Bunches of Roses

Don gave me a big bunch of multi-coloured roses on Saturday. I’m not very good at floral art, so as usual have stuck the whole bunch into my biggest vase, where they look colourful and beautiful and remind me of his love.

I have lots of greenery in the garden, though, and was thinking that with a bit of time and a modicum of talent, I could fill two or three vases with greenery and intersperse the roses through the house.

B&B guests would enjoy the beauty of the roses, on the landing or in the dining room.

It made me think of Christians, bunching together on Sundays in our church services. We probably look colourful and maybe even beautiful and remind the world of the love of God. If the world is even watching, or aware of us.

Come Monday mornings and we are scattered to our work places and neighbourhoods. We are interspersed amongst the greenery of non-Christian settings, where we can bring beauty and colour as we live out the life of Jesus in our daily lives.

It’s easier to bunch together and join our voices in praise of God. More challenging to show the beauty of Christ in a secular setting. 

But exactly what the world needs. To see Jesus in us. To experience his peace, his joy, his beauty. So this week, I am going to be more aware than ever of maintaining my integrity as a believer in the midst of my daily routines.

Fed by the Word of God, and the prayer that unites me with Jesus by the power of the Spirit.

Think I’ll be a red rose. A sign of love.

Nothing can separate us

The news is dire, augmented by links sent to me by various folk watching the brutality unfold in the Middle East. It would be easy to go downhill and feel like giving up. 

But the news has been dire before. In King Hezekiah’s time he was surrounded by a vicious army from Nineveh and he cried out to God for help. He trusted God to send in help and God did. Hezekiah knew where the real ‘big gun’ was and he went to him.

We Christians need to wake up and get on our knees and cry out to God for this world, for our brothers and sisters, and for the safety of Christianity in our own countries. We are in testing times and yet we often seem to be snoozing through them. 

With God there is always hope. Nothing can separate us from his love, Paul wrote to the Romans. Not even demons. Nothing. 

Paul also counselled his readers to pray constantly. As you drive, as you walk, as you cook. Pray for the peace of this world. Real peace. Christ-like peace. 

Nothing can separate us from God's love. Nothing.

Windmills of the Soul

After decrying the proposed erection of this one wind turbine a mile from here, I walked down the drive this morning, lifted my eyes to the hills across the valley and for the first time noticed a column of the things marching up the hill on the horizon!

I knew they were constructing a full blown (excuse the pun) wind farm over there, but I guess I hadn’t appreciated that these turbines would now be silhouetted forever against the skyline in that direction.

Well, I can’t hear them and we’re certainly out of the flicker zone for them, and I don’t think there are many houses over there. But it just shows how the landscape of our lives can change incrementally and we almost don’t notice it until it’s a fait accompli.

The parallel is obvious. The inner landscape of our lives can also change slowly, transforming our personalities and our values bit by bit. It’s only when we look back later, we realize we have changed almost beyond recognition.

This can be good. The Bible challenges us to transform our thinking because we have the mind of Christ, to transform our behaviour by the power of the Holy Spirit, to transform our goals from amassing treasure in this life to putting aside a bit of ‘treasure’ in the next. 

At a school reunion years ago, a former boyfriend with whom I’d gone out for a few years during high school, didn’t even recognize me. It was my appearance he didn’t recognize (he looked the same except a bit fatter and bald...) but I wonder, if we’d spent more time talking, if he’d have had trouble recognizing my personality and my goals. 

Today I plan to continue to work on transforming my inner landscape to one that conforms to the values of Jesus. I don’t want any man-made windmills creating havoc within me!

Fragrance of Jesus

Walking Dusty in the late afternoon yesterday, with the sun hot on my head and the smells rising from the undergrowth, I suddenly sniffed something which transported me back to Camp Suanga, a Camp Fire Girls day camp in north Long Beach that I went to as a child. I don’t know what it was. But it took me right back.

The power of odours is amazing. With pinpoint precision they scoot you to another place and another time, be it happy or sad, peaceful or turbulent. 

Sometimes I catch a whiff of a man’s after shave which reminds me of my dad – a good memory, or of a former boss from long ago – a neutral memory. The smell of nail varnish reminds me of my sister, as we used to spend time painting our nails and sharing our secrets in high school and at university. Good memories.

The Bible says that believers are the fragrance of Christ. We are attractive to those who are open to Jesus. We are a smelly odour to those who aren’t.

We can only be the fragrance of Christ when we carry him in us, when we are submitted to his Lordship in our lives and are living all out for him, as far as we are able. 

Otherwise we probably only smell of shower gel.

Everything Beautiful

Walking Dusty this morning, I was thinking of a dear friend of mine whose family has been torn apart by division. A family of many broken hearts. My friend is a lovely praying believer and it just doesn’t seem fair.

But then I thought of God’s promise, that he makes everything beautiful in its time. It may not happen in our time. She may never know the reconciliation for which she longs, during this lifetime. But in the course of eternity, she will be given the vision to see the beauty which God has salvaged and created from times of the most incomprehensible pain. 

I know she will see the beauty, in time, but I’m not sure if everyone in the broken family will appreciate it, because of the choices they make. Because I’ve still been thinking about the way we think, the things we choose to think about, and how those thought patterns become engraved in the physical routings of our brains so that we eventually do have the mind of Christ, or the opposite. If we consistently resist making choices which lead our thoughts upwards, and instead choose to dwell on the ugly, the evil, the seamy side of life, then our minds become dark and closed. We are unable to even perceive the possibility of things being as God has ordained, because we have grooves in our minds which lead everywhere else but to God. 

Another dear friend once painted a calligraphy for me which is of a verse from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, in which he counsels his readers to train their minds to think about things of beauty and life and light. I’m beginning to appreciate the holistic cohesion of mind, body and spirit, and see the importance of that advice even more clearly.

May your day be filled with encouraging thoughts and positive feelings, so that little by little, yours becomes the mind of Christ. It is an offer open to us all.

Smell the Slurry

It’s a gorgeous day here today. Sun blazing out of a clear blue sky, very little wind, though the temperature is pretty close to freezing. A fine winter’s day.

One joy of living in the country is the smell of fresh air captured on sheets and clothing which has dried in the open, so I quickly stripped a bed and did a couple of loads of washing to hang out. One load was already out there when the farmer arrived in his tractor, towing the orange slurry spreader.

In minutes the fresh smells of early spring were obliterated by the rank stink of cow slurry being flung across the field surrounding our house. 

Don dashed out to pull in the wash, which now hangs inside – who wants to smell like a barn?

Paul writes to the Corinthian church that Christians are the pleasing aroma of Christ to God and to believers, but to those who don’t believe, we are the stench of death. Maybe that’s why some atheists are so aggressively vitriolic against Christians. To them, we stink.

Physically, I’d rather smell like Chanel No 5 or even a pleasant shower gel than cow dung! But if I’m marinating in God’s presence and his Word daily, maybe my spiritual smell is determined more by the perception of the sniffer than the aroma of my spirit.