Disappeared

Disappeared. I’ve been changing the web host for my website, and it has been more complicated than I can say: it’s so complicated, I keep deferring to my IT-savvy son, Doug, whose infinite patience and kindness with my ineptness is much appreciated.

For the last few days, www.micheledmorrison.com has failed to come up on the search engine, nor have I been able to access it any other way until just now, when I googled the name I gave it several years ago: ‘Tears amid the alien corn.’ I’ve not been trying to be arrogant that I know one of Keats’ poems, but the line was often a mantra to me in the early years of my transplantation from California to Scotland, when I frequently shed tears of homesickness, feeling I didn’t belong (and I was freezing...)

Today I might take a more existential view of those lines, feeling that as a Christian in today’s society, I am often lost in fields of alien corn. The landscape is no longer Christian. I shed not so many tears these days, but have a deep yearning for our ultimate home, where Jesus will be our ever present companion.

His promise in Revelation, though, is that when we hear his knock at our heart’s door, and invite him in, he comes in and shares a meal with us. And we need never feel estranged from our ultimate home, even while in this world, since Jesus is just waiting to be invited in so that he can sit down and eat with us, sharing time, sharing love, sharing life that stretches to eternity.

We never disappeared from his search engine.

Dying Embers

Spent the last half hour trying to revive a dying fire. It’s a lot of work and still touch and go whether or not it will catch. The wood is smouldering. Some bits of coal look hopefully red. But it’s not hot enough even to set the paper alight. I don’t see many signs of life.

It reminds me of Paul writing to Timothy, advising him to fan into flame his faith in God. It’s easy to get distracted. To grow cool. To be content with the glowing embers rather than craving the crackling flames. Then, when the winds of the world blow cold on us and we long for the warmth of God’s love, we find ourselves distanced from him. He hasn’t moved, but we have allowed the fire of our love to grow dim.

In Jesus’ letters to the churches in Revelation which John records, he advises that we remember our first love (for him) and get back to that state of passion and excitement. We can allow ourselves to settle for embers when we should be fanning them into flames. 

If we want God to set the world on fire (in a good way!), we need to be giving him everything we have so he can work through us. 

Not sure this fire is going to get going before I decide to just go to bed. I am sure that with God’s help my love for him is going to carry on burning strong.

Cuckoo

What’s happened to the first cuckoo of spring? I know it’s been unseasonably, unreasonably cold this ‘spring’, but surely the migrant cuckoo should be back again by now?

I know that in some areas the cuckoo has ceased to return, and hope this isn’t one of them.

It’s funny how, among the beauty of the dawn chorus, I am listening out for the raucous, distinctive call of the cuckoo. I couldn’t identify the song of many of the birds I hear, but I can identify the cuckoo. It’s due to more than just the clock my sister brought back from Germany one year!

The cuckoo has a unique voice which rises above the rest.

Last night I was reading Revelation 4, and it occurred to me how loud it’s going to be in heaven. All that shouting praise and singing at the top of their voices, from millions of angels and creatures and people who love the Lord. It’s probably loud there already.

Yet the Lord is listening out for my voice, and yours, to be raised in praise to him. He may be surrounded by a host of worshipers singing and praising with all their might, but when my weak voice says ‘I love you Jesus’, he hears it and responds. I know he does. I can feel him. Very close. Loving me back.

Isn’t it amazing? I probably have the same discordant voice as a cuckoo among nightingales, and yet the Lord is listening out for me.

Wow.