found this on James Lock via Digging a Lot
It shows the radical Christ we need to be following:
Christ said:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind’
this is the first and great commandment.
The second is like it
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’
There is a lot of love there!
The blog has been a bit quiet – I think that is due to Lent. For Lent this year I have been reflecting on ‘stuff’ and making use of CMS’s 40 days of Yes. I know I am a year behind everyone else – but that’s the way I like to be!
I don’t deliberately give things up at Lent. My psyche works against me if I try to do that – if I concentrate on not doing something I seem to end up failing! Instead, I decide to take something on … and inevitably in this ‘taking on’ means I give up time that I was wasting on other things.
I have been challenged by a few things and I think I’m going to start to blog about a couple. Today I have been thinking more about what Rick Warren calls my ’emotional heartbeat’.
I would never ever read any of the Purpose Driven Stuff. I don’t know why but the ‘driven’ language really turn me off, so if it was not for CMS I would not have found this quote from The Purpose Driven Life:
‘God has given us each a unique emotional heartbeat that races when we think about the subjects, activities or circumstances that interest us. We instinctively care about some things and not about others. These are clues to where you should be serving …..’
And so I have been asking myself for quite a few days – what is my emotional heartbeat?
At first sight this seems that it should be an easy question to answer but I am finding there are quite a lot of layers to peel through before I can get an accurate answer. There are the answers that I think I should give as a Christian, let along as an ordained person in the Church of England! Then there are the answers which others have told me which bounce around in my mind. There is also all that ‘stuff’ that was spoken over me as a child from parents as well as a young Christian in churches when I was exploring faith. You can also add the answers that the media, both good and bad, tell me I am passionate about.
I shared recently with Sarah that the Comic Relief is the only thing of its kind that ‘grabs me in the gut’. I cannot watch Comic Relief without tears rolling down my face. Even though other campaigns like Children in Need are amazing they don’t grab me in the same way. Does this mean my emotional heartbeat is in some way connected to that? I’m not sure – but I don’t think so. (I guess this is where my concern with Purpose Driven lies – the language implies an immediate action, to jump to your heart beat … but I wonder how many people have jumped rather than thought and reflected!?)
So – what is my emotional heartbeat? I don’t know … I’m still ‘un-peeling’ but in there somewhere is justice and wanting to speak out for the voiceless, and in there is people and wanting to get to know them, and in there is Christ giving people full lives and in there is something else that I can’t quite put my finger on yet …
So …. emotional heartbeats … and yours is ….?
Ruth Gledhill interviews Canon Giles Fraser here who outlines why he thinks the church should celebrate gay marriage.
It’s a good interview that’s worth listening to.
Personally it saddens me that we even need to be discussing this … this is about love and of course love is something to be celebrated!
Today is St. Valentines Day and some will be eagerly awaiting the postman, some will be excited, some will be puzzled, some will be disappointed.
We seem to know very little about St Valentine and there is even some suggestion that this day may have been used to celebrate a number of saints. We do know a little more about Cupid who is also associated with today.
I was challenged yesterday in the excellent sermon from Justine, vice principal of SEITE. Today is a day to remind someone that they matter.
After my KCME training session earlier this week (which was good) I was able to pop to London to spend 90 minutes with Ian Mobsby, my mentor, in the new home of Moot at St. Mary Aldermary.
We were able to have a good discussion on where I am with what is happening and how the gathering is taking shape. For me its invaluable having Ian being able to input from his wealth of experience while looking at the gathering from the outside. In many ways it is like a life line as Ian not only understands what I am saying, he seems to have an idea of how I am feeling because he has experienced this stuff himself.
We spoke a bit about the expression of Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 22 of loving God, loving ourselves and loving others. This tied in really, I guess, with myself wondering what, as the gathering, our mission should be? It became clear that we aspire to love God through our worship, we believe that we will be able to try to love others through our mission (whatever that may be) … but we can’t do any of that until we start to love ourselves.
Jesus says in that passage above ‘love others as you love yourselves’. I wondered when looking at that afresh – ‘how do we love ourselves?’ … or maybe the question is ‘do we love ourselves?’ Before we can love others it would seem that we need to be able to love ourselves. So, as the gathering, we need to learn how to love ourselves before we are able to love others. Or, to turn that around, we will find it extremely difficult to love others if we dont love ourselves first.
I’m going to raise this tomorrow at the gathering as I think this is something quite key to our development as a missional community … if we want to love others we need to love ourselves … so we need to wonder what can the gathering be doing to help that. As the theme is ‘our bodies as temples’ then it may well fit in quite well.
I was chatting to someone a while ago and I still remember the conversation was quite draining – the person was a good person, but they constantly spoke and re-spoke about how hard they were working and how much the church, God, their family and life itself owed them back. The other day I saw this quote from from Hafiz (a 14th century Persian poet) onMaggi’s blog:
Even after all this time
the sun never says
to the earth,
“you owe me.”
Look what happens
to a love like that,
it lights up the whole
sky.
Thanks Maggie – that’s challenged my thinking today.
Following the beauty theme yesterday, I am thinking on this quote today from Kahlil Gibran:
‘Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.’
Do we decide when, if and how that light shines?
It’s weird today to be celebrating Tom being 15.
It does sound like a cliche, but I do vividly remember every detail of that day 15 years ago; the very ability to recall even minor facts from 15 years ago surprises me as I have difficulty remembering some stuff of the last week, or more recent years.
I can remember it was a Sunday and waking at around 730 to hear Sarah wandering around downstairs. WE went to the hospital at 8am. Tom was born at about 615pm. This morning he apologised for keeping us waiting so long – it was a long time and it is the only time that I have read the whole of the Sunday Times cover to cover while Sarah dozed or whatever.
I remember the room we waited in, the delivery suite, the colour of the walls, the enquiring phonecalls from excited young people from our youth group, the excitement on the telephone of new grand mothers, the first conversation I had with new born Tom as I held him in my arms as Sarah was taken off to have a bath, the leaving the hospital alone in the evening to join Annie and Phil for a celebratory beer (no change there then)and the journey back the next day.
I’m not a very good dad. Like other dads I look back and think I could have done more, have guilt about missed opportunities, wish I had done this or that instead of that and this … but this day each year, as do the births of my other two children, cause me to reflect on God.
I remember all those details as if they were yesterday because I, as a poor dad, allowed that day, that birth, to have a massive impact on me. It changed my life because here was a child I had had a part in creating and loved in a way that I could not describe. I guess I can only call it a father love, and maybe only fathers can understand what that is, in the same way that only mothers can relate to other mothers feelings – I don’t know, I’m falling into an emotional ramblement!
As a poor father these thin gs have had a massive impact and caused a great love to develop within me for Tom … it just gives me a tiny sense of the great love that father God has for all of his children. To think about it blows the mind, to try and explain it is ridiculously silly – the need to accept the mystery of it is just as ridiculously necessary.
Anyway – Happy Birthday Tom … 15 today, have a great day … I know you will!
On Friday, before joining the Hope 08 meeting in London I made the time to go to the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s fantastic and worth the visit – but be prepared to wait 6 deep away from paintings before you can get a good view!
I was struck by this painting of Moses being handed over to Pharaoh’s daughter as outlined in Exodus 2:10. Hogarth seems to have captured the atmosphere amazingly. The tears of the natural mother and the excitement and expectation of Pharaoh’s daughter leapt out of the piece with a clean and innocent contrast of mothers emotions.
I was captivated, however, by the look and stance of the little boy Moses. Not wanting to leave his mum, but bravely stepping towards the held out hand of his new foster mum while clutching tightly onto the robe of his tearful mother, not wanting to let go, but knowing that he has to. Knowing, in fact, that his survival depends on this simple, but incredibly brave, small step.
And than I wondered as I tend to do at such times…
Did Jesus feel like this when he left his fathers side to join us on earth?
Did he take those brave steps tearfully while clutching the cloak of God, worried about leaving, but knowing he had to go?
Was Jesus scared in the same way Moses was scared?
As he stepped away from the presence of God, did God himself cry while Mary eagerly awaited his arrival in her arms?
A divine human contrast where loves causes tears and joy over this child?
Were those cries of the babe in the manger, cries of a saviour leaving his God?
Sent out from everything he had ever known, into the unknown of his creation?
I wonder…
The last few days have been quite tough and I really have no wish to repeat the experience in quite a while. There are still many questions flying around and a general, and correct, feeling that this, the death of Kim so young, is all wrong. And it is!
These last few days though I think I have gained an insight into loss and love.
My mum used to say ‘you won’t realise what you have till it’s gone!’. Although she used it in a blackmailing way, the statement itself has some truth in it. The other side of the coin is that familiarity de-sensitizes us. In short, we forget. Sometimes we take for granted. Sometimes we are just plain lazy.
I’ve remembered something of what love is. I’ve learned something more about this word we bat around. Today, the word ‘love’ has been cheapened by society when we say things like ‘I love curries’ (vicars words, so credit goes to him). Love goes deeper, love entwines, love permeates, love captivates, love consumes. Love happens in partnership, and when one side disapears the loss hurts, it stifles, it takes the breath away, it cripples. In the deep, entwining, permeating, captivating, consuming way love gripped; the pain of loss takes over and grips instead.
I feel that loss in part, and in just that part it is incredibly painful. I cant imagine what the full force of it is like for Steve in particular. But I do believe God feels it too, and these words from Romans 8 are great:
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The Shiny Headed Prophet 