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.

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.