50 Days of Light - Epi(b)logue

I just wanted to take the time to thank everybody for all your support and lovely comments over the last seven weeks while I've been writing this blog. It's been a wonderful time for me, a time full of expectation and purpose, and each day I have come to God not knowing what things might come up - or whether or not I might have anything at all to share in my blogs - a bit scary really, but every day something has come. I have not shared every detail of my experience, because some things are just too personal, but I have wanted to be open and honest about my thoughts and feelings, my questions and some of the answers that came my way. I would also like to thank my lovely family for bearing with me during this time, as it has sometimes taken as much as two and a half hours out of my day.

I think, in the past, I have been a little scared of spending agenda-less time with God Himself, because, 

you know, he is God, and can be a little scary at times. It has been easier to read the Bible and take some time to offer Him my list of prayers. This is all well and good, but, after all, He wants a relationship with His children and what I have come to realise over these last weeks is that it is the best place just to be with Him. It's not scary, He won't demand things of me like a stern taskmaster, and it's simply a place of freedom. It's a place to be myself, to escape any difficulties life might throw at me, just for a few minutes, and it's a place of stillness where I can release my worries and receive His joy and reassurance. 

Yes, I seem to have stopped biting my nails (time will tell whether I start doing it again!), and I didn't find it hard to have a rest from watching dramas and films. I think what comes to me is that the amount of time we have in life is a gift from God, and we are responsible to Him to use it wisely. Having time to unwind is fine, but, like drinking alcohol, the amount we do it can grow if we don't keep an eye on it. Having a complete break is good, as it puts things into perspective. Some people don't watch much television so might find this doesn't apply to them, but it's equally unhealthy to work from dawn to dusk and have no time to reflect on our priorities. Spending time with God makes us whole. :) :) :) :) :)

So for now there will be no more blogs, although I may do some in the future. For now I will be concentrating on the '40 days with Jesus' we are doing as a church, focussing on the 40 days after Jesus' resurrection before His ascension to be with His Father. So all that is left is for me to wish you all shalom, and ...... enjoy the lovely spring weather!

Day 50 - Time to Party!

This morning, at church, I was singing with great enthusiasm, enjoying being with my friends, worshipping God, when suddenly I couldn't sing any more. The truth of the words sunk right down into my consciousness: death has lost its sting because our resurrected King has rendered it defeated! When we talk about death, here, it's not just about physical death, but about the power of death in our education, culture, relationships, marriages and lifestyle. Death pervades everything - everything is tainted with corruption, which is basically the outworking of death - except where the kingdom of Heaven breathes new life. Hallelujah for Easter Sunday, hallelujah for the resurrection of Jesus! 

God's kingdom - here now - explosions of salvation all over the world, where lives are touched by the presence of God - where selfishness is thrown out and love reigns - where purity and honesty fill lives which are reborn and changed into lives filled with the Spirit of God - where dancing is full of joy and worship, and there's no longer any sexual innuendo in humour or need for alcohol in order to have a good time. You know, it's time we believers in the Lord Jesus showed the world how to party! Out with the bland and in with colour! Let's not spend our days stuffing takeaways, but cook wonderful meals and take time to enjoy them with our friends! Let's dance and sing and laugh and laugh and laugh some more! We should tell more jokes and listen to more music with live instruments (you can tell I'm a musician!), climb more mountains and read more poetry. 

And we should not be afraid of giving ourselves to change the world a little bit at a time.There will be a time for crying out to God in prayer, for fasting and weeping for the world and its people, but let's not be bland! (If you want to know what God thinks of blandness read Revelation chapter 3 when He speaks to the Laodiceans)

Jesus is not dead, He's alive and He wants us to be alive too.

 It's time to party!

Day 49 - Waiting

So, I'm nearly at the end of my 50 Days of Light. As I've been waiting in God's presence I've found myself asking so many questions. A certain amount of light has come to me, but in some ways I feel I have more questions now than I had at the beginning. I like solving problems and I like to see a way round a problem to find a solution. So I'm going to continue to wait on Him after the 50 days are over. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, after all....... if I need to know anything, I've come to the right place!

Today I find myself thinking about waiting. Jesus' friends were waiting, after His death, but were not sure what they were waiting for. The women were waiting for the Sabbath to be over so they could anoint the dead body with spices and the men were just......waiting. They probably felt nothing.... numb. They had no faith that He would be resurrected, not a single one of them. Waiting without hope is deathly. 

People wait for many things: a hospital test result; a baby to be born; in a queue at Madame Tussaud's; for a loved one to appear at an airport; or for their much longed for holiday in the sun. The action is the same, but the experience is so different. 

I am waiting with anticipation for the Holy Spirit to move in greater power than I have ever known in my lifetime. I am waiting in the faith that there will be a turning to God among the people of Britain that the land has never seen the like of before. I know that the Lord has no favourites and He loves all the nations, but I have a particular love for this one, and I know He loves it too. So I'm still here, Lord, and I am waiting in anticipation.

Heart racing,

eyes raised to heaven,

smile says it all;

it's coming, it's coming.

Like a baby bird

waiting for the juicy worm

I'm ready, I'm ready.

Waiting here

For you. For you.

Day 48 - A Story

Well, from my mountaintop experience yesterday I have come down to earth with a bump. I am home, and it is Good Friday. I have to admit that I feel churned up inside. My mind is searching the mind of God as to why it all had to happen this way - why your own son, God, and why such a horrific death? One thing I know is that if it could've been any other way, God would have taken it. 

I think about how He stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and how child sacrifice was commonplace at the time. It seems people thought their gods needed appeasing and the best way to do it was to murder their own children. Surely, God, you didn't need appeasing in the same way as these so-called gods?

 Here is where my imagination takes me today - a story:

I have a picture of God and He is made of fire, so bright and so hot, no one could come near. He is like the sun. Each of His children is born free. Free to follow, free to choose, free to stray. Each one, each day, accumulating evil to themselves rather like the many coins we saw hammered into the fallen tree trunks in the Lake District, impossible to extricate. God the Father with His father's heart of love, wants to take each child into a warm embrace, but knows that should He choose to do that, we would burn up in His pure heat and laser brightness, because we are so entwined with evil and darkness. The Son agrees on a plan to rescue us from that separation, by burning up in our place. He is born as one of us, except sin cannot touch Him and evil bounces off Him like a water droplet on a hot griddle. Death can not touch Him in His purity, but He runs towards it and embraces it, and He offers Himself up like the burnt offerings of old. He becomes like a magnet and all the weights and sins and wrong choices of humanity are attracted like iron filings to His sacrifice. Imagine all those coins embedding themselves into Him and as God the Father holds Him in His warm embrace, Jesus just burns up into death. So that would be the end of the story: all our impurities have been burned up with Jesus and we are now free to live again in God's presence...... except death couldn't hold Him..... oh just wait and see what happens next.........   

Day 47 - I Believe

Wow -the sun came out today! What a difference it made to the whole place! We had a lovely time walking up the 'Old Man of Coniston' and the views have been stunning. Sunshine makes the world bright and cheerful doesn't it?

In the C.S.Lewis story 'The Silver Chair', the children go on a quest to find the lost Prince of Narnia accompanied by a strange creature called Puddleglum. Their search takes them deep under the ground into an underworld ruled by a mysterious 'Green Lady' who is really a witch, where they find Prince Rilian and try to make an escape. However, the Green Lady returns and using her magic she lulls them into a sort of trance where she convinces them that there is no such place as Narnia and that there is no such thing as the sun.... remember, they have been living underground for quite a while at this point. This is Puddleglum's shining moment. He places one of his feet into the fire in order to bring him to his senses and says something which wakes the others from their trance. Here is a slightly abridged version of his speech:

'Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in this case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well it strikes me as a pretty poor one. So that's why I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it and I'm going to live as like a Narnian a I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for overland.'

I sat quietly for a few moments in the local parish church today. Underneath a circular ring of lamps hung a piece of paper on which the local children had drawn a picture of Jesus' head, with a sad face, and the lamps seemed to be the crown of thorns on his head. Very effective, I thought, in these days as we run up to Easter. 

In our society today are very vocal voices of atheism, ridiculing the traditional Christian beliefs as fairy stories. All I can say is that, if they are only made up stories, I'd rather spend my life as a Christian than any alternative anyone else can come up with!. And I'll close with the words of Jesus' disiples when others were leaving Him and He asked them if they wanted to leave too,

 "Where would we go to? You have the words of eternal life."

Day 46 - Like Sheep

As I sit here in my time of quiet tonight my eyes are drawn again to the lovely painting of the Lake District Fells, but this time I notice something I didn't see yesterday. It is a small figure in the shadowy foreground followed by a handful of sheep; he is a shepherd. Sheep and shepherds feature often in the Bible. Jesus described Himself as 'The Good Shepherd' and He tells the story of a shepherd who leaves the rest of the flock to search for the one sheep that had wandered off and was lost. I spent much of my time today walking up a hillside in hail, rain and snow at different times, and 'enjoyed' the sensation of dampness and cold for quite a lengthy period of time! The sheep we spotted on the mountainside at least had woolly coats to keep them warm! 

A few years ago I decided to take the scriptures used in Handel's Messiah and read them through each day during Lent. I had a wonderful time concentrating on the many verses that foretell the coming Messiah. One Easter - oh, it must be about twenty years ago now - I listened to a broadcast of the work on the radio and I can only describe it as quite a spiritual experience, I was so moved by the unfolding story of God's plan of salvation for the human race. It remains one of my favourite pieces of music of all time.

Tonight, one of the movements of the work comes to mind, and of course, it is the one about sheep!

"All we, like sheep, have gone astray, We have turned, every one, to his own way..."

The music is so funny, really funny, and Handel built into the melody a wandering which so well describes sheep wandering off. It is so lively and fresh, yet as I listen to it again tonight, I am quite taken aback by the ending, which is suddenly in the minor key and is so beautiful....set to these words, 

"And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all."

Earlier this evening we watched a few minutes of a program on the television which was all about neighbourly disputes; it was a terrible program with the people involved unable to see life from anyone else's point of view. 

"We have turned, every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all...."

 If only they knew.  

Day 45 - Catching Fire.

Today as I wait here, my attention is caught by the beautiful framed picture on the wall. It is a painting of some of the mountains in the Lake District, enshrouded by mist; what an atmospheric scene. Today was a little stormy, to say the least. Although we managed a walk around the tarn during a dry spell, we decided not to attempt any uphill climbs. Later, having had a lovely time in one of the many tea shops, we drove up a little pass through the hills, stopping at the top to look at the view. My son and I walked a little way up the hill in the blustery wind. I suddenly found something stirring inside me, a sort of deep yearning. I realised how much I had been missing the mountains! 

I think I have inherited two main loves from my Dad: a passion for music and a love of the great outdoors, and in particular, mountains. Most of our holidays, when I was a child, were spent in Scotland, and I have many happy memories of walking in the hills. There is something so wonderful about the wildness, the feeling of being on top of the world, and the sense of achievement at having conquered the mountain.

I know that the thing which caught my heart at that young age was not actually the act of walking up the mountain, but the awesome sense of the presence of God. It's so strong it's almost tangible.....you can almost taste it! I know that I caught this love from my Dad, and a phrase comes to mind: some things are best caught, not taught! I take no credit for the phrase, because I heard it somewhere, but it is so true. We learn so much in school that is forgotten so quickly, but it's the love of something that we catch from certain teachers that stays with us. In particular I remember an English teacher at school and a music teacher at college who really inspired me.

So we need to catch a love for God. Jesus spent much of His time inspiring twelve men, and some women also, with a passion for knowing Him better. When the fire is stirred in you it will never leave. So catch the fire! And some of us need to stir up the flames which were once so full but are now nearly out. My inner mountaineer was re-invigorated today by simply being there...... get yourself where the presence of God is and start to get hot again!