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.
elevenpassports 