Lent Day 40

This week we are thinking about those last days of Jesus as He prepares to go to the cross.   What would you do if you knew you had only four days left on this earth?   Who would you want to see?  What would you want to say to them?  Why?

I'm really not sure what I would do.  Would it be worth trying to see everyone who means something to me in order to,.... well, I dont know, maybe have one last hug?  Or would that all just be too sad and a bit pointless.  Maybe better for them not to know at all.   I suppose I'd want to have as much time as possible with my children.  Telling them I love them and giving them as much comfort as I could about my forthcoming demise.

When I was born my mother started writing me a letter.  She wrote it on and off for eighteen years and gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday.   It is full of news about what I was doing at various points in my life as well as what we as a family were up to.  It charts the death of grandparents who I barely remember. Moves of house.  Divorce from my Dad and subsequent remarriage.   There is some advice in there about how to be happy and how to avoid unhappiness.  She tells me the price of a loaf of bread and how much a gallon of petrol costs.  Its just a fascinating, deeply personal history of me.  I have done the same for my boys.... adding to their letters every now and again whenever I have something to say to them.  It is a good way of letting them know things I cant tell them face to face as young children.  So that if I dont make old bones I shall know that they will have my words to carry with them into their adult lives.  For what they are worth.

In the Gospels we see Jesus sitting down with his disciples to have a final serious talk.  And its not a pleasant one.   In Mark 13 we see Him talking about the coming persecution - the fact that the disicples will be arrested and tried and some will die for following Jesus.  He talks about the destruction of the temple and the signs in nature which will herald the end of the age.   It is serious

stuff.  The disciples must have been terrified.   They didnt appreciate that this was one of the last times Jesus would sit down with them for a proper talk - but He was taking the opportunity to pass onto them the most important things He could before His time was up.    His message was simply this ' Guys, things are going to get worse, and then worse again.  But it's all part of the plan.  Dont give up.  Dont despair or think Ive forsaken you.   I havent.  Im coming back.  But before I do there will be suffering and pain.  Br brave.  God is still in control.'

Jesus's words to His beloved disciples, my words to my kids, are to help prepare, in some small way, for what comes next.   We are still living in the time Jesus spoke about.  Things are getting worse.  Wars and rumours of wars.  Signs on the earth and in the heavens above.   But we need to hold on to His words

28 “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. 29 Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it[d] is near, right at the door. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. ( Mark 13)

Whatever my kids have to face in life they will know that their Mum has loved them and tried to prepare them as best she can for life out there in the big wide word.  They will carry my words with them  as I have carried my Mother's words with me.  And as we all carry God's word with us to help us navigate the days ahead whatever they may bring.

Lent Day 39

And now for something completely different.

This is a twenty minute, beautiful and moving film which I strongly urge you to watch with a cup of tea in a moment of peace and quiet.  You wont regret it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_MCwlY6zzg

lent day 38

Donkeys

Im pinching this from Mervyns sermon this morning.  Cos it was good and I'd never seen it before.

Matthew 21 New International Version (NIV)   

Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King

21 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

5 “Say to Daughter Zion,
    ‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
    and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”[a]

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna[b] to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”[c]

“Hosanna[d] in the highest heaven!”

10 When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”

11 The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

This morning, instead of drawing our attention to the usual things preached about from this passage, Mervyn focused in on the donkey.  And pointed out some details I had never thought about before.  Im not a horsey person, so I dont know an awful lot about how horses work, but I do know enough to realise that you dont just jump on the back of a young animal that has never been saddled or sat upon before.  But that is just what Jesus did.  He specifically asked for an unbroken, unbridled, unschooled young animal to ride.  Madness.  If you or I tried that we would be bucked off within a minute.

Why did He do that?   Yes, of course the entering Jerusalem on a donkey thing was to fulfil the prophecy about the Messiah.  But He could have chosen a mature animal used to carrying people.  I've been thinking about it all morning, since Mervyn pointed it out.  Mervyn commented that Jesus was coming as the Prince of Peace - and that His very presence on the back of the animal brought instant peace and calm.  He has authority over every living thing.  He is King of the universe and the wind and waves obey Him - so its not surprising that a donkey would obey Him too.   But I also wonder if Jesus wasnt showing us something else too.   He specialises in seeking out the young, unbroken rather wild ones and taming them.  The presence of Jesus can transform the most unlikely lives.   Here in Northern Ireland there are plenty of people who once upon a time were angry young men caught up in the ' troubles'.  Men of violence and bloodshed who met Jesus and were instantly calmed and transformed.  And who now carry His presence with them wherever they go.

Not only did this donkey carry Jesus as his first ever mount... he carried Him through crowds of cheering yelling people waving things about and throwing things down on the road in front of him.   When you think of the amount of training police horses have to undergo to be able to deal with crowd situations..... this poor donkey was ' thrown in the deep end'.  And yet he apparently simply walked on through the crowds unphased by the surrounding hulaballoo.   This is what Jesus can do for us too.   When we are faced with potentially scary, chaotic and unpredictable situations we have never faced before.  If we carry Jesus with us He navigates us through and His presence brings peace in the midst of it all.

And here is an afterthought.   If we carry Jesus with us maybe we too can have the effect on animals that He had.  I would love to think that my spirit might be so attuned to nature and so at one with that of the Creator that I could commune with animals in the way St Francis did :-)    Something to aim for perhaps?

lent day 37

Miracle required.

Cant think of how to follow on from yesterday - so Im going to take a completely different tack and ask you all to pray for some people.  I'd like to ask that today we pray for the impossible ones.   Those people who need a miracle and nothing else will do.   You can use this post to ask us to pray for those you know too.  So we can get a sort of international prayer chain going for the next 24 hours.  :-)

So, here are my requests.  Please add your own into the comments section on Facebook and then hopefully everyone who reads this will add their Amen.

Angie

Could you please pray for Angie who is 48, a mother of two and who has cancer.  She is fighting a very good fight and knows the presence of God through it all.  But she wants more years than the doctors have given her.  Please pray that she will get them

And for Bill who is now bedbound suffering from a chronic, rare wasting disease.  Another truly remarkable man of faith who suffers horrendous pain all the time.  Nobody knows how he is still alive.  Before he got sick he was in his car at a roundabout with his window wound down and a motorcyclist drove up beside him. lifted his visor and said '  God says - the Sun of righteousness will rise with healing in His wings'   then drove off.   It made no sense at the time.   It does now.  Please pray for a miracle for Bill.

Me with Janice and Bill in church a while back.

lent Day 36

Gay wedding cakes.   What do you think about that then?

Its all over the news in Northern Ireland  and has been for weeks here - the Christian bakery in Belfast which refused to ice a cake with a gay slogan.   Today it has come to court amid huge publicity all round the world, protests held by both ' sides'  and much debate in public and private about the whole issue of freedom to believe verses discrimination.

Its been on my mind to write something about this for days and days, but Ive held back because, to be honest, I dont know what to say about it.  Im not even sure that I know what to think.

It is fascinating how something as simple as a cake can have sparked such a huge debate.   The gay lobby have said that businesses cant be allowed to discriminate about who they serve and sell to.  But that's nonsense.  Businesses have always discriminated, have always ' chosen' who to serve and sell to.   Pubs refuse to sell more alcohol to people they deem to have had enough.   Hotels just tell people they are full when they dont want to accommodate certain guests.  You only have to watch the programmes about Gypsy weddings to know how often businesses turn down people they dont like the look of.   It seems to me that if you are selling something to someone you have every right to decide who you want to sell to. You dont have a contract with the purchaser until money is on the table.  ( Which is where the Asher bakery went wrong.  They took the man's money.  Then they reneged on the contract)

However, on the other side of the argument I genuinely dont believe that people should be allowed to get away with blatant discrimination.  We are so far past the days of signs in B& B windows saying No Blacks, No Irish No Dogs.   We all know what happens when a swathe of the population is denied access to services.  We end up with a holocaust.  So.......  is there a middle line?  Or is compromise part of the problem?  Or is lack of a willingness of compromise the problem?   Eeeeeeek

What would Jesus do?

If someone came to Jesus and asked Him to bake a cake with a slogan promoting gay marriage - what would He do?

I suspect that He would have a conversation.

And thats the thing that was missing in the Belfast cake case.  The man who placed the order paid his money and went away happy enough then two days later was contacted to say he couldnt have his cake.  There was no conversation at the time of ordering.  No explanation.  No face to face human contact whereby the position of the bakery was explained carefully and graciously in a way that the customer could discuss and argue with and possibly even understand.   Jesus would have handled it differently without a doubt.  He would not have made a gay man feel small and rejected.
Knowing Jesus, He would have found a way to hold a line of faith and personal belief without causing any offence whatsoever.  The only people Jesus ever offended when He was here were the religious people.   The people who were marginalised and outcast and misunderstood - He loved those people.  Regardless of what the wider society thought.  

Increasingly we as Christians are going to have to get to grips with subjects ( and people ) which
make us feel uncomfortable.  Today I was having a conversation with someone about what God thinks about being transgender.  You might think its an issue which wouldnt arise very often so we can avoid having to think about it.  But in the past few years I've come across four people who have had to face the dilemma of feeling that they are living in the wrong body.  Four.  And I live in Northern Ireland.  Which is a very small place indeed and where people dont talk about things like that.  

We need to know what we think about these things.   Church needs to teach clearly and with huge compassion - not just so that we know the theory, but so that we can be Jesus to a hurting, confused, angry, messed up world.  It's not about cake.   It is about winning people not losing them.
I shall be watching the developments in the Asher bakery case with interest and praying that somehow through the publicity God might be seen as the loving kind saviour He is and not the small minded, prejudiced legalist the media would so often want to convey.

lent Day 35

I had a truly horrible morning today.  ( Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I'll begin..... )

It started when Keith told me he couldnt stay home as he usually does on a Wednesday to see Ben off to school.  I have to be in to work early on a Wed.  He usually goes into the office a bit later - but not today.   So I had to hastily arrange to drop Ben off at a friends house before school.   Ben wasnt wildly happy about the last minute change of plans and was dragging his feet getting ready.  I did a bit of chivvying and finally got him into the car when I realised I didn't have the car keys.   Which had been in my hand five minutes previously.  They had vanished.  Completely.
I turned the house upside down and couldn't find them even though I knew they were there somewhere.  I was getting frantic cos I knew Id be late for work.  The roads are dug up and closed so there's a diversion which takes an extra ten minutes to negotiate as it is.   Aaarrrrgh.   I was getting upset.  Which isn't like me - but it was all going pear shaped.   Ben got out of the car to help me look for the keys.  And he reminded me that I have a spare car key.  Bless him.  Yes , I do!  Brilliant.
Got the spare car key.  Decided that Id just have to go to work and leave the house unlocked ( house key and car keys on same ring)  Jumped in to start the car..... nothing.   That horrible sound of dead battery.    I couldn't believe it!

SO at this point I worked out that I wasn't going to get to work.  I phoned my boss.   Her phone was off.   I phoned her other number and left a rather stressed message on the answering machine .  Then I sent a text to the nursery I was supposed to be doing a Jo Jingles class in half an hours time and told them the car was dead and I wouldn't make it.

Sent Ben off to school.   He was worrying about me because I was upset and agitated and cross that I couldn't find the keys.   I went back into the house thinking that if I was going to be at home all day I had better search every inch of the house to find the keys.   And guess what?   They were on the kitchen table right in front of me.   I swear to you I had looked under and over every item on the kitchen table four or five times......   How does that happen???   Hidden in plain sight.   Bizzare.

By this time I was so late - but I went back to try the car again and because I was using the proper key was able to disengage the immobliser - car leaped into life and off I went.   Was late for everything for the rest of the morning.  But at least I got there and didn't disappoint the thirty odd kids who look forward to me coming to see them every week.

On the way home I was pondering the events of this morning.   Its always tempting to blame that sort of stuff on enemy activity.  It certainly felt as though someone was deliberately sabotaging my attempts to get to work today.  A succession of really annoying and unplanned events within the space of an hour or so completely robbed me of any sense of peace and perspective.  But perhaps it was God who hid my keys.   Maybe I needed to be delayed today.  For some reason I dont understand.    I know Ben was praying for me on the way to school - and that in those few minutes I found the keys and was able to get going.   So maybe the whole episode was engineered by God to show Ben that his prayers are powerful and effective.  ( I prayed as soon as I realised the keys werent there - my prayers obviously dont pack as much of a punch :-)  )

It strikes me that we live in the tension of not knowing alot of the time.  Things happen ( or dont happen) and we can only guess at the reasons why.  We are in a battle , we definitely have an enemy who is out to steal and lie and ultimately kill us.  But our God is greater.  We are in His hands.  Under the shadow of His wings.  He turns what the enemy means for evil into good.  All things work together for the good.......

Sometimes it is hard to see how the bereavement or the illness or the divorce or the redundancy can possibly be anything other than negative.  It is hard to believe that God can bring a silver lining out of the clouds.  Especially when the clouds have been glowering over us for months or years.   But He can.  And He does.  We have to be looking up to see the silver and focus on the lining rather than the clouds.

Tomorrow is another day.

I wonder where I put my keys.

lent Day 34

One of my favourite programmes on the telly of late has been Long Lost Family.   Its a show where people are reunited - often adopted children with their birth parents, sometimes siblings who didnt know each other existed.   It is always interesting and emotional to watch because the stories are about real people's lives and the reunions are always so highly charged.    Sometimes people have
been looking for each other for decades.  They have searched endless records and come to dead ends over and over again.  But with the huge resources of a television channel behind them and the research facilities at their disposal, ITV can manage to find people that private individuals cant.


Tonight Im watching it again.  It's one Ive seen before but it seems just as powerful the second time round.  And it got me to wondering what it is which makes it such good television.

I suppose the bottom line is that we can all identify with being lost.   Somewhere deep down we all have a sense that something vital is missing.  Our identity is incomplete.   Even if we have lived in beautiful families and have felt hugely loved and have lived charmed lives, we can still ache inside when we are presented with a narrative about being lost and found.  Because fundamentally we are all like those children who have been brought up by adoptive parents.   God is our real father.  He has given us over for a short time to be brought up in families.  But we have always been His and we are destined to be reuinted with Him in a heavenly homecoming one day.   As we look forward to celebrating Easter very soon we remember that Jesus came looking for us, leaving His home and His Father to walk this Earth and buy us back from the slavery of sin.  He is our brother and He is going to present us to His father and ours in a huge reunion party at the end of the age.  What a party that will be!  Can't wait!