Category Archives: God

God is deep!

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For the last couple of days I have been involved in a pretty mundane task. I have been going through all my files on the YFC server and deciding whether it is useful to keep or needs deleting. I’ve been instructed to only keep stuff that will be useful for the next person.

I am amazed and how many files I have accumulated over 4 years. I am doubly amazed by how important those files felt at the time and now they are clearly irrelevant and do not need to be kept. I am going through 4 years of work, reading and saving or deleting as appropriate. A lot more is being deleted than saved.

Makes me think a bit about baggage we carry in our lives – but that is not what has struck me through the 4 (so far!) days of this task. What has struck me is how incredibly close to God I feel throughout the mundaneness of this task.

It has reminded me a lot of the week I spent a few years back with the Northumbria Community on retreat. My guide for the week gave me the task of planting potatoes and a psalm to think about. This was my first real experience of mulling over one or two thoughts over and over again as I did a pretty mundane task.

As I embarked on this I thought I was going to get bored in a couple of hours – but as I went through the routine so that things became automatic, I found God that God revealed deeper things and took my mind on little journey’s which I would not have considered from the psalm originally.

The last few days have been a bit like that. As I have been working on automatic I have been unconsciously sucked into the presence of God which has been pretty amazing.

In particular God seems to have been gently poking fun at my current secret fear. The fear that says, come September when I leave the busy-ness of YFC to find time for the community by just being myself in dog-collar in places that says ‘you are going to be soooo bored come the end of the day!’

The fear has not gone – but God is laughing, I can almost hear it, as I hear the Spirit saying ‘you really have no idea how deep I go, or how much you still need to learn. You are playing in the shallows, venturing as far as knee depth now and again … but you need to walk further out, to experience my depth, the real coolness, to be submersed in me and understand that I am deep … very deep … real deep!’

Shades of God

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I visited Wycombe YFC today, had a great chat with Erica and a good coffee before making some phonecalls and retuning home.

I don ‘t know if you have noticed the trees around you recently, but today as I drove along the M40 and the M25 the trees seemed to jump out and grab me. Let me explain … they are so green! Maybe it has something to do with the amount of rain we have had around the country which has caused me to notice this more than normal. I did not just particularly notice how green the trees look, I was also amazingly struck by the variety of green.

The picture does little justice to the reality, but if you are near a lot of trees, trust me – go and have a look. The variety of green is quite staggering. When I stopped in an M25 queue I lost count of the different shaded of green that I could see from my car.

So many shades of green and yet we have one word … ‘green’. If we don’t have the language to describe one colour, how can we ever hope to describe and understand God!?

the magpie cometh

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I have often written here of the wonder of creation and how God is clearly evident and at work within it. It still amazes that people look for God ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or ‘over there’ when God is clearly present and working right here and right now. Where we stand, where we walk, where we sit is sacred ground because God stands, walks and sits with us – whether we recognise God or not!

For the last few days we have been getting excited at the wonder of creation. Alonside our garage which is really a shed is an amazing Clematis plant. A couple of weeks ago Joe and I noticed a blackbird collecting ‘nesting material’ and flying into the bush. For the last week while going into the garage to get things we have seen the blackbirds have made a nest wedged between the garage window and the clematis. It was quite an amazing sight and we looked forward to seeing Blackbird chicks in the next few weeks.

While writing today I was distracted by an amazing noise in the garden. The two blackbirds were screeching at two massive magpies which had noticed the nest. The blackbirds were no match and seem to have deserted the nest and abandoned the eggs to the magpies.

Creation is mazing and beautiful, but sometimes it seems that creation can be quite cruel as well. While it is easy to see God in the beauty and wonder of creation, it is quite difficult to see God in the cruelness of creation. God is there but difficult to recognise some of the time.

The becoming of G-d

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Ian Mobsby’s new book is now available.

I’ve ordered it and looking forward to a good read and thinking more on the concept of the Trinity and how we, in the west, have interpreted this and based practice upon that interpretation.

I have the privilege of having Ian as my mentor and so also had the privilege of being able to chat and hear from Ian some of his thinking on this. I think it sounds exciting – so what’s topping you!

Go buy the book here!

refreshing

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The last few days have seen me in assignment mode good and proper as it seems I have been on a bit of a role by writing 2 in 2 days. I’m now in the happy position of only have 2 left to do for the middle of June …. but I’ve just realised that’s still one every 2 weeks … ah well!

I do feel a sense of achievement, however, and the worry of a large number of things disappearing has been quite a refreshing experience.

It’s clearly not a coincidence that this time of manic work was preceded by a time of retreat. I came back from retreat pleased that the time went well and that people were supported. I did not, however, come back feeling particularly refreshed as I was not on retreat as such as our role was to be there to led the retreat.

But … it seems God did refresh me in ways I do not understand or even notice. All I know is that I have been struggling for weeks to get my head around an essay on the theology of other religions, and after a time of retreat it flowed in less than 24 hours.

Amazing what God can do when you aint looking!

weekend reflections

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It’s been a great long weekend with lots of time to chill with the family and do some reading – although I am still struggling with the theology of other religions assignment which is becoming a bit of a frustration.

Yesterday we took a great walk along the coast from Seasalter to Whitstable. Looking along the coast and out to sea it was amazing to be able to notice and enjoy different elements of God’s creation. The sea is always a place where I feel the closest to God and parts of yesterday this was very true.

I enjoy noticing God in the everyday as it reminds me, and shows others, how accessible God has made himself to us:

God in the beautiful parts of creation we observed.
God in the joy of our children playing.
God in our conversations of laughter.
God in the ordinary everyday stuff of family life.

The great long weekend is coming to an end though as I have to attend SEITE tonight as I can’t make it tomorrow – although the subject is St Ignatius’ spiritual writings so I’m quite looking forward to it. (Honesty moment: I’d miss the lecture but I’m going to write my assignment on this so thought I should make the effort!)

spectacularly common

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Sunday morning I had the privilege of preaching at the baptism of Joshua Banner. It always a privilege to be asked to do something by friends.

The text was the story of Simeon and Anna in the temple when Jesus is presented by Mary and Joseph from Luke 2. There is so much in this passage to pull out that I was struggling what to share of relevance in a ten minute slot.

Rather than opt for 3 points, I chose one and concentrated on the fact that both Simeon and Anna recognised Jesus as the Messiah and how so many others that were close to him seemed to miss that point.

I wonder if that is due to familiarity. Certainly I was challenged myself as I looked at the text and wondered ‘if I was there would I have recognised Jesus?’ Would I have been with the seeing minority or the blind majority?

2000 years on, when we know the rest of the story, and we understand some of the OT prophecies it is really easy to say ‘yes … of course I would have reognised Jesus – it’s obvious!’ If I am honest I am not so sure.

People seem not to recognise Jesus for who he is in Luke for some interesting reasons which are a challenge to me for this week in particular:

parents – the sense of wonder has been lost through the everyday stuff like nappies etc. Despite angelic visitations and immaculate conception the everyday has squeezed out the wonder.

disciples – they have got used to being with Jesus. They see him eat, drink, get tired, sleep – not things you equate with divinity. Their familiarity with him has clouded their view.

priest – they seem to fall foul of the fact that Jesus does not fit the mould of what they were looking for. They were looking and waiting, but they had decided what the Messiah would look like, and being born to a poor couple from Nazareth was not in their thinking. They were restricting God with their preconceived ideas.

I wonder if during my life, my everyday moving about, I look for Jesus in the wrong places, in the spectacular and in doing so restrict my mind into looking where I think he should be. So often, Jesus can be found in the common – at an occurance rate of 5 times a second you can’t get much more common than birth.

Maybe, we should be looking more in the common for our God, for it seems our spectatcular God loves to inhabit the common, after all – it is there that God meets his people.

God in the darkness

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Today I traveled to the Franciscan Friars house in Canterbury to meet up with Brother Colin.

For the next year Brother Colin, a wonderful Franciscan Friar, is going to be my spiritual director. If we both believe its working after the year we will agree to continue.

This morning Brother Colin got me thinking in a number of ways but one in particular followed our discussion of morning and evening prayer. For many years now I have been following and using the daily office from the Northumbria Community. For the last few months, in line with requirements of ordination, i have been using Common Worship for morning prayer. I can’t pretend to be totally comfortable with this as it is over wordy (in my humble opinion) and I resonate far more with the Northumbria liturgy.

As we discussed this Br Colin reminded me of the daily cycle. We know that God’s people saw the day starting at sundown. I was aware of this , but not really fully thought through what this meant.

If the start of the day is when darkness starts to descend, and God created that day, and lives within that day he created, then God is in the darkness as well as the light. It’s easy to think of ‘other powers’ having some rule over the night, or subconsciously thinking God is not in the darkness. Part of Israeli faith, and the first century faith of Jesus, saw very much that God was everywhere, including the darkness.

That brief conversation has opened up a whole new dimension of God for me. I’m now wondering how you recognise God in the darkness!

Advent 17: true worship?

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Todays thought again thinks around a more inclusive, or varied, interpretations of the Bible.

‘Just as God is unimaginable mystery, so too none of us can proclaim to have a total grasp and understanding of the Bible. We cannot camouflage the Bible’s message by saying that our interpretation is the only true interpretation.’

If the Bible is truly the word of God, how can we ever hope to have the one true interpretation of that word? I would suggest that at best we may glean some understanding for a certain time and a certain place and a certain situation.

A while ago at a YFC staff conference the speaker started his talk with roughly these words: ‘I don’t preach the truth. I preach my opinion of the truth, and if other preachers realised that about their preaching maybe we would have less problems in the church!’

To claim we have 100% truth in our interpretation sub-consciously dismisses our need for God; in fact maybe it even replaces our need for God. If we feel we have total truth, then we no longer have use for a God who we are answerable to, a God who we worship, a God whom we expect to continue to speak truth today. If we claim 100% truth, maybe we stop worshiping God, and start to worship truth – or our interpretation of truth!

Advent 15 gender freedom

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Todays Disturbing Complacency thought thinks more on the language we use to describe God. It amazes me that people can still become so concerned over the use of feminine language to describe God.

God is ontologically different from creation and, as such, any language that we as humans, being part of God’s creation, use to attempt to describe God will always be incomplete. We can only describe using concepts we have grown up, and God is way outside the constraints of any of those concepts.

God is not a human and so God does not have gender. When we speak of God as Father we are saying God has fatherley characteristics, but we are not saying God is male. When we speak of God as Mother we are saying God has motherley characteristics, but we are not saying God is female.

Gen 1:27 has always made this clear for me: So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;male and female he created them. People who speak against female images of God seem to disregard texts such as Is. 66:13 As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you and Matt. 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

If we are more inclusive in our language, and more open to a richer description of God then maybe we have a better chance of understanding more of our creator.