Call out the Gold

Back from my walk, I strolled round the garden to see what’s happening. I was surprised to see wallflowers budding and beginning to show colour. I planted them last year, given them by my neighbour, and didn’t know whether to leave them in for another year or pull them out in autumn. I’m glad I left them in.

It’s lovely to find new growth where things appeared dead. 

Kris Vallotton coined a phrase, ‘call out the gold’, in reference to seeing the good in every person, prophetically or otherwise. I pray that this might be my aim today and every day, that when I consider anyone else, I ‘call out the gold’.

That’s what God does with us. Even when we were still sinners, he saw something within us worth redemption and Jesus came and died for us. Even when we mess up, he still looks at what might appear dead, and sees green shoots of life and beauty.

The message of Easter. So fitting for springtime!

It is finished

The jealous men sold their hated little brother to passing slave-traders and lied to their father that he’d been killed by wild animals.

Years later, they found themselves begging for food in a neighbouring country. To their horror, they discovered the man with the power of life or death over them was none other than this ‘little brother’, Joseph.

Joseph reassured them. Though he struggled and wept, God enabled him to forgive them. God showed him that although his brothers meant to harm him, God turned a truly terrible thing round and used it to bless many.

Mhairi was criminally assaulted by a man with power seventeen years ago. He probably didn’t start, or stop, with her. The assault shrouded her life for years until now.

Last night she released the music video to Sadie Jemmett’s new song, Don’t Silence Me, in which she and other women who have been used and abused throw off the shroud of shame and walk free. I’ve shared the link on my FB page so hope all can find it as I’m not very good at social media.

Mhairi hasn’t named the perpetrator, preferring to pursue forgiveness. Not easy, but in Jesus, possible. I don’t say that lightly.

But, what was meant to harm, God has turned to good, a blessing for many. Redemption. Freedom.

As Jesus said from the Cross, ‘It is finished’.

Whose fault?

When Jesus and his friends ran into a man who had been blind since birth, the friends wanted to know whose fault it was. In the thinking of the time, misfortune was the result of sin. Being born blind – did that indicate sin of the parents or was a baby capable of sinning while still in the womb? That was the gist of their question and it was a familiar point of debate at the time.

Jesus turned it on its head. Nobody’s fault, he says in effect. Stop looking for someone to blame and instead see what good you can bring out of the situation. In this case, Jesus was going to use the man’s ailment to illustrate his claim to be the light of the world. He would heal his physical and his spiritual blindness.

We live in a blame culture, where we often seek to shirk responsibility and instead identify something or someone else to blame. By looking back we can get sucked into a mire of recriminations, and as we identify a culprit we usually find that we ourselves rise up a few notches in our own estimation. 

But basically we’re all the same. We all make mistakes and do things wrong. And we live in what we Christians call a fallen world, so that bad stuff happens which has nothing to do with what we or anyone else may have done. It’s just the way it is.

Jesus counsels us to look forward. What can we do in the situation in which we find ourselves? How do we redeem the situation so that good can come out of it?

Vision. Hope for the future. Redemption from the past. That’s what belief in Jesus as Saviour and Lord gives you. A new focus. A new life.

Just beginning to gear up for Christmas here. Starts with Thanksgiving this week. More on that another day.