Wispy Clouds ... Tiny Whispers

I have a self-imposed, inward principle I try to follow:

      Catch inspirations     
              while they're here
               act on them quick
                  they'll disappear!

 Inspirations appear, often from nowhere, like wispy, little clouds appearing in the sky, swept along by high winds and so, so soon, blown out of sight. So … grab hold of them and act on them. If not, they may well disappear and even if you remember them sometime later, they may seem empty and it’s easy to find an excuse not to do anything with them.

Ah, let me quote Amy Carmichael yet again: “Don’t only read and pray; LISTEN. And don’t evade the slightest whisper of guidance that comes. God make your very sensitive, and very obedient.” (Whispers of His Power.)

It is often our response to these wispy clouds, these tiny whispers, that opens doors to new opportunities, bringing joy, fruitfulness and fulfillment – not only to ourselves but to others as well.

Set Your Course:There's a Difference

There's a difference between

 a hazy and a sunny day
a sense of duty and loving service
obligated relationships and enjoying people
a handshake and a hearty embrace
enduring an adventure and enjoying an adventure 

Hey, there’s a difference between

a trudge and a walk
gritting one’s teeth to face a challenge and positively embracing it
hanging onto the past and learning from the past
wishing time away and savouring the moment 

Yes, there’s a difference between

treading water and swimming
existing in and living in the present
choosing what is good and what is best
acknowledging God and adoring worship
recalling others’ past sins and keeping no account of them
recognizing others’ help and gratefully appreciating 

Yes, there’s all the difference in the world between 

a dreary  sky and an inky sky arched by a rainbow
sticking to ‘safe boundaries’ and climbing over ‘our fences’ to love and serve
saying ‘I will’ and doing the thing
Christian service and a life of love lived all for Jesus’ sake!

Which one of these is ‘us’ does not firstly depend on our genetic make-up or our background, who or what we happen to be as people. It largely depends on the mindset we choose to adopt: we set our minds, our hearts, like the wheel of a ship, on the course we choose to follow. Yes, it’s no easy task, for like a ship, we face squalls, buffeting and storms of the utmost severity. Yet, it makes the difference, the difference, let’s say, between death and life. As Paul says, “the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace”. (Romans 8:6 NASB.)

Mother Teresa in Soho: summer 2012

 An unlikely place, Soho, to house an exhibition about Mother Teresa or .. mmmm ... perhaps not. Like Jesus, she specialised in the sort of people that most people prefer to bypass. Second thoughts, a likely place to find an exhibition about her.
 
There was her room, a replica of it anyway. A tiny hospital bed, two old telephones (I mean old), a primitive filing system and a cardboard box under her bed with ‘AWARDS’ written in thick black pen. Perhaps, most telling, was what she had on her wall: a photo of Theresa of Lisieux, (whose name MT adopted at her first vows) with the saint’s words, ‘My vocation is love.’ 

I think those words could be a summary, actually, of MT’s life.
 
Walking around the exhibition reminded me of my university days. I was studying Theology and finding much of it tedious and dry: reading books written in seminaries or theology departments by academics. Not that I’m against academia or theological study but theology springing from real life, actually life in the gutter, takes on a new and exciting dimension. I remember, in my third year, walking round a reservoir with a book of MT’s sayings in my pocket and finding it, well, a reservoir of life to me at that time, water in a largely desert place. I felt as if I had found ‘the real thing’.

It was fascinating to see her simple blue and white habit, her cardigan, the worn cloth she darned, her handwritten notes and letters  asking for this and that. It made her a little more tangible and gave  insight into her humanity. ( I hate the iconizing of even the most saintly of people.)

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Albania, Mother Teresa felt the call of God to become a missionary nun when she was eighteen. She joined an Irish order - the Loreto Sisters - and in 1929 arrived in Calcutta where she took her final vows.

Mother Teresa taught for many years. It was not until she was recovering from a serious illness in 1946 (aged 36) that she received what she called her 'second calling'. The voice of God was clear: she was to leave her convent and work with the poorest of the poor.

The exhibition displayed her conversation with Jesus at this time:
“To leave that which I loved and expose myself to new labours and sufferings which will be great. These thoughts were a cause of much suffering – but His voice kept on saying, ‘WILT THOU REFUSE?’

Jesus said to MT, “Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come be My light, I cannot go alone, go among them, Carry Me with you into them.”

Mother Teresa's life had many similarities with St Francis of Assisi. Like Francis, strict poverty, abandonment of every personal possession and celibacy were all integral parts of her calling. Like Francis she formed her own order - known as the Missionaries of Charity - whilst remaining firmly within the structure of the Catholic Church. Whilst the number of monks and nuns has been steadily declining the brothers and sisters in the Missionaries of Charity has been growing and growing, numbering about 4000 today.
 
The exhibition revealed MT's inner crisis of faith (what a relief to find people like her had crises like you and me). ‘For nearly 50 years MT clung to Jesus in blind faith, not feeling His presence yet profoundly united to Him, radiating His joy and love to each person she met.’
 
MT wrote: “Within me everything is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through. The smile is a big cloak that covers a multitude of pains.”
 
Mother Teresa referred to herself as 'Christ's spouse', as do all the sisters. She commented that being ‘Christ’s spouse’ is similar to the love of a wife for a husband. “We are all women who have the ability to make use of this love. We should not be ashamed of loving Jesus with our emotions.”

Speaking of her celibacy once, Mother Teresa said, "I cannot in conscience love a creature with the love of a woman for a man, I no longer have the right to give that affection to any other creature but God."

For Mother Teresa, the love she would have given to a spouse was first directed to God. To her it was marriage of a different kind. Commenting on this 'marriage relationship' she found with God she once dryly said, "But sometimes I find it difficult to smile at Him because He can be so demanding!" 

MT's achievements are formidable in their international scope and she has become a byword of sanctity. The exhibition, however, showed us not only the depth of a love born out of suffering and obedience but a woman who was a human, like you and me. 

‘My vocation is love.’ MT got it right and I guess, if we have those four words emblazoned on our hearts, we can’t go too far wrong either.

Dropping anchor for a while

I turn my head; I hear the plop; a little tern in free fall hits the streaming waters; ah, it’s found a wriggling, silvery fish. And there, an oyster catcher’s anxious, plaintive call; has it lost its nest and young to this high, sweeping tide? An old gull sits with watchful gaze upon its post and, with outstretched wings, flies away to caw and cry; another answers -  some strange language I do not know – maybe it’s about me, warning its mate that I’m around; I mean no harm.

I drop anchor, splosh, my little boat swings and tugs against the flooding tide.

Ah yes, I know this boat; she’s older than me and I first learned to row her when I was perhaps six or even seven. The smell that always was, is still there, salty, varnish-y – from swelling, clinkered planks, warmed by the summer’s sun. I position myself on the worn floorboards and sit and watch and listen. Downstream I see the mill, the sluice and far away, I’d like to feel, is civilisation. I love it, how I love it; alone with my thoughts and they’re not very deep because, because I’m distracted by the beauty. That sky – a wide and open sky, a painting above my head of varied hues and strangely textured clouds; there’s no hideous buildings here to block my view.

Yes, the tide is tugging, tugging, wanting to pull this craft away but the anchor proves too strong. I’m here to stay, that is, until I pull up anchor and this I feel reluctant to do.

The tide is turning, I must go .. soaked in the beauty, the grace of tide-drenched marshes and swathes of purple lavender; up anchor now and man the oars, off and away until another time …

Inside too … there’s stillness, the tugging tide subdued, I realise my Anchor will hold … another day….

Stillness

Once a week I leave the city and take a walk in the countryside; it’s bliss! I walk down the sloping orchard, through the long wet grass that stretches between row upon row of stooping apple trees – packed now with small, tight apples, swelling agreeably with all this rain .. but sun not much…

The air is different here; it feels different, smells different; what is it? … It’s like the world of nature owns the air itself whereas in the town we do -  humans I mean …Yes, the distance grrrr of lorries and high speed trains  is still here - but the bees, the buttercups, the swallows and the wind all own the air.


What is it I breathe here, this country air? It is so different? I can only describe it as ‘stillness.’ ….


Stillness is what I crave for and yet don’t want, seek after but choose hurriedness instead … it’s so hard to stop …. put on the brakes ….

Yes, when I get there … I’m in tune with myself, my deep within, I feel in step with God again and sense others’ deeps too. I'm righted, no longer heeling sharply over, I’m sailing again …. phew ..


Learn it, my soul, learn it – stillness.

Moonless midnight - or a cheery summer's morning? ‘Hearing’ God – a problem with words

I’ve got a problem as a writer that crops up again and again:  How do you hear God?  It can be misleading to say, ‘I heard God speak’ or, 'I heard God say..’ Certainly, the great majority of the time we don’t hear Him speak in an audible voice (I’ve never heard the audible voice of God.) I mean, do we 'sense' His voice or 'feel' His voice or 'perceive' His voice? Which verb should we use? I’m not sure.

Of course, I’m a good evangelical – and I hold that my main source of hearing God’s voice is through the Bible. Most of the time God speaks through the written word (thank God for those amazing people who fought (and died) for it to be translated into the vernacular. So, I can ‘read’ His voice – well that’s another angle.  

Elijah describes God’s voice as a still, small one. Not loud, not tempestuous, but like still air, gently, almost imperceptibly, blowing across your face. It’s noiseless .. but then others have described it quite differently: it feels like a hammer or fire in the bones (Jeremiah 23:29; 20:9.) 

Perhaps, at times, I can say I have ‘received’ God’s voice rather like my mobile receives signals. Somehow, spirit touches spirit - it’s very hard to explain. The psalmist says, ’deep calls to deep…’ (42:7) Something deep out there, but also very near at hand, actually so near at hand that it comes from within, connects with my ‘deep’ and I recognise, ‘that was God.’

This deep ‘word,’ this voiceless voice, takes us by surprise.  It does not come with what we would expect. I think of the time when wretched with condemnation I ‘received’ the word, the notion, the something, that this other ‘deep’ embraces me and my ‘deep’ with an unconditional blanket of love, looking beyond all the turmoil that I sometimes am. It comes with unexpected comfort in the storm; equally it comes with reality, bringing the uncomfortable when all I want is peace.

And sometimes I get it wrong … and I am loath to say ‘God says…’ I much prefer, ‘ I think God has said..’  We all make many mistakes, as James has kindly pointed out to us (James 3:2) …..but that doesn’t matter too much, not in eternal terms anyway, as long as we learn from our mistakes.

One thing I do know: ‘receiving’ God’s word makes all the difference, yes ALL the difference, the difference between a moonless midnight and a cheery summer’s morning, the difference between, well, death and life.

Make me a better receiver .. deep calls to deep….o mighty God.

aaaaaaawesome

Ezekiel, well, he’s not my favourite prophet. I don’t get what all those temple measurements are about but then, I’m not a mathematician (understatement)  but that vision of the glorious ethereal beings, the moving throne, the wheels within the wheels, just moving this way and that and the .. the what? The Man on this throne, steering  the great thing I suppose … well that is just aaaaaaawesome. It’s a glimpse into another world, a world beyond our world; maybe that’s the wrong preposition, parallel to our world .. I don’t know ..I don’t know because I really don’t know where this world is at all …..

I think we live in fascinating age of discovery .. every time I hear of a new constellation, planet or star being discovered it makes me go a bit tingly.

But this other world is not subject to the same laws as our world is.  I mean, you can’t just send off a space probe to measure it, photograph it or conduct an experiment to find just what is what….

This other world seems to reveal itself momentarily when you least expect it. Ah, I’m just reading the Magician’s Nephew (well, actually having it read to me – luxury.) C.S. Lewis captured this fact gloriously; you can’t follow one, two, three steps and you’re there. It just happens when it happens.  And happen it does…

You know this other world .. a few weeks ago someone, let’s say of a sound mind and a rather respectable social standing was passing by our marquee in Northamptonshire and, when he least expected it, saw this other world. Above our church marquee was a bright light (so bright he could not look at it.) I bet if he looks when it’s pitched again this summer he won’t see it - even if it is there - because that's the nature of things…

This world, the world Ezekiel saw, is not magical - well not in our sense of the word. It’s real, as real as, well, you and me. Other, different, beyond, paranormal, numinous, supernatural ……. words fail.  Ezekiel saw it ….. aaaaaaawesome.

Ragworts: smelly poisonous weeds? They carry a lesson for me

It's my friend Rachel's birthday, and I've written this as an inspiration for her:

There was a time in my life when I looked at the scraggly yellow ragworts that broke through the cracks on the city pavements or straddled the old decaying brick walls and railway cuttings of Leicester and wondered … wondered at just how they survived this arid, urban waste and I thought of my own life at that time … nothing, nothing seemed to be happening … the long days seemed monotonous, unexciting and the ragworts gave me hope indeed. Even in this ‘waste’ I could find life … and so I did.

I was working as a cleaner cum shop assistant and discreetly, near my side, I kept a notebook in which I jotted down my ideas, my thoughts, my plans, my stories … and so the dullest place became a place of inspiration. 

 Now I know the reverse for life is busy and, yes, fulfilling but I still want to take inspiration from the ragwort and learn a lesson from its tenuous rootedness, its ability to find life when there seems so little life around.  I need my roots to push deep down into the soil and this means finding God’s inspiration in everything I do. In the parched times or in the downpour, God must be my soil, my sun, my rain, my life.

Postscript: I’ve just read that just one single plant of a particular type of ragwort can produce up to 150,000 seeds in its lifetime! These scrawny, golden, fetid flowers can multiply, multiply, multiply. So with us: just where will the ‘seeds’ of lives given to God be carried and, when they take root, what kind of fruit will they bear?

A fruitful day? I just heard the drip dripping of the rain

“There was a day when I died, utterly died — died to George Muller, his opinions, preferences, tastes, and will; died to the world, its approval or censure; died to the approval or blame even of my brethren and friends — and since then I have only to show myself approved to God.” George Muller, 1805 –1898, evangelist and philanthropist.

Mmm … things like that make for a bit of heart-searching and deep thought …..

Anyway, I have been wondering today: what has been the most fruitful day of my life as yet?  I have no clue but probably it was not one of those memorable, exhilarating days when you feel heaven is close and sense the Father’s comforting whisper... Much more likely it was one of those grey, drizzling days when quietly, unnoticed, I have had to die, to put a nail in the coffin of the self-importance that so wants to be something, to do something outstanding and special and to put on the mantle of a faithful servant who is happy just to do her master’s bidding and love and serve Him as well in the small as in the great.

Grey and drizzling, monotonous drip dripping of the rain – hidden-to-me but known to God - a rainbow arches the sky and the sun beams through with glorious promise…

Unlikely turnaround – book review and comment: ‘Miracle on the River Kwai’

I’m reading the book ‘Miracle on the River Kwai’ by a Scotsman, Ernest Gordon, and published in 1963. Allied soldiers are captured by the Japanese and, as slave labourers, forced to build a railroad between Bangkok (Thailand) and Rangoon (Burma) and a bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand. Appallingly treated by the Japanese, soldiers, in their thousands, slip into despair, selfishness and depravity, expressing what must be the very darkest side of human nature. Men die lonely deaths and those left alive live only to care and fend for themselves. And yet, another principle is also working in the camp, that of selfless love and self-sacrifice and living by the words of John the Apostle, ‘whoever loves God must love his brother also.’  (1 John 4:21)

 In this story, at which only the steeliest heart can remain undented, the stark contrast between two kingdoms – two extreme kingdoms – is portrayed; it is light and dark at opposite ends; the huge difference between the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light is displayed. What is more, the Rule of Love is shown to be the winner, hands down.

A while ago walking through a museum in Nottingham, I chanced to read a notice advising citizens how to conduct themselves in the blackout. It was striking – everyone was commanded not just to look out for themselves but for their neighbours. Every man for himself? – Not then. Yet, now, sixty five years on, with many, many notable exceptions, society seems to have taken a step downwards. We no longer seem to care about the whole; it is me, my immediate world that counts so much; people in their thousands die lonely – and people live lonely too.

Perhaps days of greater austerity are ahead – it looks that way. Maybe we will find ourselves experiencing extremes of poverty we have not known for decades. Many will suffer – particularly the already-poor. But perhaps, too, it will ultimately lead to a measure of turning around as in that prison camp by the River Kwai in WW2.

The way of Jesus’ kingdom society is always to puts others first; at it best it is a society where heroic self-sacrifice abounds, a society whose remit is ever ‘whoever loves God must love his brother also.’ Society as a whole needs the church to be at its best and, if this is so, what we are as church,  will spill over into, salt, however you want to say it, our families, our neighbours, our towns, our cities, our countryside. It begins with us. One book has convinced me that turnarounds are possible: ‘Miracle on the River Kwai.’

Not detached …..butterflies, rocks, roses and lilies

A while ago I wrote this reflection about a butterfly on a friend’s birthday card and have added to it a little:

I saw a butterfly busying itself with the sort of things butterflies do: collecting, feeding, laying eggs and spreading out its wings before the sun; it was unconscious of its own beauty. 

This butterfly was an unusual one. Most butterflies fly from bush to bush, or from flower to flower and usually stay fairly near the ground. This butterfly flew higher and higher, exploring the sky. Strangely, however, I noticed that the higher in the sky it climbed, the nearer to the earth it also flew.

This was a paradox! And so it is with us: The closer in heart we get to God and the more in touch with Him we get, the more we explore His spiritual realm, the closer to earth we become in the sense of finding His love and His heart for humanity and for the individuals we are called to share this planet with. 

One of my favourite authors is John Stott; I’m indebted to him in many ways. Certainly, as a Christian writer and thinker, he was not in favour of a life of abandonment but involvement. He wrote the church should be ‘like a rock in a mountain stream, like a rose blooming in mid-winter, like a lily growing in a manure heap.’ (The Contemporary Christian.’)

                               ‘Nearer to God’, may we be
                             … but never abandon humanity ...

Nothing big? Perhaps not

A little while ago I was having a sort out (I’m always having them) and found the battered old diary I used to write as a teenager (painted black with a gold buckle and lock – the key long since lost).  I stumbled across the telling account of a particular incident I had long forgotten about.

A bowl of oranges sat on one of the long red tables of the girls’ boarding school I attended and we were sitting down to our evening meal. I reached for my orange and began to peel it, only to find it was blue inside. Moaning and whingeing, I complained loudly to the whole table of my sad lot. At the end of the table sat an old teacher, Miss Stirte her name was; she was well past retirement age. ‘Here you are, Julia,‘ she said without any fuss. ‘Have mine. ‘

My teenage diary told my story. Tail between my legs, I was profoundly convicted by her unassuming response to my need – and ashamed, too, of my loud, ungrateful complaining. She would never have known her simple action halted me in my tracks and I’m sure she is no longer alive. But I had observed, learned of, a truly honourable way: that of quiet and small, unheralded acts of self-sacrifice.

Now, if someone would ask, what is your call? I might say, “‘Nothing big; I’d just like to keep doing quiet, small, probably unnoticed  things that perhaps may cost me a little but others will benefit from them.’”  These are what make God smile; they are what move His heart and bring His blessing; they are indeed inspired with the breath of heaven and build His kingdom, perhaps like almost nothing else.

‘Nothing big:’ I think I better rephrase that. The small and the insignificant to us are often of high importance to God. And that forgotten incident of so many years ago? I believe it changed my life.