Cairns

On a day out with good friends, we hiked part of the Cairn walk, which is a jumble of spaghetti trails on the Balmoral estate leading to the eleven cairns Queen Victoria had erected to commemorate weddings of her children. They sit astride hills of varying heights but each gives panoramic views of the surrounding hills. Although our walk coincided with the annual Balmoral runs, which attract hundreds if not thousands of competitors, most of the time we were alone in the wilderness forests above Balmoral. 

The cairns are dry-stane creations, it seems, rough and unhewn stones without mortar to hold them together. It is a skilled job to construct a pyramid of such symmetry, and not end up with just a jumble of rocks. Above the rest, the ‘daddy’ of all the cairns is that which Victoria had raised to the memory of her dear husband Albert, who died young and left Victoria alone and bereft for decades. His cairn was fashioned from dressed stones, fitting snugly together as do the pyramids of Egypt, requiring even more skill from the artisans. 

As each cairn crowns a wooded summit, we thought of the craftsmen who had to find and choose the stones and then get them up the slopes.  No mean feat: I hope that Queen Victoria appreciated the task she set them.

 

The Israelites often used stones to commemorate miracles of God – the crossing of the Red Sea, for instance, or the Lord’s appearance to Jacob at Bethel. God instructed his people to remember events through ritual or construction – the annual Passover meal is a prime example when the older generation rehearsed again the detail of their forbears’ flight from slavery, using word and carefully-chosen food to remind them of the event. 

Jesus took the ordinariness of bread and wine and lifted them to the level of a memorial of the most incredible gift the world has ever received. Believers still use bread and wine to remember this divine sacrifice for our sakes.

I’ve been thinking about cairns in my own particular past, markers of significant events that dot through my life. Meeting and marrying Don: that beautiful cairn is built of a box containing 8 months of letters and a photo album of the wedding. The births of our children: albums of pictures. The deaths of my sister and dad: tear-stained and intangible, that cairn is. The marriages of our sons: more pictures. The births, and the death, of our grandchildren: pictures cemented with tears.

The daddy of my cairns, though, has to be the moment I first met Jesus through the power of his Holy Spirit. My eyes were opened to see that Jesus invited me to have a living relationship with him. That he died for me, so that I might live with him. That cairn, built of no less than the body and blood of our Saviour, still excites a thrill of gratitude and love, having eternal significance and towering right through time.

So I’ll say it again. Happy Easter.

Withering Words

Autumn is around the corner and the leaves are beginning to turn. Soon they will wither and fall and the trees will be bare branches reaching to the skies.

Jesus once cursed a fig tree which had no fruit on it, and by the next day it had withered and was dying. There may be many lessons that can be taken from that but for me today I’m thinking about the power of words. The withering of the fig tree is a visual demonstration of the power words carry. Power to bring life, and power to bring death.

How many times have I used words which have caused someone to wither? I hope not often. I can remember a few times when a person has said something sharp or critical to me and that sharpness has caused something inside me to wither.

On the other hand, words are powerful to bring life. Many things are written in the Bible about the power of the spoken word to bring life or bring death. 

Jesus warned his followers to be careful with what they said, because we will be judged by every careless word we have spoken. Although many understand that to mean something for the Judgment Day, I think it means that uttering careless words is more powerful now than we imagine. 

We only know that which we see, but Jesus has given us many illustrations and parables and sayings which illustrate that what we see is not the reality that will last. What we don’t see, what is happening in the supernatural realm, is what will last. And what we say affects that realm more than we imagine, despite all the teaching in the Bible. 

In the Old Testament, Jacob stole the blessing which should have been the elder twin Esau’s. He tricked their father into bestowing his dying blessing on him. That may seem a silly thing to be upset about, if all it is is a bunch of words. But if the words have power to effect change, to affect the whole course of our lives, then the upset felt by Esau is more understandable.

May God bless you today and help you to keep a tight rein on your tongue, and me to keep a tight rein on mine. May he inspire me to speak words of life to all I meet, words which inspire hope and give peace even in the turbulent times in which we live.

Bless you!

Bless me!

A couple of years ago, we hosted a friend/colleague of Jamie’s, a young man from India named something like Sagai. He was a very pleasant young man. When we walked him out to the car in the morning to say our goodbyes, Sagai came over to me, bowed his head, and said, simply, ‘Bless me, Mother’. 

I was so taken aback by this that my mouth sort of dropped open (I imagine). I glanced at Jamie who nodded his head to encourage me to go for it. I put my hands on his head and prayed a blessing over him, but wished I’d had a little time to gather my thoughts before being invited to do such an important thing. 

When I’d finished, Sagai went to Don and repeated the action, bowing his head, and saying ‘Bless me, Father’. 

We live in a youth culture, where growing old is not valued. It strikes me that though I would say I’m not resisting growing older, I know that my self-image is of someone much younger than I am. So when I was asked to give a blessing, I felt like giggling – as if I were sort of fraudulently claiming a wisdom of years and even perhaps a stature which I hadn’t yet amassed nor earned.

And yet I have. I am older. I have had a lot of experience. I have learned one or two things during my lifetime and may have a few words of wisdom to impart. I certainly know God better now than I did in my youth, and believe that a blessing is more than just form. There is substance there. 

I just read the account in Genesis of Jacob wrestling all night with ‘a man’ who, he discovers at the end of the night, is God. His plea then is, ‘Bless me! Don’t go until you bless me!’

Jacob had fallen out with his brother Esau years before because Jacob had tricked the elder twin out of his father’s blessing. Twice. He’d got Esau to trade his birthright (blessing) for a plate of stew, and then when their dad was on his death bed, he pretended to be Esau in order to get their blind dad to give him the blessing.

He then had to flee his brother's wrath, and the story of him wrestling with God and asking for a blessing takes place the night before he returns home to try to make peace.

It’s all very strange. Why should the older boy get the whole blessing and there be none left for younger boys, or older or younger girls? A different day; a different culture. We’ve come a long way.

But not so far that the blessing of God is redundant. When somebody sneezes, many of us say ‘Bless you’, conveying a desire that the person gets well soon. When we write to others, or say our goodbyes, we say, ‘God bless you’. 

As I continue to grow older, as I will, I pray that I will step more surely into a sense of the gravitas of years, that I will convey more clearly my conviction that God’s blessing is something to be desired above all else, and that when someone says, God bless you, it is more than a kind wish. 

Jesus taught we should let our words be few. James wrote about how powerful words are, and that we should choose them carefully.

So now, I say to you, May the Lord bless and keep you. May he make his light to shine upon you. May he give you his peace, his understanding, and his encouragement, today and every day.

And to you, Joey, a special happy birthday. May you enjoy God’s favour in a special way today, reassuring you that you are a much-loved daughter of the King of Kings.

Stairway to Heaven

For reasons I won’t mention, I’ve been thinking – and weirdly, even praying – about scaffolding for the last couple of days. 

Anyone who has wobbled precariously on the top rung of a ladder knows the blessing of sturdy scaffolding underfoot. I’m not good with heights, so try to avoid ascending more than about shoulder height – on anything!

Jacob saw angels coming up and down a stairway to heaven when he camped out at a place called Bethel. And when he heard the message God gave him from the top of the stairway, he reckoned that he was at God’s gateway. He’d had a pretty rough night (I can’t imagine ever choosing a rock for a pillow), and was in a predicament of his own making, but still, God met him in an incredible way and revealed something the natural eye just could not see, and gave him an incredible promise. (Genesis 28:10)

Jacob didn’t stretch up a ladder or build a scaffolding, but God came down to him in his need.

Not sure which way to go on this whole idea of scaffolding. I can see an analogy with Bible study and prayer, erecting a base from which we can glimpse more clearly God’s activity in the world. Which is good.  But I’m wary of thinking that, in case that encourages me to equate the building of scaffolding with ‘works’, so that I beaver away at doing good stuff in order to get closer to heaven under my own steam.

Jesus has done it all. Nothing I do is going to earn me the right to get into heaven. I only want to be doing those things which God wants me to do because he has gifted me to do them. I don’t want to get entrapped into thinking that the good things I do are like scaffolding.

Because really that kind of thinking is like a wobbly ladder, off which I just might fall.

Though incredibly, having just read the passage about Jacob again, I’m full of faith that if I did fall off such a wobbly ladder, Jesus would be there to catch me. 

What a Saviour!