What are you doing here?

Again, the wind howls relentlessly round the house, weaselling its way in the cracks with whines and whistles, causing unpruned bushes to scrape and scratch at the windows. It feels as if the wind has been our constant companion for weeks. Not a fan of it.

Covid-19 is similar. Only more threatening. More fear-inducing. Ignorance is not bliss. We don’t know much about Covid-19; if we did, we could choose our weapons more carefully and target the fight more precisely. Instead we are all hunkered down in our houses, googling how to make hand sanitiser and anti-bac spray and wondering when it will end.

Such global upheaval raises the question: what is God saying to us? Elijah longed to see and hear from God, so God took him out onto a mountain. A great and strong wind rent the mountains, crumbling some of the rocks. It wasn’t God. Then there was an earthquake, but God was not in that either. Next there was a fire, but no God there either.

Finally, there was a still small voice. Elijah recognised who was speaking. It was the Lord. And what was he saying? ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

I wonder if God is whispering to me today. What are you doing here, Michele?

Well, I could laugh as I defend myself, Boris has put me in lockdown. Can’t go out.

True. But I can be more effective in lockdown than I can running around the place. I can worship. I can pray. And I can obey and do whatever he says. Feed the hungry. Pray for the persecuted. Phone the lonely.

Perhaps he’s asking Church the same thing. What are you doing here, Church? Are you shining a light in the darkness? Holding out hope as you share Jesus?

What are you doing here? Where would Jesus be?

Beast from the East

Just when we thought the #beastfromtheeast had blown itself out, it seems his cousin is beginning to huff and puff our way. Snow is a possibility for the weekend. And there I was yesterday writing about crocus and the sense of spring in the air. Sigh.

There’s another beast from the east commanding the attention of news media right now, too, a sinister beast whose huffs and puffs threaten indiscriminate mayhem and destruction. This morning I read Psalm 37, which includes some verses about beasts, referred to as ‘the wicked’. Despite their schemes and attacks, the psalmist declares that the Lord laughs at them. Generally, one only laughs at a bully when one is confident of one’s own power and might.

I find it reassuring, that as nightmarish as it is to know that the wicked lay in wait to target victims with lethal horrors, God is more powerful and he knows that their story will be short. We are to hope in him, trust in him, and pray. That’s where the real power lies.

More hanging chavs

Still considering those hanging chavs. I think it’s going to become a shorthand expression in my home as I recognise that there are recurring things all the way through life which need reviewing and resolving. It really is part of living in the real world. 

The garden keeps needing weeded. The roses need dead-heading. The carpets need vacuuming. Windows need washing. Walls need repainting. Bills need paying and direct debits need monitoring. These things are normal and not worrying, just tiring and sometimes tedious. 

Occasionally, however, one of the recurring things is worrying because it’s not quite right and needs investigating. An invoice that doesn’t tally. A bank transaction that doesn’t seem right. An online scam. Those, for me, are the hanging chavs which I need to learn to take in my stride and not let any anxiety creep in. So, this morning I have swept away one of the hanging chavs which was exercising my brain the other night. There remain a few more but because I’ve had success with the one, I feel encouraged.

Remember. God reminds us throughout the Bible to remember the good things he’s done for us in the past, so that when we are faced with a new challenge we can take heart, reassured that he is always with us and ready to help. Stronger together.

Sometimes people say with a sigh, ‘All you can do is pray.’ ‘All’? That is such a powerful ally in our walk through life, even as we negotiate the annoying hanging chavs. 

I am so grateful to God. Life must be a real lonely battlefield if you aren’t aware of the powerful ally standing shoulder to shoulder with you.

I am giving thanks for the hanging chavs in my life today, as I feel God’s breath on my face and his Spirit within, empowering me to understand, to sort, and to be encouraged.

Fat Adolescent Pheasants

Something caught my eye as I stood in the prayer alcove this morning. It was a fat little cock pheasant scurrying up the drive furtively glancing this way and that. Could his desire for the seeds and nuts spilled onto the ground from the bird feeders over-ride his fear of a predatory cat crouching in the bushes? 

Yes, it could, and close behind came the next wave of fat young pheasants ready for easy pickings at the bird feeders. They brought a big smile to my face. I daren’t go beyond that to thinking that we are just fattening these guys up for the pots of the shooters who raise them for that purpose.

Actually, this is a bit of hypocrisy, because I have a frozen pheasant sitting in my freezer waiting for the oven or pot. Not, I hasten to add, one that I fed from the bird feeder! This one was given to us, shot and cleaned and all the rest by someone else.

The bounty below the bird feeders tempts these adolescent pheasant chicks into a place of danger – from the cats who are generally inside during the day but occasionally have daytime excursions. I am thinking of those three young adolescent women who have somehow been tempted to join the Islamic forces in Syria and who have now disappeared into a black hole of circumstance beyond my desire to consider.

The predators will most certainly have pounced on them by now. 

Jesus told his followers to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. That is a tricky balance to strike. How do we maintain innocence while being shrewd to the ways of the world? 

Only through Jesus. Jesus’ challenges and advice to us are almost always beyond our own ability to achieve. The only way to ‘win’ through and live out the life he calls us to is in him. ‘Abide in me’ he advises. 

Abide. Listen. Read. Draw near. Don’t make quick decisions without praying, reading Scripture, talking with other Christians. Teach this to your children and your children’s children. This world is fraught with danger.

It is easy to slip into the fat teenage pheasant mode, and walk right into danger which is beyond our ability to escape.

The Bigger Picture

Remember those pictures with the hidden pictures inside of them? Can’t remember what they were called, (magic eye?), but I can remember staring at one in my uncle’s house, trying to relax my eye (as he instructed irritatingly) so as to see the second image concealed within the obvious picture. 

Thinking about life this morning, and how we can become so intent on seeing the detail, the smaller pictures in our lives, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. I know I’ve been writing about perspective recently but maybe it’s just a theme in my life at the moment. 

As a mother, I want my kids’ lives to run smoothly and if there is a problem, I want to fix what I can and then watch God fix what I can’t. I do my pathetic bit and pray increasingly fervent and frustrated prayers if the problem isn’t going away. I lose sight of the bigger picture and I lose sight of the generous God who has given us life. 

This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. The first line of one of the first choruses I learned after being born again, and it comes back to me usually in the teeth of a storm. 

There is no physical storm today but in the lives of a couple I love the storm rages on. We all search the horizon for a break in the storm clouds but sometimes it seems all we see are yet more black clouds piling up. 

An Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk, wrote, ‘Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour’. He wrote that not while lounging on a sun-drenched beach but when devastation and starvation loomed large. That is not easy. But today, I face neither devastation nor starvation, so how can I do any less? I will rejoice in the Lord; I will be joyful in God my Saviour. 

Jesus is the bigger picture. Today I will get lost in him. This is the day he has made. I will rejoice and be glad in him.

The Peace of Jerusalem

Tendinitis only becomes frozen shoulder when the shoulder freezes. And it freezes when the pain of movement causes the sufferer to avoid moving it.

Unlike the characters turned to stone by the wicked Queen in the Narnia tales, who were transformed in an instant, mid-movement, a frozen shoulder seems to be a gradual stiffening as a result of pain.

Most of us carry pain of some sort. Emotional scars, spiritual hurts, physical traumas. The temptation is to put a plaster over the hurt and pretend it’s healed. But of course if we don’t lance the wound and get rid of the poison, it will never be truly healed.

The Bible talks of those who cry, ‘Peace, Peace’ where there is no peace. It’s like pretending the problem is fixed and peace is true and lasting, though the causes of the pain are suppurating underneath the ‘fix’. 

There is no peace in Gaza and Jerusalem, and there won’t be until the Prince of Peace himself invades the hearts and minds of the wounded inhabitants from both sides of the conflict. Will this be the Second Coming, or will it involve a movement of the Holy Spirit invading the hearts and spirits of those involved? God knows.

The Bible tells us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Prayer can thaw the most hardened of hearts, as God turns the heart of stone to a heart of flesh. The stony hearts result from years of pain and trauma which have frozen them into a self-protective defensive attitude. 

Until Jesus comes and enables people to choose to be vulnerable again; until he replaces the hatred and fear with love and trust, however tentative, conflict and anguish will continue. Resolution may involve pain; it will involve forgiveness of a scale unimaginable for most of us, because most of us, thankfully, don’t know how it feels to have a child or a loved one wiped out by a weapon of warfare.

Today I am praying more fervently than ever for the peace of Jerusalem. May God work a miracle in the hearts and minds and spirits of all those involved in the madness and brutality going on there just now, and bring peace.

Torn Handkerchiefs

The pale blue sky was filled with thin, ragged clouds which pulled apart like cotton wool. 

A perfect spring morning. No wind, the sun was out and shining brightly on a dewy landscape as Dusty and I rounded behind the woods. The birds trilled their joyful songs.

We walked. We prayed. And then we stopped, soaking in the beauty of the rough field before us. For between most thistles and thorns, weeds and saplings, stretched gossamer strands of webs spun by millions of spiders. Each web was picked out in droplets of dew and sparkled in the sunlight. 

A torn carpet of moisture mirroring the torn canopy in the sky above.

I smiled as I remembered a scene of moist tissue sprinkled across the lawn and raining down from the trees of our home when I was a teenager. Friends had ‘toilet-papered’ my house the night before – a fun way of marking friendship in those long-ago days of innocence – but my Dad had not been impressed. He ill-advisedly took the hose to the strands of toilet paper which laced through the trees and blew gently in the breeze, bringing down millions of tight balls of wet tissue onto the grass which I then spent the next few weeks raking up every day. 

Fun memories of innocence, of adolescence, and even of my dad’s temper.

I thought of torn handkerchiefs, and remembered the tree outside of a tomb in Cyprus which was adorned with a myriad of torn hankies, each representing a heartfelt prayer offered to God at this holy man’s memorial site. 

A myriad of spiders’ webs, picked out in glistening dewy drops, offering a paean of praise to the loving Creator God.

What better way to start the day?