Well-loved Voices

Every morning, one of the first things I do is open the iPad to check emails. I’m not wedded to work or looking for anything other than emails from those I love. 

This morning was a red-letter morning, with about four connections from ‘children’ who have flown the nest a long time ago. Good news of a hedgehog which has moved into a woodpile in the garden. A slug-eating hedgehog, in the garden of my dear daughter-in-law who has a phobia of anything without legs. Confirmation of a BBQ to look forward to next month. (Expect rain now, on the 14^th of June. Sorry.) News from LA of frantic busyness interspersed by moments of fun and relaxation. I love the instant communication of the internet. 

Psalm 5 has a verse in it which reminds me that God is attentive every morning, too, hoping to hear from me: ‘In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.’ 

That blows my mind. Billions of people in the world and yet every morning, the Lord is longing to hear my voice, and even more than that, he is ready to answer my requests. The tragedy is that so many times, we blurt out our needs to God with little hope, let alone expectation, of seeing his answers. His answers can come in such a variety of ways that we need to stay alert in order to recognise them. He may answer in the way we hope or he may answer in a completely creative and different way. But whatever way the answer comes, it will come, and it will be good, because our God is a good God.

I may have mentioned already that I heard Biblical hope defined as the ‘joyful anticipation of receiving something good from God’. 

I have raised my voice to the Lord this morning and given him a few requests. Now my prayer is that I remain alert and receptive to the answers which are already given.

I love the voices of my kids coming through their emails. Isn’t it amazing that God loves the voices of his kids too – and to connect with us he doesn’t require any technology or anything more special than the heart and voice he gave each one of us.

Come to Me

Jet lag leaves a body weary, sleeping at the wrong time of day, awake when everyone else is sleeping. 

One of our B&B guests told me today that every Monday he experiences ‘van lag’, because he has to rise so early to drive over a hundred miles north to start his working week. Of course he is not crossing time zones but missing hours of refreshing sleep.

It doesn’t take much for a body to grow weary, especially as the years add up. But there is another kind of weariness from which it is harder to bounce back. Soul weariness. Weariness of life itself. It isn’t just us in our modern, high-tech and high-pressured world who feel such weariness; a man called Elijah in the Bible was so tired of being the pariah of Israel, hunted by the Queen herself with an intention of murdering him, that he ran away and languished under a bush in a desert, longing for death. He was weary, world weary.

God knows that some of us are more tried than others. He knows that many have good reason to be world weary. And he offers respite.

Come to me, Jesus invites. All who are weary, and I will give you rest. 

Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, Moses said about the tribe of Benjamin. The one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders. A good vantage point. A safe place. 

It’s hard to see yourself as beloved of anyone, sometimes, let alone of the Lord. Who indeed is good enough to be loved by the Lord of all?

Well, nobody is, but Jesus died for everyone, before they were ‘good enough’. None of us is good enough. But still we are the beloved of the Lord. 

So how do we enter his rest? How do we experience that safe place on the shoulders of the Almighty?

By seeking him in places where he can be found. The Bible. A good church. Christian friends. In the wilderness, along the ocean, on the mountaintop. It may seem, for ages, like there’s nobody there but our imagination. How wrong we are if we stop seeking. We all have further to go, and deeper to go in his rest.

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Wherever you are; whatever your circumstances. He hears every voice that calls out to him, the cry of every person who looks for him. 

Come to me, he says, and I will give you rest.

Sunshine and Showers

A variegated sky above a variegated landscape – one shades of grey and one shades of green. And then – a rainbow.

What a lovely reminder that God’s promises are always true. That he is a faithful God. That he does what he says he will do. That he loved the whole world so much that he was willing to pay the ultimate price to ransom it from the grasp of evil.

Not that you would know it, looking at the state the world is in right now. But that’s where it helps so much to know in the very centre of your being that God’s promises are always true. That’s where it helps to know what his promises are.  We are so blessed to live in a free country where there is a wealth of Bible translations, all available in paper or even on line.

Back to the variegated sky though. I noticed this afternoon that while I was busy with something, it started to rain in the front of the house. I was busy and couldn’t rush straight out the back to bring the sheets in off the lines, but when I did go – after the shower had passed – I discovered the sheets were dry as a bone. It hadn’t rained at the back of the house.

Localised weather. Sunshine and showers. How often when we are standing in a deluge of trouble, it is easy to assume the trouble is universal. When we are enjoying happy times, we also may presume that most other people are similarly blessed.

But we are variegated people, and the Lord uses those standing in the sunshine to encourage those standing in the showers. They may be as close as your neighbour. We need to be alert, full of compassion and eager to extend a helping hand or hug.

I love the line from an old hymn: I trace the rainbow through the rain. May you trace the rainbow through somebody else’s rain today. Or if you're in the rain, I pray that someone will trace a rainbow through it for you.