Calling

What does God's call feel like? Look like, sound like, taste like, smell like?

Does it sometimes feel like a weightless certainty, and at others as urgent as two labrador puppies on a leash - busting to get going but not 100% sure which direction, just away, just acting, not standing still!

Is it sometimes a burden,and other times a joy? Sometimes almost clear, other times a mystery? Sometimes close and other times all-enveloping?

I have a call, an insistent, not always pleasant call.

'Feed my sheep, travel if you have you, but feed them! I don't need another pew-warmer. Time is short. GET MOVING!'

'But how, Lord? Alone? Do I need innoculations, a passport, a degree, a church to sponsor me? Could you tell me a bit more? Perhaps make some aspects clearer? Should I stay here, work in the community, feed the lambs whose language I speak and know?'

'You will know when you're doing it right, just DO IT. Time is short, the flock is hungry. Move!'

Or do I imagine it? Is this insistent urge just a fantasy, a hope that God finds me useful enough to speak to and encourage and whip into shape?

Meantime I squirm in the pew, pray for guidance, look at all the options, feel like I'm not doing enough. And the call, the insistent, urgent, GET OFF THE TRACKS call... help me to decipher it.... please.

Please help me in praying for guidance, and for clarity. I would have said patience too, but I feel the impatience does not come from me...

For Mellory

I never met you, Mellory, but we would have recognised something in each other.

The mark of the street.

We have each been a person of the night: pale, restless, empty, yearning.

Busted and messed up and so very full of nameless pain.

The papers and message boards are full of angry takes on your story, penned with such viciousness, some of them, that the page bleeds.

The kind of viciousness that set your feet on the path that sadly, inevitably wended its dark and nasty way to the Avon river, and your senseless, brutal death.

You are to blame, they say, for your fate. You had faults, you committed crimes, you hurt people. At 15, when you entered the sex trade you were OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER!

This Christmas, there is no scoring or whoring for you. It's over, perhaps for the first time in years, and to celebrate your freedom from it I offer for you a prayer of peace and love and comfort.

May the God who sent love down at Christmas extend his great grace and mercy to you, Mellory.
May you rest in his peace.

Meantime those of us who lived long enough to leave the streets, and those who never felt that dark lure, the need or the compulsion, let's tuck our kids in tight, let's be glad for what we have, and let's stop casting stones at the vulnerable, the broken and the dead.

Sometimes it's hard to follow Jesus...

Following Jesus is a doddle some days.

When life shines brightly, and the world feels good, and my neighbours are loveable I can be the Christian I long to be.

A Christ-follower with grace and patience, true to the Word, true to my beliefs, someone who strives to make the light of Christ visible in this dark and broken world.

Some days it's a doddle.

Yesterday it was excruciatingly difficult. Yesterday I failed, as I will doubtless fail again.
I have a son, Paulie. He has an intellectual disability that makes him trusting, open, a target for other people's treachery.

Paulie works fulltime on minimum wage as a trolley-pusher in a local supermarket. He saves his money to buy himself nice things, which he shares with others.

Paulie is a shining light.

Last night he opened his door to a man 'who didn't look like a robber' and let him use the phone.
The man left after stealing Paulie's call phone - a Treo which was his pride and joy.
Paulie phoned the police who were too busy to respond, then his dad and me.

I was mad. Mad as hell. Mad as a mother whose vulnerable child has been ripped off and disappointed. Did I love my neighbour the thief?

Hell no.

I sent him several texts telling him what a scumbag he was. I used very unchristian language, and railed against him. He returned my vitriol with interest. Anger responded to anger. I wasn't mad about the phone - it's just a thing. I was mad that I couldn't protect my son against the meanness in the world.

This morning, after prayer and a good night's sleep I am working on forgiveness.

Paulie will buy a new phone, a little sadder and wiser about the world, and I will work again on grace, and forgiveness and loving my neighbour.

There are days when following Jesus is a doddle. The true test of faith is following him just as closely and truly on those days when it is not.

Those days when we can't fathom other people's motives. Those days when life isn't fair. Those days when we don't get what we want, or deserve, or desire.

Forgive me Lord, on those rainy days, for this sinner is a work in progress.

Just a season...

In the drought we long for mist; in the cool months, long-past summers fuel our dreams.

We live in a world in-between: forgetting to delight in the now. Forgetting to be present to the beauty that exists today.

This day.

Every day.

It's so hot and dry: the hills baked to the colour of ginger-crunch, the lake a desert oasis, the strange mist of a few mornings-ago a cool blessing.

The mist rose early, so deep that the world disappeared in its moist white embrace.

It pressed its damp cheeks to the house, repelling the sun that would disperse it.
We were all alone, marooned on an island of cloud.

Gone was the lavender outside the bathroom window; gone the burned grass bank behind it. Gone the rabbits, the pukekos, the hunting cat. The lake and ponds gone - erased from the canvas while we slept.

The mist pressed a cool compress to the baked earth. It smothered the sighs of the wilting olive trees, it caressed the dried arrangements that once bore fruit. It whispered to the land that one day the drought would end.

The quiet, shrouded earth rested, recovered a little.

The bell-bird who sips each morning from the flax flowers stayed in its nest. The tui in the gum, no more, no more.

No magpies gargled. No frogs creaked. No plants tap-tapped against the side of the house.

The morepork slept, his head pillowed on his chest, dreaming of the hunt just finished.

The clock ticked, time shuffled its weary feet, light imperceptibly slipped through the muffling mist.

The lavender - usually bee-buzzed by now - ghosted silently, empty against the window.
The trees tiptoed back into place, trailing cottony shrouds behind them.

Soft glints of sky peeled off the lake, the parched world was reviving.

The birds ran quiet sound checks before one by one rediscovering their voice, and they hailed the bright, hard sky as it returned.

Drought, broken for a brief time, is so much easier to bear. A promise glimpsed eases our pain, allowing us to appreciate anew the beauty here and now.

It's just a season: its time is limited.

The world will return to rights.

Relax, wait, enjoy.

This time too, will pass.

Ghosts

Who sleeps in the star-strewn bed in the sunlit room in the house on the high hill?

Who curls in a ball, deep, deep asleep between clean sheets, and cannot be waked?

She is away,

Away

Where fear is dead and the dark a friend -

Life safe and predictable, and she is free.

Where there are no sharp edges, only bellbirds ring, and a white cat purrs on a pillow.

She plunges so deep all her cares are drowned.

While she floats, drugged by sleep, in buttery sheets, rocked by the wind.


When hypnos flees who stirs, and stretches, breaks the ghostly web?

Finds her inner grown-up and rises, feeds the cat, waters the plants and returns to curl, to shrink, to sleep again.

In a star-strewn bed, a feather pillow, with some books and a cat for company.

The one who sleeps gets smaller and more tenuous every day.

If i find her before she disappears i'll send her on her way.

Away, away

With clean sheets, a well-fed cat, and a starry blanket

And though i'll miss her, i will let her sleep

her life away

Three-in-the-morning questions

does a butterfly ever want to return to the safety of the cocoon?

are the moths knocking on the window really looking for the moon?

why do cold-night stars look like you could get a fingernail under them and pick them off the sky like a cat-thief, while on warmer nights they are a firmly secured window display at a jeweller?

what is that noise in the background, under the lonely moon, when all sleeps - a sound like frozen grasshoppers, like celestial white-noise, like a high-pitched respirator?

'surrender to the sky your heart of anger' - why is the night sky more receptive, less likely to spit anger back in your face?

will the sickle moon ever slash open the sky?

when the moon falls from the sky will it be full, or new?

does the snore of a sleeping husband create a tornado far from here?

why did I have coffee after nightfall?

Thankful

Lord, how easy it can be, stuffed with milk and honey to remember how far you have brought us.

Through the seas, the wilderness, the searing dusty places where our stomachs growled a common language of want.

You fed, clothed, watered and loved us, created in your image, yet so determined to allow only a spark of your glory to shine through us.

How you have nurtured us, and moulded us - God-created mosaics of our experience and your grace.

Today, despondent, forgetful of our journey together I sat, head in hands.

Woeful, mindless in a garden you had me tend, waiting on a pillar of smoke to make me feel remembered, important.

Where were you?

A weeping maple drank my tears. Not salty desert tears, but too much milk-and-honey tears, forgetful self-centred tears. Impotent, not important tears.

Then three weightless fantails, all heartbeat and feathers, designed for your joy alone, alighted on the maple. They chittered their heaven sent message of praise, and when my heart lifted, they alighted back to you; my misery annulled by remembrance of your goodness.

Forgive my forgetfulness.

We have journeyed together over seas and through endless wilderness to this land of more than enough.

Thankyou,

And again, thankyou.

I will remember, in my impotence, your endless and wonderful and central importance.

Broken

I once wrote a book called "Bent Not Broken".
The title was a lie.
I was broken.

Broken, broken, broken.

Like an old-fashioned thermos flask that had been dropped - I was okay on the outside but the slightest shake revealed the shimmering shards inside.
Broken.

Not the pretty kind of broken, nor the wee chip that elephant glue would mend, but ugly, nasty, dangerous, mixed up broken.

Broken like a box of crystal glasses that has been drop-kicked then gift-wrapped. Don't hug it too hard to your chest - the gift is broken, and dangerous.

Broken like a heart, like a vow, like a bone.

Broken like the psalmist who wrote:

I am poured out like water,
all my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
it is melted within my chest;
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death. (Ps 22 14-15)

And still broken.

Still smashed up inside, still trying with the help of God to straighten my bends, to heal my brokenness, to fix me up from the inside out.

No more plastering over the cracks, no more smoke and mirrors but bare raw broken wounds that weep for divine healing.

Heal us God, give us guidance, for the ways of the world are broken.

Broken.

Broken.

Body as Temple

“… do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” 1 Corinthians 6:19


We are the body of Christ.
Our bodies are the flesh-and-blood temples of the living God.

We have an awesome responsibility – to provide a dwelling place that is fit for God's habitation.
When we look at ourselves through time, and at the masses around us, we see a huge diversity of worship-places . Each of us comes in a variety of incarnations and denominations, as we shape ourselves, or life shapes us to produce temples worthy of God.

When we are children our temple is raw green wood: a developing wonderland where life is new and breath-taking, and we worship in the wide world of our senses .
Our worship is a dance, a bike ride to the creek, the midnight call of a Morepork, the wag of a yellow dog’s tail, the smell of Vicks vaporub on a feverish chest, and a pat on the back by a beloved teacher.
Our brains are expanding, growing, making connections. Our body is building, cell by cell, memory by memory, experience atop experience to place at the altar.
Our initial trembling step, the first time we read a sentence then a chapter book all by ourselves; the pride of a lone wobbly ride on two wheels instead of four, and the night we learned to sleep with the light off, trusting that the dark was safe, and God was there, and would watch us as we dreamed. These milestones are building blocks in our temple.
The Spirit inhabits a gap-toothed scabby-kneed temple with wonderful potential: cohabiting briefly with the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny, but they move out as the temple grows up. Worship is ad-libbed, spontaneous and joyful, and likely to erupt at any time. The altar may be adorned by a transformer, My Little Pony, or a tadpole in a jar. Chippies and Fanta are the Host. The Spirit is a pure smokeless flame, with outwardly undying energy.

Adolescence is a strong temple, occupied between the overcrowded one of childhood and one the congregation will grow into. It’s a bit rough-sawn and tentative at times, and excitement flares intermittently as it struggles to establish its own final identity.
This temple is a fun fair, a changing room, a quiet place, a hall of mirrors, an advisory service to friends. Fences are built and torn down again, allegiances formed and shattered. The temple is redecorated and worship maps redrawn as new styles are tried on and discarded, but it strengthens and grows, and starts to put down roots as it becomes more sure. The Spirit burns brilliantly where it lands, and pours out its energy on a listless world.

Some youthful temples are Las Vegas wedding chapels complete with sad short couplings, impersonators and flash fakery. My teens were built on that model. I thought that by ignoring the Spirit he would disappear - but once invited he’s a guest who is hard to budge. While I felt my life was Godless, looking back Holy fingerprints were there, and took the form of conscience, and intuition, and a belief that I could do and be more. My trashy temple was acceptable to God who waited for me to rebuild and recommit. Our Lord is not afraid of trashy temples.

Adults provide the greatest selection of temple architecture.

A new parent’s temple is busy, tired, untidy, sprinkled with baby-powder. The architecture can be a muddle of old and new as budgets are stretched beyond previous limits and priorities change. The lights go on and off at odd times, dictated by the youngest member of the congregation. Toys can be found scattered under the pews, and an old rusk in the lectern. The communion glasses and wine are stored high out of reach of children and their frazzled parents. Music softens, contemplative silences are treasured and far-apart, and private spaces are rare. When the Sunday School takes part in services the building rattles along with it, every word known, every action mimed. The Spirit is hot h-o-t , hot, and is bright, but has a kiddie guard around it just in case.

A student’s temple is a bizarre mix of party hall and library. It is young, trendy, ambitious, unsure if it wants bean bags or pine pews. Architecture is not a priority, nor is design (except, of course, to students of these subjects). The altar is decorated with a vibrant mix of candles, incense, and an old lava lamp. God is alive, and faith has not usually been tested enough to waver. Communion wine might be served in yard glasses (as a joke, of course), and the bread might be lost in the back of the fridge, but the commitment is fresh. Especially near exam times, and other testing periods. The Spirit is bright incandescent flame that issues a challenge. The student temple opens all hours, depending on the academic and social timetable.

An athlete’s temple is fit, dynamic and alive. The building structure is strong, vibrant, spare. There are plenty of bike parks out the front. Doors and windows are muscled open, fresh air barrels down the aisles and between the pews, blowing away the cobwebs of ages, ruffling the hymnals, and flicking the edges of the notices reclining on the corkboard. Light flushes the building, any flaw is exposed and worked on relentlessly. The flowers on the altar have been squashed in the gym bag – their bruised scent pervasive. The Host is rice bread – for the protein and organic fruit juice. The Spirit is energy, consuming, focussed. It burns on every forehead and the service is rocking, pulsating, with drum and timbrel and upraised hands and may include a rousing haka. The strong heart of worship beats energetically. The sermon exhorts action, mission, accomplishment. Act! Be busy, the Kingdom of heaven is racing towards us. The athlete’s temple opens for the ten-thirty service, giving enough time for a half-marathon or 100km bike ride beforehand.

The builder’s temple has attention to detail but is never quite finished. Its working hands are clasped in prayer to the carpenter who came before. The Host is dwarfed in these hands, so like those of the one whose body was broken. The Spirit is on the level, and burns cleanly in a well-constructed fireplace.

The teacher’s temple is the world. Like the child, the teacher needs to be open to all senses – to be sensible and wise. The teacher’s temple is bright and airy, with coloured wall hangings and a mat for a pulpit. The congregation crosses their legs and folds their arms and receives the lesson without wiggling too much. They nibble The Host from lunchboxes. The teacher’s Spirit is bright, bursting with the stardust of knowledge passed on.

Pastors, writers and eternal students are contemplative sites of studied worship and scholarly discourse. A well-stocked library is required, and real coffee is enjoyed by those who thirst. The temple is welcoming, respectful. It fosters growth, renewal and restoration, and all who seek may be embraced. Service can be experimental and mix liturgy with drama. It is not dull, even though congregants may not be clocking sub 4-minute miles, or rocking in toy strewn aisles. The door is propped open and the air still. The nave has darker areas where one may sit and reflect, kneel to pray and perhaps chant quietly. Light slants softly through high windows, turning dust motes golden in their twirling fall from grace. Flowers are dried arrangements, no water to stain the manuscripts, and no plants to feed. The Host is nourishment, time out, to be shared and lingered over. The Spirit is hot coals, smouldering, burning heat that lights the page, burnishes the hymnals and invites those who are cold to warm themselves.

Maturity renovates the temple still further. It opens early for the first morning service. It is a little older, perhaps a bit wider in the aisle and worn softer in the pew. It is more comfortable, less driven. It has weathered many storms and quakes, witnessed a lot of change, and is grounded in unchangeable truths. It’s unflappable, serene, solid. The lectern is unmoveable, and bathed in coloured puddles of light trickling from stained glass windows, bought a long time ago. Flowers sit behind the pulpit, unruffled, real, home-picked flowers. Nothing showy or distracting. The service is familiar, the hymns are known, the worship downbeat, comfortable. There is a warmth and generosity and stability about this temple. It is a place of true belonging. The Spirit is the eternal flame, lovingly tended and sent prayerfully on wings of love and peace to bring hope to a despairing world.

The infinite variety of human temples mirrors the differences in culture and denomination and opportunities for worship in the world. Is it an accident that mega-churches arise in cultures where obesity is endemic?

God is present in mud huts, on street corners, in stadia, private homes and synagogues. Our Lord is within us, woman and man, child and adult, short and tall, stout and athletic, old and young. The shape and style and upkeep of our temple does not matter.
God will wait in us, quietly showing us grace and light and love, whispering encouragement and advice, and loving us till we listen, respect the temple and rededicate it all over again.
Encouraged, the spirit will burn in our hearths, warm our worship spaces, providing heat and light for ourselves and the cold, lost world.

We are God's temple. We are the Body of Christ.

Let God, through us, nourish the world.

Loving our neighbours

We all have neighbours.

Whatever the size of our property or nation, there is someone who abuts our boundary, or overlooks our clothesline, someone we drive or trek past to collect the mail, someone who knows a little more than we might like about the hours and the company we keep and about our own comings and goings.

Some neighbours act as watchdogs for us; their presence in our lives can be comforting and give security. The watchfulness of others is a burden and embarrassment.

Sometimes we end up with neighbours from hell who breach our boundaries with unwanted noise, roving animals and free-range children.
Some neighbours arrive in our letterbox or on our TV. Starving, displaced people with empty eyes and bloated bellies. Children with flies on faces where their tears have long dried up. Neighbours who make our conscience weep and our wallets twitch.

‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’

Of all the commands the Bible hands down, this is the one that causes many to stumble. We who wouldn’t murder, deceive, commit adultery, dishonour God or our parents can still struggle to love our neighbour.

When asked to name the supreme commandment, Jesus ran two together: ‘Love the lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, and love your neighbour as yourself.’

To love our neighbour is as important to God as loving Him.

We are called to love them as we love ourselves – even the neighbour whose dog fouls our lawn, even the neighbour who smashes bottles over his partner’s head at 2 in the morning bringing the screaming of ambulances and the wake-the-dead march of police, even the one who lives in a nation whose politics we don’t understand, who speaks languages of sorrow and loss, who we would never know if we locked the mailbox and turned off the TV, and demanded ‘no more junk mail’.

Love your neighbours… even the ones who murder your tranquillity, even the ones you just don’t like.

Who is our neighbour?
Jesus tells us with a story, so familiar to us that it no longer has first century impact. The good Samaritan – the man from a race despised by the Jews who aids a man beaten by the wayside. The religious men kept a holy distance, not wanting to contaminate themselves with his despair, yet the despised Samaritan, acting as a neighbour, brought comfort and healing to a damaged stranger.

The broken, bleeding, bypassed world is our neighbour.

Paris Hilton, the Mongrel Mob, the widower next door, Helen and John, the orphans of Darfur and the displaced in Timor, prisoners and pop stars are all our neighbours.

The kids who tag the church and vandalise the cross outside: they are our neighbours.
The Scottish tourist beaten to death in Taupo, and the young man who killed her: our neighbours.
The sporting teams who beat us – we are to love them as we love ourselves.

It’s a lot easier to obey the ten commandments given to Moses – but Jesus says this is NOT enough – we must also love our neighbour – as ourself.
No wonder the way to the Kingdom is narrow and overgrown.

I find it hard to love my neighbours. It’s struggle enough to love my family at times. Yet in loving our neighbours we stop just ‘doing good’ and start ‘being good’, as Jesus asked us.

The Pharisees were professionals at ‘doing good’. They followed the letter – but not the spirit – of the law. Jesus had no respect for that, and continually told them that they would not be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus urges us to be good – to love our neighbours, just as much as we love ourselves.
Nothing less will do.
I have got a lot of work to do to be good, but I’m trying.
How about you?
Let’s go out into the world and love our neighbours.