Shifting Sands

One of the things that blocks out the Lord is our independence. When things are going well, we rely on our own innate abilities and strengths and forget our need for God. Well, I’m speaking for myself here but I suspect there may be others who fall into this category.

This is why deserts can be a blessing. It’s when I’m in the desert that I cry out to God and I rely on him to reveal the blockages and pitfalls and mountains which impede my progress and keep me in fear. 

There are probably a lot of different types of deserts in the world. I’m no expert but I think I may google that later and explore what they are. I know that there are deserts of stone and then there are deserts of sand, dunes which shift and blow in the powerful winds. Don once rode a train across the Nubian desert and was amazed when it would stop in the middle of nothing but shifting sands and people would get off and head off home bearing their purchases and belongings. He could see no landmarks by which they could navigate but somehow the indigenous desert folk knew how to find their way. 

Perhaps they were guided by celestial lights, the sun and moon and stars. When I feel lost in a desert of shifting sands, the only place to look is to the heavens and trust God to guide me through. Note to self.

Cold Comfort

Cold comfort?

Wrestling with those opening verses of Isaiah 40 this morning. Hard to reconcile the God of love with a God who pours out double punishment on people for their sins. Am I reading this wrong? Is it really meaning that he gives double blessing to those who have been suffering greatly? Any insights on this out there?

Led me to think about how John the Baptist’s audience heard his cry (from verse 3 of Isaiah 40) about preparing the way in the desert. They would certainly have felt they were in a desert, with the Romans in control, so how would they have understood the injunction to clear a path for God’s glory to be seen by all mankind? Seems like they responded on a personal level – what about corporately though? I guess the Temple largely ignored him or thought of him as a solitary and singular figure.

After Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension, though, those who prepared the way were filled with the Holy Spirit and the glory of the Lord was certainly revealed. As it still is.

On to today’s persecuted church. What do our brothers and sisters make of these verses, if they even have time and space to consider them? I’ve just read an article on the report by Open Doors on the state of the persecuted church in 2015 and it makes grim reading. Scattered and frightened, fleeing situations of brutality and often having no safe haven to run to, how can they prepare the way for the Lord? 

Where is there comfort for them? Is the onus on us to be speaking tenderly to our brothers and sisters and reassuring them that the tough times are over? But are they? And I am not happy with the implication from this reading that they are suffering because of their sins, when our sins are just as heinous.

What about the state of the church in the west? Today’s news coverage is all about the Anglican Community’s sanctioning of the American Episcopal church for its stance on gay marriage. More fracturing, more disunity but how to repair it? 

What I take from this reading this morning is that we are all in the desert and somehow in that desert we are to make an effort to remove the impediments which promote division and discord. How do we even identify these with integrity and love? 

Conclusion today is that more than ever we need to live and walk close to the Lord as the body of Christ, because only he can guide us on the way forward. That as we come together in humility and in a spirit of seeking the way forward, he will highlight and demolish strongholds of division and discord. And as these things happen, all mankind will see it and marvel and recognise the glory of the Lord. 

My prayers are powerful and effective, according to God’s word, so I better get on it.

Freedom, exuberance and joy

My interior life – my personality – can be a desert wasteland, a place of mountains of dread and fear and depressions of anxieties. It can be a place of tortuous curves of self-justification and valleys of low self-esteem. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Isaiah 40:3-5 speaks personally to me about this. ‘In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low, the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.’ 

I can deliberately work on rectifying these situations in my mind and personality but that can quickly slide the way of most New Year’s resolutions if I try to do it by myself. It’s only as I ask prayerfully for help in identifying the mountains and valleys and boulders, and then continue asking for help in removing them, that success will come, and it is as I work with God on this interior landscape that the glory of the Lord is revealed and others see it. We’re meant to be a partnership: each one of us + God.

What does his glory look like? Freedom. Exuberance and joy, light and laughter and love, togetherness in relationship.

All mankind together will see it. 

Division in the church is opportunity to prepare the way of the Lord. To prayerfully, humbly seek to remove boulders of division. It can only be done with God’s help because we don’t want the church to end up watering down the message of grace nor conforming to the spirit of the age. 

When God’s glory is revealed in the church, the whole world will see and rejoice.  May his kingdom come and his will be done in me and through me, in the church and through the church, today as it is in heaven. Amen.

National Parks and Soaring Eagles

A few years ago, Don and I drove from Colorado to California through Utah and Arizona. The terrain either side of the road is extraordinary. The dry scrubland is punctuated with exclamation points of dramatic stone shapes – we skirted the famous Zion, Bryce and Canyonlands national parks so were enjoying their leftover magnificence.

We stopped frequently, at every lay-by, to take pictures and read the tourist trail descriptions of what we were seeing. At one particular spot, we read that Butch Cassidy’s hideout with his Hole in the Wall gang was nearby. At that same place, another information board told of the Mormons following this ‘trail’ as the discrimination against them intensified in the east. 

We wondered how their wagons could have possibly traversed the landscape we were seeing. It was pockmarked with depressions, littered with stones and hillocks and scrub bushes and cacti. Every foot forward must have been deliberate and required some preparation.

There must have been scouts and trail blazers looking ahead and trying to predict the easiest route for the clumsy wagons and weakened pioneers to take. Sometimes that may have been the shortest route but no doubt there were times when the easiest route involved going in a round-about way. Not every mountain and river would have been passable, even with care.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God, Isaiah wrote thousands of years ago. 

I sense that we have come through a wilderness these last months – me trailblazing as much as possible and then moving forward. I have often felt weak and daunted by the mountains before me. But with God’s help, we have arrived at an oasis now.

I say an oasis because we are not out of the desert yet. God has been speaking to me about the eagle as well as the wilderness. Isaiah 40 ends on the wonderful verses that those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.

I hope in the Lord and therefore my strength will be renewed. As I soar like an eagle, the obstructions of mountains and cacti and ditches and scrub bushes blend: none looks insurmountable; all look fairly innocuous even. From a height, I can discern a way forward better than I can when obstructions loom above me. 

Jesus invites us to sit with him and enjoy times of refreshment. I anticipate a thirst-quenching draught of his Holy Spirit. I am excited to linger with him and be renewed. Even in the on-going busyness of life, such refreshment and renewal can come. I am so grateful, as I sink into his presence.

Thick and Thin

Today my blood is 2.4 times thinner than your blood. Which is good and the way it should be. But as I eat my way through the next six weeks until the next blood test, it will thin and thicken depending on how many avocados and mangoes, how much kale and spinach, how much red wine I consume. It is an inexact science maintaining a safe level, but for over a decade now it’s been ok so I sit down to each meal trusting that as long as I eat in moderation, it should all be ok. 

Rat poison is the best the doctors can do. It sounds pretty crass and basic, but so far, so good. I am grateful for it.

Health is an element of life which can be a hole, a stumbling place in a walk with the Lord. I am blessed in that mine is a quiet background condition, unlike the many painful and intrusive conditions which afflict people. How one feels can dominate one’s thoughts and perspectives, understandably so. Some of the reason is the intrusiveness of pain on one’s consciousness, and some is fear. 

I can only imagine the devastating agony of constant pain and so am not qualified to say anything about that. But I do know about fear. When I got the pulmonary emboli all those years ago, I found myself fearful of many things. 

I am focusing on Isaiah 40 right now, and those opening verses speak to fear. ‘Level the mountains and hills. Straighten the curves and smooth out the rough places.’ The curves speak to me of the unknown, the future, out of sight and around the corner. How to straighten them out? 

With God. There is no fear in love and God is perfect love. When I spend time with him, I know that whatever lies around any curve, as long as I go round it with him everything is always going to be ok. In God I trust. And as my faith deepens and my trust grows, the curves straighten out and the fear loses its hold on me.

May you walk through this day with courage and faith in the God who loves you truly, madly and deeply.