Climbing

Do you ever wish there was a simple answer?

 

If only we could stop doing the things that destroy us.

If only we could know how our efforts to connect can be so inappropriate and prey on the vulnerable.

If only we could know how to say what needs to be said, without offending.

If only we could decide to do something difficult, because we know it will yield a better life.

If only telling people they are loved were enough - that they would know it core-deep.

 

 

Remind me that I'm not trying to scale Mt Sinai.

 

I'm climbing Mt Zion.

Waiting

I was seven months pregnant when I realised it. The waiting wasn't just for bones to get long enough, a heart to beat reliably or lungs to blossom into countless sacs of diffusing membrane. I needed the waiting too.

The unsettled pregnancy sleep prepared me for waking to someone else's need. And the inability to be relaxed and comfortable in my skin for nine months made me appreciate returning to being me. Somehow, the waiting is how I gradually prepared myself to care for a tiny being. For the emotional reality of it.

Plenty of people are happy to remind me that change is hard. Sometimes marathon hard. Sometimes hit by a semi-trailer hard. And waiting is a way to build up for the struggle of change. A long slow drink before we walk out onto an unknown path.

I have been waiting.

And waiting is not a passive time. I wait with my family amidst the squabbles and raucous laughter, the scrapes and the home reader books. I stopped blogging for a few weeks and didn't miss it. Waiting was busy and absorbing. I am getting ready. Unsure for what.

Caught in that moment of knowing preparation is necessary, but bewildered about how to get ready.

I started to think about the group of faithful waiting in Jerusalem. They didn't really know what for. Just told to wait for the gift. They had no idea what would happen to them.

“Do not leave Jerusalem until the Father sends you the gift he promised, as I told you before. John baptized with water, but in just a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Acts 1:4-5.

They could not have anticipated seeing the flames of God, hearing the wind of his presence and the flurry of talk amongst them. How could they have understood what Jesus meant about a counsellor coming to be with them? That God himself would come amongst them in a new way. A reinvention of the tabernacle.

The pastor reminds me that this is the one festival that the early church celebrated - Pentecost.

 As I wait, I am sharing in that mysterious expectation. I am preparing myself to see God flaming in the world, to hear him blowing past my ears, to witness him bring understanding.

Waiting is the time to pray for eyes to really see and ears to truly hear.

Are you waiting for something?

Linking with Emily at Imperfect Prose

What is poverty?

I recently finished reading Life at the Bottom: the Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple. He's an English author and psychiatrist who has worked in Africa and in Birmingham. After returning from Africa, to work in England, he wrote these essays reflecting on the culture he encountered in the slums of Birmingham.

One reviewer wrote that "he found what he considered to be true barbarism—the cheerless, self-pitying hedonism and brutality of the dependency culture". I found this article which describes the life of a patient he treated in the slums. It has some similar reflections to 'Life at the Bottom', which is also peppered with vignettes of patients.

I had a few gut reactions to this book...

I was really confronted that I meet patients like this frequently. Crime, poverty, domestic violence, drug and alcohol use, dysfuntional relationships, abuse, mental illness, welfare dependence, homelessness and the failure of government services are all right here in south-west Sydney. We have an underclass like the one Dalrymple describes in Britain. And we have created the same cultural traps that bind people in poverty and powerlessness.

Dalrymple is extremely critical of the middle class and the way we have used welfare, social structures and liberal thinking to rob the poor of a way out of their dilemma. He believes that when someone can use their addiction or their history of deprivation and trauma (for example) to explain their criminal or abusive behaviour, they can then avoid examining their own role in creating their current predicament. Rather than empowering broken people to hope, and strive, for a better life, we are telling them there is actually no escape.

Not only that, we reward extreme dysfunction. The more chaotic a person is, the higher they climb the list for priority housing. So people who work hard but start with little, wait longer for any assistance because there is always someone who is having a more impressive emergency, perhaps even as a result of their own carelessness or refusal to participate in the system.

I can see the points that Dalrymple is making, but part of me longs for him to be wrong. I don't want us to be harsh, or punishing of brokenness. I don't want us to abandon grace and compassion. I want humans to be better than this - but we are so not. I felt sad as I read.

There's a saying - 'If you're not a leftie in your twenties, then you haven't got a heart. If you're not a conservative in your forties then you haven't got a brain.' I don't want to abandon my heart, even though my brain whispers quietly to do so. And we walk this tenuous balance of compassion and pragmatism. We need to struggle here, because there cannot be a solution without grace and transformation.

A tight fear grips my heart - I hear lives told, and they leave me incarcerated with no key. If I feel trapped by the tale, how must the one who tells feel. How can they see possibility or hope if I can't?

The step of faith I need to take is this - Insist there is hope. Talk about change and rescue and redemption even when I doubt the possibility.

This is Dalrymple's sobering reflection on true poverty, comparing Africa and Britain,

"Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul." from What is poverty? Dalrymple, 1999.

Tracks and Habits

image from here

The picture is the story. Sheep running along worn paths. Wending through grass, flattened under their feet. My shoes tread the grass down, too. Following daily planted footsteps, crossing the road at just that odd angle. The angle I walked yesterday. Do you step in the worn patches of dirt? Or let the smoothed, worn stone cradle your feet?

Habits form us. Form me. We construct our lives in repetitive, well-worn blocks. Follow grooved, gouged tracks.

It's tempting to concentrate on the bad habits. The paths we trip thoughtlessly along, forgetting their destination. Trapped on exit-less freeways, addictions, weaknesses, sins overwhelm us. "I can't stop." "I didn't want to end up here..."

But every maze has a way out. Don't forget we are the ones who've made the paths, and they can be changed. The first time you deviate is exhausting, time-consuming and messy. The old path calls you insistently back. It resists an overgrown, unused future. The whispered, lingering reminders in your ears are final pleas for existence. But deviating for the first time is exhilarating. Making a new, better, wise path brings possibility and hope.

Habits can also breathe life. Good ones open our existence so that grace can get in. I wish I could find the list of helpful habits I read last week, because it illustrates the sensible simplicity of good habits. The ones that have stuck are - getting 8 hours sleep a night, sitting down to eat breakfast. Alas, google cannot find the rest tonight :)

A wise life is one with well-crafted habits. A network of paths that lead to healthy destinations. Paths painstakingly carved and carefully re-routed when necessary. I long for a life like that.

What about you?

Here is a trustworthy saying...

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.

Proverbs 4:26

So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1

Easter confronts me with my weakness. Jesus begged his friends to stay awake and pray, but they kept falling into slumber. I can't even be at peace with people I love. Sometimes I don't want to bother trying.

Did Jesus ever think that Easter was too much effort, all too hard? Again and again I need to remember that reaching out to me was costly. It hurt.

That he is with me as I choose to pick up my cross. Not so I can pat myself on the back, but so I can know that I am not alone.

Trying to answer and delusions of grandeur

I wrote about floods in southern Queensland, no idea that it would just be one among many shattered places. Tonight I read of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, Christchurch is still shocked, last month far north Queensland was blown away by a cyclone. Bushfires, crops destroyed, homes flattened or burnt.

Cancer smothers people, marriages disintegrate, addictions rob friends of their dignity.

I notice two responses.

Some know a God who accompanies them in these desperate times. He comforts, strengthens and consoles. His presence salves wounds.

Some question the presence, the wisdom and the interest of a creator. 'How can there be a loving God if this cruelness is possible?' This shattering of life is proof of a dearth of purpose. Or we have been carelessly dropped into a grim, sarcastic, vengeful universe.

How can the God-followers, the comforted ones, reach into this deep, yawning-gulf question? These two persectives live such a long way apart. Are we even speaking the same dialect? Sometimes I wonder.

I know my words are paltry and half-hearted. Poorly thought out, surprised by the questions. Much of the contents of my heart and my mind never gets formed into syllables. Because I stumble and mumble to get it out. I need to think more about the questions we get asked. How can God transform this world-lostness, by his presence?

I would love to be like Peter. Impetuously outspoken. Faithfully fervent.

To those wondering how we can find comfort in God, I would answer. Boldly.

"Where else have I to go? His words are those of eternal life. Where else can I find the comfort, the challenge, the merciful forgiveness? Where else can I find freedom from this earth's tyranny and ruthless destruction? This world, these people, brings wounds, God alone is the salve."

And yet would they listen? I confess I long to do the spirit's work and touch ears to really hear. Shake someone so that they no longer ignore what is before them. Why can't I choose and they respond?

It takes faith to leave it to God, because my pride pictures me doing such a fine job of discerning and enabling. How deluded I am. I mess up simple answers to honest questions. Imagine the mess I would make of divine tasks.

Broken and Wet

The past few weeks have been wet ones here in Australia. Rain has been falling on dry, hard earth. Rivers have been unable to carry the amount of water being delivered into them. There have been flash floods, 'inland' tsunamis, rivers rising inexorably. Evacuations and tense waits have been followed by mud-filled floors, stained walls, waterlogged houses. Some floods came so quickly that there are people still unaccounted for.

all these images are of the Queensland floods from smh.com.au

Thousands of homes have been damaged. The clean-up will take months, maybe longer for some. And as our news is filled with progress updates, stories also come of floods and landslides in Brazil. And we look for the stories of hope to calm our fear.

Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and fear. "Is it the end of the world?", says a friend.

Some are desperate to know, but I'm thankful that's not in my hands to decide.

I find myself, rather, seeing the flimsy fragility of our existence. We build, we gather things, we make homes. We rest our hearts, our hopes and our selves in the midst of things. In an instant they can be washed away or left destroyed and useless.

But on 24 hour coverage of floods, where people who have lost everything are interviewed, their words are fascinating. They speak of people who help, of others who've suffered more, or of determination to live on. They do not eulogise fancy lounge suites or wide screen TVs, or boxes of things. They courageously admit where their real hope lies - in relationships, or communities or in their own fierce-held survival. They are their own victory trophy over disaster.

We know what really matters, and sometimes disasters clarify our view to see it. The one thing we gloss over, though is God. Disasters are 'acts of God', and blame can lie heavy with him. We forget the fact that he is with us in the disaster, too. He sits in precarious places waiting for rescuers to arrive. He sifts through mounds of destruction and helps clean and rebuild. He cleans mud away, he delivers needed food, he listens to traumatic stories. He is present for the clean up and restoration.

Our lives, our achievements, our possessions are like grass, blown too easily away.

But God stands firm - with us, amongst us. His love in destruction brings impossible hope. That despite our transience and fragility, we will live on.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,

though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.

Psalm 46:1-3

Joining the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival - Broken

Pentecost coming

Friends gather. One flies, some drive, one trundles on the train. Together we laugh, we listen, stories draw us together. Sometimes we weep, as we share the rawness, the people-pain, barefoot walk on gravel. We plead with the one who binds us together. Bring healing, breathe your spirit on us and imprint your glorious image on our forgetful souls.

Blessed again by time, by familiarity of the ones who know us well. A yearly glimpse of the me who was young, fervent, often lost but searching. The me who looks forward to the drink that will forever quench my thirst in the golden city. The me who wants to linger in awareness of now and this precious time of preparation and waiting. The me who sits up too late not wanting today to unfold into tomorrow...just yet.

Another gathering of friends, brothers and sisters bound in adversity, all bearing the imprint of a divine teacher among them. How they miss him. They wait, aware a gift is coming, curious to see. Perhaps impatient to begin, probably nervously-edged eagerness. What is the secret?

And this is the secret:
Christ lives in you. (Col 1:27)

The pentecost secret.

Hope

I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the holy spirit. Romans 15:13.

I keep coming back to this verse from Romans as I finish reading the book this week. The word hope caught my attention, as I try to puzzle out ideas about faith, hope and love for a weekend away later this year.

God = the source of hope.

Hope is future-orientated. It's what we look forward to, what we are waiting for. So often, the way we talk about our 'hopes' is with a sense that they may not eventuate. We hope to get particular things or go to certain places or achieve established goals. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes we keep trying and other times we just shift our sights. This is not the hope of God.

When we trust in God for our future, then we can have confident hope. We can be confident that God will take care of us, both here on earth and when we enter the place he is preparing for us in heaven. The holy spirit will remind us again and again of God's promises to seek and find us, to reconcile us to himself, to adopt us as his children, to make us part of Christ's body and work through us, to bring us to the Great City in heaven and place us among the worshipping throngs of people.

God does not make these promises lightly. He makes them as the lord of the universe who speaks and things happen. Hope in God is sure because He is trustworthy, and he is powerful to make it happen. Trust then leads on to confident hope. Trust also gives us joy and peace. Knowing our lives are in God's hands gives us an abundant contentment and a sure hope.

It's hardest to hope when things are falling apart around us. When a child dies, or when a partner leaves us. When we can't find a job or when the one we have seems to hard.

I find it hard to hope when its difficult to see God's work in the lives around me (especially mine). Maybe I don't trust that he can do things, that he will fulfill the promises he has made to rescue people. Sometimes my sin is to trust in my own wisdom for a situation, rather than looking to God and praying desperately for him to do what is needed.

Paul is praying that God will give people joy and hope, as they trust in Him. Then they will have overflowing, confident hope.