The Waiting Room

We have two local doctors that we go to when we need one.

One is our GP who we know quite well now and who knows our family. She doubles up as a local politician and her husband is the suburb mayor, heaven only knows how they get any kind of family life.

To see her we usually need to make an appointment a couple of weeks in advance so if we need quick treatment, we also visit the no appointment clinic with rotating overworked doctors who do crazy long hours and to whom you are just a faceless patient.

In the latter clinic, as with my hairdresser, you turn up, take a number and wait. Sometimes for hours and hours.

When you’re waiting, it can seem like an eternity. The second hand on the clock seems take a whole minute to flip over and it as if you are being tortured.

Sometimes your partner drops by or sends you a text.

Any news? How many people are in front of you now? How much longer do you think you’ll be?

Only six more people you tell them, but the last one took 45 minutes.

And then you look up and suddenly there is only one more person in front of you. Or you’re next.

I was thinking this morning that there are seasons of our lives that feel like that waiting room. Even though you know that time will eventually pass, things will eventually change, you feel like you are waiting for God to move, to respond, to speak, to say anything, anything at all.

And it can seem interminable.

In fact in a weirdly parallel way, in any one life, there are things that are moving and changing and yet inevitably there is also a list of things that we are waiting for to change.

How do we wait well? When there is uncertainty, how do we hold that uncomfortable tension and wait for the fog to clear?

When there are painful situations or grief, how do we wait without a running away or housing or distracting ourselves with sorting out another?

When we don’t know what to do or how to do what is in front of us, how do we wait well for the answers?

What happens if others come in the midst of our waiting and all is what’s happening or what we are doing there or even did we get it wrong?

I’m not asking because I have the answers, I’m asking, wondering if you do?

I realise just how bad I am at waiting, how I use all kinds of distraction techniques, how I hide from facing the uncomfortableness and do everything I can to think about something else while I wait.

And in my waiting room, sometimes I realise that I thought I was there for one purpose but it turns out God had an entirely different purpose altogether.

What do you do when God changes the game plan on you but other people still think you should be on the old plan? How do we reconcile God’s expectations with other people’s expectations, our own included?

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-and-white-chairs-on-white-floor-tiles-Ujj6iKN4WoQ?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

In a cultural pickle

This week, a woman in her early 40s in the UK was forced to announce to the world that she had cancer and ask millions of people to leave her and her family in peace

On the other side of the world, another younger woman publicly apologised for liking and dating someone, disappointing fans who demanded that she remain single.

And let’s not even get started on the rising tide of identity crises, mental health issues,   insane pace of life and stress of being overwhelmed with information and impossible expectations.

How did we, society, get ourselves into this cultural pickle?

How did we get to a place where we encroach on others lives, sometimes when we don’t even know them personally?

Where we dictate how others should live? Or we allow others to dictate how we should or shouldn’t live?

How did we get to the point where virtual line becomes more important than real life and where we invest our interest in people we have never met?

Last week I came out of the weekend and into the working week exhausted. I faced my to do list at work and took a deep breath, pushing down the indigestion of panic.

We are at the end of March and with both of our full time jobs with increasing pressure and growing responsibility, interviews, endless drs appointments, people who are on my heart to pray for, some new commitments at church, and more, it was all a bit much.

I have reached a breaking point in the past and now when I feel myself getting close to that edge again I take certain actions. I know that once that thing in me snaps, it’s a place that takes a long time to come back from.

I asked God for advice, a strategy:

I booked myself an emergency Friday off and extended my Easter weekend break by two days.

I stopped contacting all but a few people to see how they are doing because I was concerned for them.

I drastically cut down on social media.

I started planning to do things that I know renew my soul: gardening, organising things at home, cleaning, creative activities like writing a blog post, going to the hairdresser, walking the dog and picking wildflowers on the way.

I closely watched my thoughts,  asking the Holy Spirit to help me stop thinking about work problems or worrying when it was not working hours or in the middle of the night.

A few weeks earlier I had already stopped watching the news and any Netflix series that had negative, spiritual or cruel aspects to them.

And I refused a couple of last minute invitations where there would be people to socialise with.

Everybody has a different make up of their character. What is good for one person is not necessarily what is good for another.

As I get older I get to know myself better and better.

I realise that I am an empath and that I have a pastoral heart, meaning I care for others and naturally want to help them and pray for them. I easily take on other people’s burdens but they weigh me down and I cannot easily stop thinking about them. News items with people constantly suffering can be overwhelming.

In short, social relationships drain me and when I am running on empty I need to refill before I can continue.

I am ambivert, meaning that I enjoy and need social interaction but it needs to be balanced with time alone for me to reengergise.

I am created to be creative, I am a planner an organiser and a thinker. When life becomes too rushed for too long and I can’t find that time to do these things, I need to stop and make time for them before I go on.

My heart is to help others and to see them liberated by God into the things he has for them and I love social media. Sometimes, I need to be reminded that first and foremost I am too experience life with God and enjoy him forever.

And then if I have time after that I can write or post about it. If I never do, that’s fine too. It’s not because I don’t say it outloud that it’s not true or didn’t happen.

Not everything needs to be expressed to others.

And as I thought about this time blocked out away from the world, I realise two things:

1. How even though everyone needs this emotional space, still society doesn’t allow it. How if you say to someone that you blocked the weekend to do nothing but be on your own and not see people, it is still seen as atypical and not acceptable.

2. That Jesus often, very often, went away on his own to pray and be by himself with God. And how people were constantly searching for him, not understanding why he needed to get away

Relationships are wonderful. We are created for relationship with God and with others.

Social media is not a bad thing, it can be an amazing way of connecting with other people.

But it is a tool and and not our master. And it is a broken mirror that easily distorts reality and can distance as much as it brings people closer. And it can cause us to confuse actual relationships with false relationships.

We desperately need the discernment of the Holy Spirit to be able to take the good in the virtual and apply it so that we engage in real life better.

I love Matthew 11:28 which says Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”

https://bible.com/bible/116/mat.11.28.NLT

The tiniest of flowers found on the walk with the dog, there were a cloud of them on brambly weeds.

Chicken feet: Tips from a Serial Oversharer

Photo de Jacek Dylag sur Unsplash

Guess what Mum? she said as she got in the car. When I was there I ate chicken feet!

What?! My stomach turned over at the thought. What did they taste like? I asked weirdly fascinated.

Kind of soft and chewy because they cook it a long time. The meat was a bit fatty and you had to pick out the tiny bones. It wasn’t too bad actually.

[Dear reader: Before you judge me for my close-minded gustative prejudices, just know that I’ve grown up in Pakistan, seen and tasted a lot of varied cuisine and had to cut up tripe with my bare hands for our dog to eat which has traumatised me and I could very easily be vegetarian.]

As we rolled in the driveway and she got out to open the gate and slipped in the offhand remark:

I bet that’ll be the first thing you tell everyone when we get inside!

I’m sorry what? I cried, very slightly offended. Why wouldn’t you tell everyone? It’s so interesting. You should tell everyone.

It appears that my first born believes I am a serial oversharer.

My very direct Aunty once said in a very irritated voice, I can’t understand why people post photos on Facebook of their sandwiches, I’m not interested in their sandwiches!

Well, dear Aunty, it might tempt you into trying a new sandwich recipe, it might have been a particularly delicious sandwich, the location of the sandwich might have been on the top of a beautiful mountain and it captured the joy of living so perfectly that they might have wanted to share that moment with you. It could also have been a sandwich they shared with friends they hadn’t seen in years or a sandwhich which brought back a flood of memories from their childhood.

And don’t forget there’s usually that little MUTE or UNFOLLOW button if you don’t want to see your friend’s sandwiches.

I know that there are things that are shared on the internet that really shouldn’t be shared but actually the act of sharing a moment is a sharing of joy, of heartache, of beauty, of hilarity, of deep thought and eternal truth.

It is interesting to see what people deem to be newsworthy, or not.

Life involves people and people are fascinating. Even if you live a quiet life or if you live a life of hardship, you cannot avoid seeing something of note around you that touches your heart in some way or another.

Sharing it with someone else either in person or online brings them in on it, as a call to action – either to rejoice, or to laugh, or to mourn or to bring about justice.

I am therefore unapologetically an oversharer and you regularly will see my dinners online because they were delicious and you can never have enough dinner ideas when you’re bored of your food.

I have however learned a few tips on curating my oversharing and thought I’d share them here , they are applicable to undersharers too.

I have a number of people in my circle of friends around the globe who post absolutely nothing which makes me sad because I want to hear about their lives too, especially if I haven’t seen them in a while.

Tips for Oversharers and Undersharers

In this age where internet privacy and in person privacy is important – remember to overshare only your news and not other people’s – unless you have their permission. This I have had to learn as the kids grow older. There are some things you can share and some things you can’t.

[Sorry in advance Amélie for sharing your chicken feet story]

Share things deliberately and avoid off the cuff sharing unless it is inoccuous. This is why I don’t have a snapchat account because I know that I can say stuff or do things that I later regret.

You don’t have to share everything in your life or say everything on your mind. Stop and think before you share. Some personal journeys need to marinate in your soul for a while before they are shared publicly. Sometimes we talk before God is finished speaking and sometimes he needs to deal with us privately before we share it.

Good communication is the key to avoiding misunderstandings. An argument can be avoided by sharing what cannot be seen from the outside. You might look ok on the outside to someone and they would never know what is going on inside you. Also what you say isn’t necessarily what is heard by the other person. Reflecting back what someone says to you is a good way of checking you got all the facts right. Don’t be afraid to check the potentially ambiguous details.

Share kindly and lovingly, and if you can’t, then don’t say it. There are too many people who don’t realise how hurtful their irritated comment in CAPS LOCK on facebook is. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t post it online. CAPS LOCK or using red font by the way is like physically shouting at someone. Please don’t do it, however urgent the issue.

Keep a tab on the tone of your voice both online and offline. What I mean is that if your posts are all negative and mean all the time, it doesn’t do you any good and it doesn’t do other people any good. There is already enough bad news in people’s world, they need some encouragement and some joy in their lives to keep them sane and so do you.

By sharing the good things in person and online you actually lift your own spirit too. I regularly look at my social media accounts and try to see what themes I’ve been posting on lately to see if there’s an imbalance.

Share your pain not just the good moments. Sharing the hard stuff with other people means that, if you want it, they can comfort you, help you practically, pray for you and generally sympathise or give advice if they’ve been through it. Sharing these moments show that you trust them. We are not meant to do things on our own, we are created to be in community so that we can get through the hard stuff. You also never know when you will connect with someone going through what you are going through and can help them to feel less isolated and alonge.

Share the end of the story too. People tend to stay on the last thing you said so if the last thing that you said was the depressing disaster that happened to you, in their minds you are frozen in that place still even though you have moved on, are healed, have had a financial breakthrough or a new job or are now feeling much better having shared what you are going through.

If you can’t share your thoughts yet, share a holding statement. This actually enables people to be patient and wait for your reply to their question or their need for information. It works really well in the workplace as well in social situations.

When someone sends you an email or asks you a question, it’s good to let them know that you saw your message and you’re thinking about it and you’ll get back to them. If you don’t reply, it’s like blanking someone or ignoring them in real life.

Often when I’ve invited people to a meal, I’ve noticed that they just don’t reply at all and this usually means that they’re not coming, they’re busy or they don’t want to come. Misunderstandings happen in these social circumstances. Please reply, even if it’s the fact that you can’t reply yet.

Choose your audience and don’t take offence when others choose their audience too. Not everything needs to share everything with everyone and depending on the sensitivity of the information depends where you share it. Whether are conscious of it or not, everyone has an Inner Circle, a Middle Circle and an Outer Circle. And btw, you may occasionally come across people who shouldn’t be in any of those. We tend to share our most private sensitive information with our inner circle just like Jesus did, then when it becomes less sensitive, we share it with our middle circle of friends and finally it becomes public knowledge when we share it with our outer circle. This is natural and wise practice.

What’s tough to accept is when you thought you were in someone’s inner circle but you turned out to be in their middle or outer circle or not in any circle at all.

Collect stories and share them. Some people, when I ask them what’s new say, nothing really. Actually there are lots of things happening all around everyone all the time but sometimes we don’t think they’re newsworthy to others or we don’t notice them. Noticing and sharing these stories when you see people makes conversation flow when things are unnatural and stilted.

Reciprocate the sharing, don’t stalk. Like I said before, I share but I also want to keep contact with my friends. In the world of social media there are a number of people who want to hear your news but don’t realise that you also want to hear their news (and see their sandwiches) because you care about them and appreciate them. Communication is relationship. Let’s keep those relationships alive.

For oversharers, realise that the totality of sharing that you see people doing in person and online is not the totality of the sharing they are actually doing.

For undersharers, realise that the totality of the thoughts and conversations that you have shared in your head is not the totality of the thoughts that you have shared outloud. People can’t hear what you think.

Listen to other people’s stories and drop your agenda. Sometimes us oversharers can be so much in our own heads that we chatter away and don’t leave room for anyone else to have space to share their thoughts and stories.

One of the things I’ve had to learn is to listen and ask questions and to stop trying to wangle my interesting story into the conversation. This focuses you less on yourself and more on others, and gets you over a lot of awkward social interactions. Most people, not all, if you ask the right series questions will speak for quite a long time and you will find out some really interesting things about them.

My favourite tiktok video is an Australian living in Paris who describes comically how people in his circle of acquaintances don’t take an interest in anyone around them. He talks about how at a party he casually drops in the fact that he used to work at Eurovision and the person he talked to had absolutely no questions to bounce off of that information.

Just a side note to all the current generation – this is how conversation works – questions and answers, you pick up clues of something interesting in what someone hints at and you ask them questions. No more social Billy No Mates moments. You ask questions and they will chat away. It is possible to find conversation topics with just about anyone if you pay enough attention.

Happy Sharing to you all! May it enrich your life in all the right ways.

About the future…

Photo de MI PHAM sur Unsplash

It would have been sometime in the mid 90s when I went up to see Granny one Christimas as a student and we went out to the Grinshill Village Carol Service. I don’t remember an awful lot from the service except the golden glow of candles, mince pies, mulled wine and Granny’s talcum-powdered pink cheeks fresh from the snowy walk outside as she recounted some outrageous yet hilarious situation from the choir practice.

Granny had a very naughty sense of humour. She was pretty direct and could be fairly unkind on occasions so I grew up a bit scared of her but as I got older, I realised that she would collect and tell cheeky stories, her upper lip doing a turtle lip as she tried not to chuckle before the punch line. She had a funny laugh, a sort of hyuk-hyuk mixed with a hee hee hee and however outrageous, you couldn’t help but laugh along with her.

This is my Granny who had cancer and decided she’d had enough of hospital so she disconnected the IV but left the catheter in her arm and escaped via the fire exit having prepped my uncle to be at the ready with the car and a pair of plimsoles.

She assured Uncle Iain she had been properly discharged and asked him to stop for bread and bacon on the way because she was sure Grandad hadn’t got any at home. It took the doctors several days to track her down at home and remove the catheter.

That sense of humour runs in the family – my Dad, my uncles and aunties all have it, my Mum has it but in a different way, when I get together with my brothers and sister the conversation gets to taking the mick and laughing a good deal.

So the fact that this runs in the family makes it difficult to see whether it’s just genetics and personality or whether this sense that for the future, God has an outpouring of joy.

I think it’s the latter though. I find that I can be at work and I feel joy bubbling up inside of me for absolutely no good reason. For no reason at all, I feel like I could laugh hilariously outloud and anything could set it off.

Along with this sense of out of the blue joy comes a desire to be creative, to learn new things just for the pleasure of it, to take up hobbies because I can and because it gives God pleasure to see me enjoy the world.

On my random things I’d like to do list are – keep learning the guitar and Korean, learn to play the drums, write a film script, work for a film company, make pj bottoms, finish painting the cupboard, buy a chainsaw and chop up the branches in the garden, renovate an old piece of furniture in the garage….

These things seem to be an overflow of a stream of creativity that is flowing and comes following a weeding out of religious thinking in me over the last five or six years.

Moving across the world followed by being ill for a year, then covid hitting and starting full time work, these things have been a process of deconstruction and then reconstruction of my faith and how I live it out.

All of these events have taken me, a person who was fully committed to her local church, wouldn’t miss a Sunday, was at every church event with the family in tow, involved in church leadership etc, to a place where I go occasionally, am not in a connect group, am not serving in a local church but I still am committed to church planting and the gathering of believers, still praying, still full of faith, still sharing my faith, still reading the Bible and hearing from God.

I have been dechurched or deinstitutionalised (and not by my own volition), if you like.

In all of this process, my thoughts have been: am I a heretic? why God? what’s important to retain? Am I backslider? have you forgotten about me? have I gone off track? what does the Bible say about this? what do you want the church to look like in the future? have I got it wrong?

I’m not going to lie, during these events I have struggled but particularly we were in lockdown, I felt God clearly say to me in a particular situation:

Stop trying to drag people to church by the hair. I’m not interested in their forced presence. That kind of relationship is not what I am after.

Here’s some takeaway thoughts that have accumulated and become a part of me over the last couple of years:

God is not in a rush. He is so patient and he will wait for people to catch up before he moves on because he loves them. This means that we can be patient with them too. Isaiah 40:11 has a beautiful prophetic picture of God the Father and of Jesus the Good Shepherd carrying lambs (those who are young, weak or have no stamina) and of gently leading ewes and their young, going at the pace that they can travel at.

God created us for his pleasure. He created us with gifts and talents that have no salvatory purpose whatsoever. Just like he created the bizarre and varied form of thousands of orchids and fish live at the bottom of the ocean that haven’t even been discovered yet, God created you and I with things that are completely for his glory and may never be used to bring someone to faith in him.

He wants us to enjoy living those things because our delight in how he created us gives him pleasure.

Somehow in the church we have come to the wrong conclusion that everything we do must be for a purpose and if the purpose is not salvation of souls then it is not worth pursuing.

The irony is that in enjoying the random things God has created us to enjoy, we put on display his glory, which in turn turns people in amazement to look at him.

So enjoy candle-making or making tiktok videos or learning to speak Chinese even though you live in Patagonia. Let’s get rid of this idea that we shouldn’t have hobbies because they’re not a worthy use of our precious days here on earth.

God has created rest for us to enter. This is a biggie because it affect absolutely everything we touch and do. Entering the place of rest that God has for me means that I in fully trusting him to provide, and I am no longer plagued by anxiety, fear, depression or the uncertainty of the unknown.

The pressure is no longer on me to perform or achieve because I can ask him to arrange things on my behalf. Entering God’s rest means that he has offered to sort out the things that are bothering us if we bring them to him.

Hebrews 4 and Matthew 11:28 talk to us of him carrying our burdens. He’s already provided peace and rest for us to step in to and he will even help us enter it if we find it too difficult.

So what does the church of the future look like?

For me, it looks like a place where we live our lives hanging out with other believers and inviting people into to an atmosphere where there is an overflow of joy, of peace, of freedom, of grace, of mercy. A place where creativity is poured out in abundance, where people’s lives are restored, where worship and thankfulness abound and where people are accepted just as they are knowing that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them at the pace at which is right for them.

I’m so excited by this thought because I know how much of difference it has already made to me and I can see the potential in the lives around me. I can’t wait to jump in and be immersed in everything God is doing.

Matthew 11:28 in the Message version says:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

The unforced rhythms of grace and living freely and lightly are where it’s at.

Go where the wind blows you

Photo de Saad Chaudhry sur Unsplash

There’s a crack up line in the movie How to lose a guy in 10 days where Andie, a writer for a fashion magazine has a conversation with her editor Lana :

Lana: Congratulations. This shows me you’re ready to be unleashed. From now on, feel free to write about anything.
Andie: Anything?
Lana: Wherever the wind blows you.
Andie: Even politics?
Lana: Well, the wind’s not going to blow you there.
Andie: What about religion, poverty, economics?
Lana: This wind is really more of a light breeze.

https://www.ranker.com/list/how-to-lose-a-guy-in-10-days-quotes/movie-and-tv-quotes

The hubster and I often use this line jokingly on each other because it’s so true. We invite people to feel free to do whatever they want but in reality there are limits to what we’ll allow.

I had an interesting conversation at work a couple of weeks ago. ChatGPT the AI programme that is sweeping the internet was the hot topic of the day. I had seen it advertised on social media targeting students writing dissertations and essays.

If you haven’t come across it before ChatGPT is an online tool which uses artificial intelligence to formulate the answer to just about anything you could ask it and to learn from your responses to it so that it gives more and more precise answers as you go along. For example, it can write your literature essay for you complete with quotes, real life examples taken from across the internet. Or it can put together a computer programme for you or a fitness programme that is worthy of a highly qualified fitness instructor.

At Uni 30 years ago we studied basic natural language processing, or teaching computers to formulate grammatically correct and socially appropriate responses. ChatGPT is that, but on steroids. As one of the guys in office said, it is as big of leap in AI evolution and revolution as the creation of the internet.

Clearly the obvious downside is that it will do away with a number of jobs.

Who needs computer developers if people can simply pop in your needs and AI writes your programme for you?

Would you pay for a fitness expert when you can get a tailored programme online?

Why would you go to church to hear a sermon when you can type in what you want to hear into a programme and it writes a perfectly formulated theologically sound message for you that avoids everything you don’t want to hear? Ahem.

As the AI is learning, who is harvesting the information?

Will machines take over the world and oppress us?

Are we continually being manipulated by subtle marketing?

Are our phones listening to us and targeting us with ads online using the conversations we have while they are sitting innocently beside us on the table?

As we talked over the implications together of what this development might mean for the future it became clear that in the wake of all the global changes that covid, expansionist policies, wars, earthquakes, political reform and the rising cost of living has brought, this one is going to provide an existential crisis for hundreds of thousands of people.

And yet.

And yet, as we talked, the thought came to me that this could actually be an opportunity for us to use our collective imaginations and could be something that we use to leap off of to do something that nobody has ever dreamed of. Used correctly as a tool, AI could free our time to do other things if we could just imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

Before cars were invented, nobody knew what a mechanic was or a panel beater. When cottage industries were replaced by factories, nobody imagined one day there would be research and development teams, or robot manufacturers.

This leap in AI evolution is not a new leap that we haven’t done before, it’s just an exceptionally big leap and people, as they always have been, are anxious that they will be replaced and not find their place in the world.

Honestly, I am excited. This is a huge opportunity for collective imagination to get to work and for calling things into existance that do not yet exist.

I wish in my conversation I could have said what I was really thinking but couldn’t say because the incomprehension was already too great.

I wish I could have said that God gives creativity, wisdom, imagination to people if we ask him, that he has a hope and a future for humanity and it is a good one, that he is our secure place from which we launch ourselves into a world wobbling from uncertainty, that he is our rock when we feel like everything is crumbling around us.

I wish I could have told them about his incredible goodness that makes us courageous and brave to face the future because he holds us securely in his hands and he protects us.

I wish I could have said that the winds of change bring new life, that they spread seed across the land into places we never thought life would come.

Seasons

Feature photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

It’s spring here in the south of France. This weekend the wind turned warm, the garden, after months of hibernation has suddenly started budding and growing at a rate of knots, the sun warms me up and strips off jumpers and scarves as I do my weekly weeding of the gravel.

We haven’t yet had the Saints de Glace, the official end to the cold weather but already the warmer temperatures are fooling us into thinking they are here to stay.

Our yearly outdoor chores have begun and thoughts are starting to turn to filling gas bottles for the bbq and to friends we haven’t seen during the winter months when the freezing Mistral blasted through us.

After five years of living here I can see we are travelling through the year at the pace of the seasons and I like it. These first warm breezes that rustle the huge pine trees in the garden, the unveiling of patches of violets as I mow the overlong grass, the sunshine sparkling boxes of shiny strawberries, these things bring me not just joy in the now but joy in the memories of past years too.

I look at them, feel them, smell them, touch them and this feeling of delight of refinding a good thing wells up in me.

I find I need it too.

My heart dinged with self-identification at the instagram post of a friend who, weary with all the sucky things that are happening in the world at the moment, shut the door, lit a beautiful candle and just enjoyed the peace and beauty of her living room.

I know that feeling.

The relentlessness of having to make an effort in relationships, hearing about war and hardship, constantly being covid-flexible, having plan B, C, D, E and F in place, of parenting, of finances, of sick kids, of emotional outbursts, of problems that need solving, of heart-aching tragedy and long long long journeys with no end in sight.

Sometimes we need to shut the door on these things, to stop our minds going to those places and enjoy the small beauties, the gifts of the now moment that bring us delight. And sometimes we need to create those moments for ourselves just so we can open the door again and face all that’s on the other side.

The other day I thought of part of this quote from CS Lewis in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe :

“They say Aslan is on the move- perhaps has already landed.”
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it has some enormous meaning- either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer

I find that often the physical reality reflects the spiritual reality of what is going on and for me this season of spring feels significant, it feels like, just as the wind changes direction too, just like Aslan was on the move bringing changes, so too is God on the move. I don’t know what he’s doing yet but this year feels different. It feels to me like it is not just a physical season that is changing but that there is a spiritual season changing too and that is is one that is bringing an expectation of hope and joy with it.

And in general, this is how I have found it to be with the things of God, you sense that a change is in the air even before you see it. You don’t know what is happening until it does and then you say to yourself, aha, so that is what he was up to, I can see how all the dots join now! And everything suddenly makes sense.

I don’t know what is coming but I think it’s going to be good.

When the far off touches your life

We were waiting at the bus stop in the Vieux Port when I turned around and the view caught my breath. It was already 8am but the sun hadn’t fully come up and the light from the sunrise made the white stone buildings and boat glow pink. A photo doesn’t really do justice to what the human eye takes in.

Even though the port was bustling with people setting out for school and work there was a calmness to the water, not even the clustered boats were bobbing much and the fishmongers hadn’t yet set up their stalls.

I was doing a mummy run for my young adult child, my softy who is building her confidence up slowly, incrementally. We were taking the bus to discover a whole new world of the journée de citoyenneté, the replacement for military service in France.

Looking at the gathering crowd of fellow bus travellers, I warned her saying It’s going to be a bun-fight to get on, don’t hang back. We made it on ok, counting the stops, averting faces from bags pushed too close and tiktok consumers obliviously watching and re-watching outloud their favourite clips.

We stopped by a lycée and a crowd spewed forth onto the pavement. Two stops later we saw the barbed wire rolling across the top of a high wall we knew we had arrived at the military barracks.

Hopping off I was struck by the surreality of the situation. Heavily armed, bullet-proof vested soldiers with big imposing guns guarded the barracks, high walls, high security, and at the end of the road, the view over the calm blue sea, the pink light on white buildings.

A picture of peace and beauty at the end of the road of war and violence.

My girl hung out with me at my bus stop while we waited for the call up. And then it came and she responded, following the crowd of young adults then lining up to have her bag searched and her crochet hook temporarily confiscated, labelled as a dangerous weapon amongst a pile of scissors.

My girl who has a heart for the environment, a pastoral heart that cries when her friends are in distress. My girl in amongst khaki camoflage and guns with bullets that rip into flesh.

I thought about the Bible College course I am doing this term on sin, the bent out of shapeness of every human being that has ever existed and of our desperate need for salvation and a perfect Saviour because we’re all just truly messed up right from the word go.

And I thought too about the course I did last term about how to make ethical decisions and what is our theology of war. Because whether or not they know it, everyone has a theology on just about any subject you can imagine and our theology or our beliefs about what God thinks of certain subjects, or if we even believe there is a God, determines our choices and our actions in life.

This week the theology of war touched my life in a personal way. It’s not some far of thing, it actually affects me and what I believe and what I do.

Am I pacifist, believing that non-violence is the only way to go? Or do I believe in protecting the innocent and the oppressed? And what does God think about these things? What would he have me do?

These are real decisions that are affecting leaders in governments today. In fact while we are living our cushioned sanitized lives, they have to deal with them constantly because this is not the first war they’ve had to make decisions on.

Where does the line between peace and justice exist? When do we help others and stand up for them and when do we stay out of it let them sort out their own problems? These are sticky issues for each of us in everyday life as well as in world politics.

As I ended the week, all these things are running through my head and increasingly we are touched by this war that is just three countries or so away.

Military planes are taking off from just down the road from our house, at my workplace in the regional government offices money is being donated and supplies being collected to send off in road convoys and this morning, a Ukranian student at my girl’s lycée has sent out an email asking for donation of supplies and people who can help temporarily house refugees.

On Friday night coming home from work I heard – or rather felt – God say – in all this rush to help, listen to me first before you act.

I think in this season there is so much news and half-information, there is so many things going on that now more than ever we need to have the discernment and the wisdom of God to be able to identify what he wants to do in a situation and then to pray that. I want to take action but I can see that it needs to be God’s action I take and not my own because I don’t have all the information.

I feel a holy caution in the atmosphere.

If we are to use the war analogy, I feel like we must be careful where we step because only God knows where the landmines are and ultimately he knows where to help us to place aid and help the quickest and the best.

Proverbs 2:6 says For the Lord grants wisdom! From his mouth come knowledge and understanding and then in James 1:5 it says If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will rebuke you for nothing.

About all this turmoil Jesus said there would be wars and rumours of wars but he also said I am leaving you with a gift – peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift that the world cannot give. So do not be troubled or afraid.

Sending your lots of love from my couch to yours.

When the world rocks and roils

You know those astronauts and pilots who have to go through space camp and go into the simulators where the they’re in a rolling cage that goes backwards and forwards, up and down and they have to keep their eyes fixed on one fixed point on the horizon in order to keep on a straight course?

Mhmmm that’s just about everyone in the world right about now.

We’re all just standing on a wobbly ball trying to keep going forward and stay upright doing our best to keep our eyes on the horizon.

We go into work or school thinking about what we’re going to have for lunch and who needs a pick up from the bus stop at what time and we discover that someone’s brother has covid, the heating stopped working in the middle of winter and oh, yeah, Russia decided to invade Ukraine.

For some of us that means that our workday becomes huddled round an online news site or tiktok watching with horror snippets from around the world. For others of us it means they can hear bombs going off in their city while their 10 year old vomits in the next room in anxiety and they plan how much petrol they have to get to a safer place and which way do they go.

What do you do when the world rocks and roils around you? Where do you go? What do you do when situations overwhelm you with anxiety and fear and take over the space in your mind? What is the horizon your’re looking at in order to keep your balance in this crazy world?

Even before the surreality hit this week, I’ve been thinking about this questions because it’s not just when world politics go bananas that we are affected by these questions.

We face them in our personal world when things go haywire and we face them in the shift and change of culture and society too. And then there are weeks when just about everything goes wrong.

I’ve just come out of a difficult month – one of the cars (don’t judge me – we live in an area not well serviced by public transport and have 5 people to get to work and school in 5 different directions) broke down definitively, a week later the heating karked it (it was 0 degrees outside some nights), then the washing machine went on the blink, my managers asked me to do three jobs at once, my work colleague handed in her notice, my boss went on holiday and I, already completely beyond the pale exhausted, had to cancel my holiday, and Thierry was told he had to go Grenoble for the week for work. And that’s just the stuff I can explain easily and simply!

When Little Bun messaged me to say that while on a sleepover at a friend’s she fell down the stairs and hurt her arm badly, my first thought was: wonderful, a broken arm is just what I need right now with no car and Thierry away next week.

It was as I was verbalising all this to a work colleague I realised that all this life stuff, this parade of bad news and difficult situations had begun to veer me off the path of hope and faith and onto a path of expectation of disaster and catastrophe.

I realised that while I put my trust in Jesus and I pray for situations to change, sometimes I find myself praying without actually believing that God will change things that I ask him to change. And when he does, I find I’m surprised!

I think he must not be that impressed with me sometimes, it’s a good thing he loves me unconditionally and has eternal patience because boy, he needs it.

It’s as though Jesus is living in my heart but he got pushed to the back of the cupboard and out to the periphery of my life for a moment and everything else that sucked was front and centre. And this is what happens in life all the time. We need to be constantly moving Jesus to the front and centre of our vision or weeds pop up and clog our view.

Jesus described it very neatly in the Parable of the Sower actually.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them…as for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word but the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches chokes the word and it proves unfruitful

Matthew 13:7, 22

This is exactly what happens to us when so much bad news and uncertainty happens in our personal lives and adds to the bad news and uncertainty that is happening in societal shifts and world politics. Our hope and our joy that God has spoken to us gets choked by the legitimate anxieties, fears, cares and concerns of life.

These things are legitimate fears. For the people of Ukraine it’s a legitimate fear that a bomb might fall on their house. For the person who has no job, it’s a legitimate fear that they may not be able to pay their bills.

We can’t dismiss these fears but we do have an antidote to them. We don’t have to live with them and we don’t have to live in constant anxiety. There is a way to have peace even when the world rocks and roils and there is hope available.

Jesus.

Jesus can change things. He can change your situation and my situation and he is more than powerful to change the Ukrainian situation.

The minute I catch myself thinking, it’s hopeless, I remind myself that I am not part of the people without hope because I put my trust in Jesus who is the Hope of the World.

Is hope an abstract thing? If we don’t catch our thoughts it is. If we say we believe God answers our prayers but in our hearts we don’t really. If we say that we believe all authority and power belongs to God but in our hearts we don’t.

What does the hope that Jesus brings mean to me in my situation? What do I really, truly, actually believe?

Hope means that I can ask him to change a situation at work and he will do it because he loves me and hears me and has promised to respond to me.

Hope means that the healing Drs have told you can’t possibly happen, can happen because what is impossible for man is possible for God.

Hope means that when I am exhausted and can’t go any further, he carries me and gives me the energy I need to do all that I need.

Hope means that I can ask him to change someone’s attitude or approach and without me doing anything at all, that person’s attitude shifts or a God idea of what to do pops into my head and that shifts their attitude.

Hope means believing that when God says that he turns the thoughts of the king in his hand like water, that God turns the thoughts of world leaders in other directions.

Hope comes from having direct access to God to whom all power belongs and who is unfailingly loving, kind, patient and faithful. And when we have hope we begin to have peace.

I have the choice though to examine my thoughts and see what I actually believe. I have the choice to allow the presence of Jesus to fill my mind and my thoughts and push all the fear and anxiety to the periphery.

Honestly I don’t know how people do without Jesus because there is only him who can give you a steady horizon when everything else is roiling around.

And the more our worlds roil and rock and shake, the more vital it becomes to keep our eyes fixed on the horizon that is Jesus so that we can experience the miracle of unreasonable peace.

We know friends of friends who are in the Ukrainian region at the moment and my prayer for them is that their vision will be filled with Jesus and only Jesus and that everything else, however serious or life-threatening it is will be pushed to the periphery of their line of sight and that they will know his peace. He is after all known as the Prince of Peace and his government, his reigning and his ruling over our world never comes to an end.

Fruit Salad

Photo by Christine Isakzhanova on Unsplash

[I used to be a prolific, almost obsessed blogger back in the day when the kids were small and I was at home full time but since I started working, since we moved to France and there’s stuff that take time to process in private and since the kids hit early adulthood and we became part time taxi drivers, not so much.

In a busy life though you learn to look for little blocks of time to do regular tasks and this week I realised that I have an untapped block of time in my week that I (hopefully, no promises) take up writing for fun again. My block of time is that early Saturday morning where I can’t sleep but when everyone else is their first sleep in of the week and the rule is DO NOT MAKE NOISE.

Perfect writing time.

So I am going to try. Try writing again. Try expressing my thoughts. Try being creative again. Trying getting into a healthy rhythm just for me.

Of course that being said, I have only been writing 5 minutes and one child has woken up and come down to join me. Murphy’s Law. Here it goes anyway…]

I have been thinking this last couple of months about our identity here in France. We’ve been living here for almost five years now and when we first came I thought to myself that we should do everything in French. I started facebooking in French, I tried speaking in French when we were out in public (too tiring for the girls to do it at home as they didn’t speak much at all), I tried to make only French friends and avoid English speakers and if we were around tourists I tried speaking in English in low voices. In short I felt like I should apologise for being who we are.

I still do to a certain extent. I don’t know if it is the region that we live in but when people hear us speaking in English, you can see the side glances coming at you. You know those looks, the out of the corner of your eye, looking the person up and down look. I do it myself, although I do try not to!!

In Pakistan when I was a kid there was no hiding it. We were the only white people in the town where we lived and, particularly out in the smaller villages, children would surround the car giggling and pointing or trying to touch you to see whether white skin felt different to brown.

In Europe, the same thing happens but subtly.

So on a street sound level, when we go out as a family and the girls are chatting and laughing like magpies amongst themselves, we become the family that gets the curious side looks.

I have tried to hide and blend in as much as I could but even when speaking in French the conversation inevitably turns to “Mais vous n’avez pas un petit accent?“

At some point along the way though I thought, “Stuff it! We are who we are, a French English family living in France with a background from Pakistan, NZ, Fiji, Australia and there’s no way we can change it. We are most definitely, as the Fijians say, Fruit Salad. Let’s embrace our fruit saladness. Let’s stop thinking about who we are and just be.”

So we are now the noisy annoying hybrids abroad who don’t really fit in but are cheerfully embracing our franglais-ness and our weird background, accepting the oddity of whoever happens to pop into our world.

As I embrace our mixed up nationalities and languages, I’m also embracing the things I like and don’t like. Perhaps its my age or perhaps its a side-benefit of covid throwing all normal things out the window but all of a sudden I am wondering why growing up in a Christian culture it was frowned on to have hobbies or passions.

Nobody really verbalised that restriction officially but somehow I grew up with the impression it was not really holy to be passionate about anything but God. I think this still exists in the church today. We tend to think that loving God means that we can’t love anything else, that everything else must shrink to non-existance in his presence.

This, I am coming to the conclusion, is incorrect.

Actually the opposite is true. We can love God fully passionately and enjoy the creativity and passions he has put in us because he gives them to us … sometimes for no particular reason except that he wants us to enjoy and appreciate his handiwork.

I’ll give you an example.

When I was a teenager, I never really got into fan-girling anything.

When I was a young mum, my South African uncle who I met for the first time at my brother’s wedding asked me what I did with my spare time and I was at a complete loss as to what to say. I could not think of a single hobby or passion that I had.

Since Uncle Ant asked me that question though I started thinking about what I liked doing and I realised that I had been enjoying writing, baking and crafting.

A friend got me hooked back on to crocheting and sewing. Later I found I relaxed a lot while doing mundane gardening tasks in my parent’s garden. Even though I am horrible at keeping plants alive or watering regularly in the hot weather, I love the tactile sensation of snipping branches and pulling up weeds or sorting out garden sheds.

And as our kids grew up they got into Japanese animé, kpop and then kdramas. At the point where they got into kdramas, I started watching too and one thing led to another. Now I’m learning Korean for fun on my bus journey home from work every week, I’m Ia huge kdrama fan, and I cook asian food several times a week.

Is any of this of any heavenly good ? Probably not. I may never use my Korean language skills in my life, there are probably only a tiny amount of Koreans in France but I am enjoying life while doing it. It’s tapping into my love of understanding different cultures, my love of languages and my love of cooking. All put in me by God who made me.

A friend of ours has taken up cheese-making in a big way. Is that of any heavenly good? Probably not, but I think God loves his creativity and he uses his cheeses to bless other people. This friend has a great hashtag sense of humour and tags his posts #blessedarethecheesemakers .

I love this. I think we need to stop being po-faced Christians and start realising that God has made us to be wonderful creative beings who are all mixed up like fruit salad, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and made to enjoy this planet, this life he has given us. No guilt and condemnation for being who we are included.