surely along our path of salvation and grace and love and faith. We take some steps forward and several steps back but it is all part of going through everything and avoiding nothing.

The sound of choir music and slick pastoring cannot be anything but a plaster on the deep wound of present humanity. Nowadays it is even barely that. The wound festers underneath. It does not heal by fantasy or the arcane grasps at success. The poor, the rich, the successful, the unsuccessful, the living life to the fullest, the dying, the enlightened, the unenlightened, the high and the low all have to face the huge feeling of ennui with day to day life without the medicine of the moment or the cure for all time.

The medicine of the moment is the thing we are presently chasing. It makes life meaningful as long as we are chasing it. It can be the first lover you ever have or climate change. It is big within your line of vision and its fulfilment will make everything better. It is the cost of living on earth: having a commitment to something real, that you can track and weigh and measure. It has no use outside this present state of things and it is somewhat better if it there is no God and no reality outside the material. Dust and dust and nothing else. Life is the meaning you give to it. It is absurd, as the philosopher wisely said, but this is all we have evidence of so let us live under the relative calm of earth and earth only. It is scant consolation and amazingly arrogant but it is a way to plaster over the cracks and not fall into oblivion.

The cure for all times makes the idea of eternity the centre of existence. It makes all the details of your life a chapter in the much larger book of life and everything else. It tells us healing is certain in the light of God. It says today is the day of salvation. It calls us into God because we cannot see past our narrow view of what life is and then into what life can be.

 Answer that call. Choose not just life but what life can be.

Healing.

H,

I see your point but even if we did not know then we are sure now that there is need for some serious healing. Not just from our past, full of misconceptions about God and other common and uncommon disasters, but also from our present where the sand gets in our teeth and we are constantly surrounded by the threat of not meaning anything at all.

Nowadays I feel we are being released from that burden. The burden of what we think a life that matters really means. We are lost in this idea that actions count in the physical world and that lays up for us some sort of spiritual inheritance in the life to come. This may well be true. We are told to run a race and get a prize. Yet, it may not all connect between acts and eternity in the way we think. There is always something deeper going on beyond the obvious. I do not think Elyon is trying to make it harder. I think they are trying make us more real. If we think all we have to do is act then all we will do is act. See what I mean?

It was never meant to be easy on our nature. The most challenging thing to do on earth is to stand in the light. There is so much darkness all around our own hearts.

I remember thinking recently of all the doors I want to close in my own fractured memory. I would remember something and have a smile on my face. Then I would remember it again and the truth of it would slip out from other the interpretation I had given it before. The smile would go and I would be on the floor, all my fears realized. The unpleasantness we keep trying to hide is at the root of heavy-sleepless nights and listless lives. There is not enough beer in the world to cure us of the sting of memory.

And there it is, right? Once we start looking inward we faint at the things we do not want to see.

 I do not think we should look at ourselves with anything less than the light of God. We go back to prayer and quietness and from that unpack all these Freudian slips and Jungian slip ups. There is still healing in the blood, on the cross and in the resurrection to come. For too long we have tried to heal ourselves by forgetting. Now we must learn to be healed by the open heart of God.

Let the healing begin.

Amen. 

7/6/2017

You,

“Seen”

When you are lost and confused, when you can’t tell up from down or who you are from who everyone else says you are, to whom do you turn?

Our identity is in the one who knows every intimate detail about our lives. The things you have done in secret are not unknown to Him. The thoughts you have but cannot speak come as no surprise. He knows the depths of your sadness and the heights of your joy. He knows the colour of your rage and the sound of your uninhibited laughter when you are all alone. When you are lost or unsure, afraid or dumbfounded, all you ever need do is seek Him.

If you have no doubts about these things, then you must believe that He knows all the things happening in this world as much as He knows you. He knows events that don’t make the news. He knows the secret meetings in secret rooms held to decide the fate of people across the world. He knows what world leaders will not speak of and what religious leaders will not preach. And He knows that an answer is on its way. It is one we have heard before, one we have been expecting: come, Jesus come.

Amen

6/6/2017

You,

“Seen”

There is nothing that we do that is hidden, not truly, not completely. There is no shortcoming that is unknown to Him. There is no pain that He turns His face from. There is no silent mourning that He doesn’t hear. There is no cry that fails to reach Him. There is nothing you have done, thought, felt, or spoken that has gone unnoticed. He is there. He sees it all.

It is far too easy to feel alone in the isolation of this mad world. Friends and family walking beside us are oblivious to the turmoil taking over our lives most days. How then can this distant entity truly know all the things the envelope your heart and your soul? Perhaps because He is not as distant as you think. It is His desire to have you walk beside Him as a friend, as a child. No one who wants to have such a relationship will ever be that far from you.

Everything crumbles and everything falls, and in that chaos, it is easy for pain and fear to completely overwhelm you. But He sees it all and His arms are outstretched if you will run to Him.