praise and music

My dad subscribes to New Zealand's Open Brethren magazine, the Treasury, which comes out monthly, and here is an excerpt from the editorial by Ken Edgecombe in July's edition:

C.S. Lewis claims that only damaged people fail to give praise. Everywhere,
he says, the wolrd rings with the sound: praise of weather, of wines, of dishes,
actors, pets, flowers, rare stamps, beetles, colleges, even politicians or
scholars; of any conceivable thing. In fact, he believes that the giving of
praise completes the experience. Other people have come to the same conclusion:
Elvis Presley asked (All Shook Up), "Who do you thank when you have
such luck?" The healthy person looks for a way to acknowledge the
admirable.

In that sense, God's people are offered a fullness of life. I always
admired Ed Hillary's Everest climb, but I was thrilled to meet him when I was at
high school, and his autograph is still in my book. We love to admire the music
of Handel, but what would it be like to hear the man himself play it? Surely
nothing would be more natural than to say "Isn't he great" if we watched the
maestro perform. And when we see the wonders of the created order, we are
invited to move beyond the creature and acknowledge the creator. It's the most
natural thing for a witness to do. "Let everything that has breath praise the
Lord."

To me, this was a really interesting thought. It's true; it seems natural for us to want to look beyond a brute fact of nature like a sunset and to ascribe some sort of responsibility for it somewhere. In fact, how can a sunset be beautiful at all if we were not given minds that comprehend beauty? In looking at things created by humans, it seems stunted to ignore the existence of an artist figure or a mind behind it, because that can add so much more significance to the thing itself. If you look at most modern art, this rings very, very true. There's no point in observing Duchamp's Urinal, for example, as a work of art unless you know what the artist intended it to be, or it's just a urinal, nothing more and nothing less. So why should it be any different for the created world that owes nothing to humans?

I was especially interested by the analogy using Handel. I don't really like analogies usually, as I think you can make anything sound plausible using analogy, but I think this one is a good one. It seems to me that music is a perfect example of the way we are naturally inclined to give praise. In watching an oratorio like Messiah, or perhaps a concerto or symphony, a portion of the praise falls to the music itself. But a larger portion falls to the musicians. Sound cannot help itself, it just is, in the same way as a sunset is just light, even if it's beautiful. The musicians' skill, however, cannot be ignored; they have worked hard and long to perform something that is pleasing. If they are particularly good, their portion of praise grows slightly, and they become like a mini-creator.

But. At the end of every performance of Messiah I have ever been to, the conductor holds up his score above his head for everyone to see, and the audience claps long and hard - because the true genius behind the performance is not the performers or the acoustics of the hall or the minds with which we understand the music, although they are all necessary. It is the person who formed the music from nothing, who gave it meaning and rhythm and beauty. It is almost the most moving moment of the performance for me.

So: what this says to me. Understanding life and living a good one is, in a sense, a praiseworthy goal, and if we ever achieve some success in this, we are entitled to some credit. Often our parents are too, as the ones who performed the crucial step of bringing us into the world and teaching us how to live - much like the musicians. Appreciating beauty in itself can never be a bad thing. But if we fail to look beyond these aspects of life to the very first cause, if we cannot look past the sunset to see the Creator, we are missing out on the most important aspects of it all.

urgent prayer request

To be brief: a woman I know has today been told she has days to live, an unexpected outcome of treatment she was having for cancer.

This woman was a friend of my mother's, who spent hours with her in Bible studies and at our church's craft group before my mother's death, but as far as I know this woman has never accepted Jesus as her Saviour. From what I have heard she's never quite got to the point of acceptance though she's come close to it several times. She's had some hard times in her life, not least being this cancer, and I think she finds it hard to get past them. She has two children who have become Christians; the youngest is only sixteen.

Since my mum's not here to pray for her and to visit her, I feel really strongly that I need to pray for her. For her recovery, which would now be miraculous, and her acceptance of Christ. I believe God can bring about the first, but if he doesn't, she needs to get to know him very quickly. Please pray for her. I know this sort of thing happens every day, and there are a lot of things to pray for. But please do.

Also, another woman at my church who is her friend has been visiting her every day in hospital lately, but her mother has taken ill and she has had to go away to another city for at least the weekend. I am praying then, also, that this woman will be able to come back to talk to the dying woman and be a friend to her in her last days, if that is God's will.

I seem to slip into Christianese when I talk about things like this. It may come across as a bit inane. Hopefully not; I'm actually really serious about everything I've said, and I believe it all.

a grudge

I have had, for a long time, a grudge of sorts against Pentecostals. I'm not saying this is fair, or unilateral, or anything - in fact, it would be hard to live with a bitter aversion to Pentecostalism as some of my best friends are Pentecostal, or go to a Pentecostal church (ha! this is sounding worse and worse and I'm just digging myself a deeper hole).

Please let me try to explain myself (properly): I went to a Christian high school, where a lot of people went to Pentecostal churches on Sunday, would talk about amazing miracles and how they spoke in tongues, and then the rest of the week be bratty, insincere, drunk teenagers. That, for a start, put me off, because I don't see how the Holy Spirit can give you such wonderful 'gifts' and then for the rest of the week you can forget about them. Obviously, this is not the behaviour of all or most Pentecostals, and I have long since got over that.

But for the purpose of this blog post, the more important thing that has annoyed me about Pentecostalism is the implication that if you 'have' the Holy Spirit, you're going to be showing it in some fairly wacky ways. Last year one of my very best friends would go on about this all the time, and I could tell she thought I wasn't that great or fulfilled a Christian because I don't speak in tongues or fall down screaming all over the place on the slightest encouragement, and I don't dance around when I sing at church, and my church is a quiet, fairly restrained place. I also have some pretty strong opinions about faith 'healers' such as Benny Hinn. While this perception of my 'spirituality' annoyed me, it also made me feel quite insecure about my acceptance by God. What if the Holy Spirit did only come to believers in that way? What if I was a cold, repellent being who hadn't yet come to true faith or true acceptance? Who is the Holy Spirit, anyway? (Although, then, I tended to think of him more as an 'it'.) Because I'm not the sort of Christian who is going to go to the other extreme and say that there's no such thing as speaking in tongues etc etc, I found it very hard to find a firm place to stand on the spectrum, and I've tended to be sometimes a little flippant, even rude, about the Pentecostal church.

Lately, however, I've begun (thank God) to feel very strongly that the Holy Spirit is always present in my life. Because some Pentecostals presented him in a very specific light, it took me a long time to come to a realisation that he'd never actually been gone from me - but now, I've realised that whenever I hear God talking to me, through the Bible or through my conscience or through people or through anything else, it's him. That seems such a simplistic, obvious thing to say, but it's taken a long time for me to realise it. As I write this, I'm not quite sure how to put into words exactly what this means to me. It's like I've had a friend hanging round me all my life whom I've only just discovered, a personality that has only just made itself known to me, although I've felt him there all along - it's just I always assumed I had to label him God the Father or Jesus Christ, because I wasn't experiencing him in a way that made me inclined to writhe around on the floor. I suppose it's a bit like that footprints in the sand poem that people always quote.

So this is my grudge against the Pentecostal church (although it's not really a grudge, perhaps more of a concern): I'm only just getting to know someone who has actually been there for a long time, because the way they portrayed him didn't add up with my experience. Who says the Holy Spirit needs to work in the same way, every time? Not the Bible, that's for sure. I think the fact, also, that Christians feel forced to categorise God into three neat little boxes (that's the Spirit, that's the Father, and that's the Son) goes entirely against our own doctrine and the Word of God - God is not an entirely understandable God. He is mysterious. This doesn't mean he's unknowable, but there are things about him that we don't need to understand quite yet. That is what I was trying to do, unsuccessfully.

So I would encourage any Pentecostals who may read this (not that I'm saying every Pentecostal fits into the same box, either) to be very careful about the way you present God. (I would also encourage the other extreme not to scoff at acts of the Holy Spirit; it's just that the former view has presented more problems for me personally.)

shame

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the
salvation of everyone who believes. Romans 1v16.

Tuesday nights are Navs nights (= Navigators). I get in the car and drive my little self off to uni at 7pm, and meet with a whole lot of other Christian students. Then we all go off in small groups to different flats and do a Bible study. We have just started going through Romans, chapter by chapter.

The last few weeks have been rather depressing for me. There's a lot of stuff that seems to be going wrong for people. It seems a bit attention-seeking for me to say that it's depressing for me when it's all happening to other people, but that is seriously how it's been. Just knock after knock after knock for people I know and care about, or know a little, or don't know at all.

I've had a few crises in my past and here I am, still a Christian, going reasonably strong. So really, I should have sorted out any issues I have with the topic of suffering. The thing is, when it comes to my suffering, I don't have to try and be sensitive to myself or anything like that. I am aware of how I feel and so I can be grateful to God for many things despite the things that don't make me happy. However, it's not so simple to tell others to be grateful, especially when what they're going through is about five hundred times worse.

I'm not the sort of person who feels embarrassed to say that I am a Christian, most of the time. I'm not particularly interested in how that may change someone's opinion of me. I'd rather they knew, actually. All the same, there's part of me that gets very, very embarrassed that I subscribe to a belief system that says yes, suffering sucks, but there's something more important than that. It's so easy to slip into all the little cliches that Christians come up with to explain away suffering - everything happens for a reason - God is in control - sometimes God answers prayer with a no - etc etc etc. They just embarrass me now and I don't want to admit that I am so arrogant as to pretend I can get something meaningful out of suffering. And then I start getting very, very confused. Because I do believe God is in control. I just don't know why he doesn't choose to intervene sometimes. I'm studying the military resistance to Hitler at the moment, and Hitler escaped assassination by the minutest of chances a significant number of times - why did God allow Hitler to be lucky? And my mind becomes a huge tangled spider's web. And I don't want to try and explain suffering to someone who is suffering, because I know that nothing I say can explain it.

Yesterday, for the Navs study, Romans 1v16 glaringly stood out to me. There are times when it has been very dark and scary for me over the last few years. But somehow I didn't just drop the gospel, because for me, beyond all the darkness, the gospel trumps death. Beyond all the suffering, all the contradictions and confusions, the gospel is a powerful thing and the only thing in the world that could ever offer hope to get through death and suffering.

So my conclusion is: I don't need to explain suffering yet. I'm sure to have more question marks about it and I'm sure to find it difficult. But I do have to trust God to pull me past it, and I do have to stop being ashamed of a faith that dares to say that something about suffering is meaningful.

the heavenly man

I succumbed to temptation a few weeks ago and finally bought myself a copy of this book - The Heavenly Man. Written with Paul Hattaway, this is a memoir-type book about Brother Yun, one of the Chinese house church leaders who is now living in exile from China. As it turns out, the urge to spend money this time wasn't so much temptation as a jolly good idea.

Several people had recommended the book to me before, and it seems like everyone has read it. I was therefore a bit dubious about reading it, because I thought it might be a Purpose Driven Life-type book - which was an okay book, and the forty days thing was fantastic for our church, but the book itself didn't grab me as that amazingly helpful personally. Anyway, I'm digressing (as usual). The Heavenly Man is in no way a fashionable but vacuous Christian read. Be prepared, if you read this, to really want to change your life. So it wasn't written by a Tolstoy or a Rushdie. It doesn't need to be because the story is so amazing. I'm not going to go into the details because that would ruin it for you, but this Brother Yun is one impressive person, and his story of the Chinese church is amazing, encouraging and humbling. His personal sufferings for the faith are heroic, and he doesn't hold back an opinion on how the western churches are tending these days. But at the same time, I did not come out of this book feeling wicked and lukewarm. Instead, I almost wanted to be persecuted so I could have a chance to stand up for God. Is that masochistic? Maybe I should rephrase. I came out of this book excited, because God really does exist, and because I have a chance every day to represent God in a hostile world. A Big but exciting responsibility. So far I doubt I've lived up to it but this is one of those few books that I could actually say has changed my life, and not feel corny saying it. Highly recommended.

Bonhoeffer

Okay, so - almost a week ago I handed in an essay for my history class on the response of the German churches to the Nazi regime. I have been planning for a while to write about it on this blog because I found it so absorbingly fascinating, but I have an aversion to posting my essay on here, for anyone to plagiarise, and also I think it would be pretty boring for a blog-reader to wade through 2,597 words of essay-style writing.

My conclusion, all the same, was this: that the churches in general did not respond admirably to Hitler. It was embarrassing and puzzling reading what happened in Germany, although in many ways I can see exactly how such inaction came about. The only times the church as a whole, or the majority of its leaders, acted against Nazi policy was when it threatened their own independence. Not much was said against genocide; nothing was said against the persecution of Communists. Some of their actions did force the regime to change things, such as stopping the euthanasia programme, but all this shows, to me, is that had the church done more, they could possibly have prevented the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. This essay was obviously therefore very challenging to my own standards. How would I respond? Having done more study on it, I'm not too quick to say that I would definitely have responded better. I just don't know. What they were up against was just so frightening and threatening in its brutality; why the church in the main responded the way it did is understandable, though shocking.

Which is why I have developed a deep admiration for certain individuals within the German churches who consistently opposed the Nazis, at great personal risk, from a strong ideological standpoint. The one that came up in my study the most was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although there are others as well who were equally obnoxious to the Nazis. Having seen how many Christians behaved in those times, it makes people like Bonhoeffer, Lichtenberg, and Delp, who died rather than betray their faith, stand out even more. I just wanted to share some of the things about Bonhoeffer which amazed and fascinated me the most when I came across him in textbooks. The following is quoted/paraphrased from pages 205-207 in On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler, by Theodore S. Hamerow (Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997):

From the very beginning Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a consistent and persistent
opponent of National Socialism. From the start he argued Nazism was incompatible
with Christian beliefs. After the establishment of the Third Reich he had to be
a little more careful. But there could be no question about his views. In an
article ('The Confessing Church and the Ecumene') in summer 1935, he deplored
the erosion of sense of religious universality within German Protestantism. "The
fact attested in the New Testament and in the symbolical books that the Church
of Christ does not stop at national and racial boundaries but transcends them
has been all too easily forgotten and denied under the assault of a new
nationalism."
In January 1936 his eulogy at his grandmother's funeral became a
bitter condemnation of Nazi teachings. "With her a world is disappearing for us
that we all somehow carry within us..." Her last years were saddened, moreover,
by "the great sorrow she felt regarding the fate of the Jews in our nation, a
fate she shared and pitied." And yet, "that legacy, for which we thank her,
imposes a duty on us." Those listening must have understood what he meant.
The most eloquent and moving protest against Nazism's inhumanity was
Bonhoeffer's sermon of July 11, 1937, concerning Psalm 58, the "Psalm of
Vengeance". He lamented the "evil times", "when the world silently allows
injustice to take place, ... and when the persecuted community in its greatest
needs calls on God for help and on men for righteousness and no word is heard on
earth to provide it with justice." Bonhoeffer repeated the words of the psalmist
denouncing acquiescence of society in wickedness: "Do ye indeed speak
righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?" He
condemned Nazi bigotry without naming victims - there was no need to. It was
enough that they were "human beings who are the creatures of God like you, who
feel pain and misery like you..." Yet those in power offered them only "pitiless
and biased" words, judging them by their status, not justice. Bonhoeffer had
become an impassioned Old Testament prophet decrying the iniquity of the proud
and mighty.

I don't know about you, but having studied a bit more of what Nazis did to those who opposed them, reading something like that sends shivers up my spine. As soon as I read this part of the textbook, I got out my Bible and looked up Psalm 58, and realised how extremely apt it was for the Nazi leaders, and how courageous one would have to be to use it against them. Here it is:

Do you rulers indeed speak justly?
Do you judge uprightly among men?
No, in your heart you devise injustice,
and your hands mete out violence on the earth.
Even from birth the wicked go astray;
from the womb they are wayward and speak lies.
Their venom is like the venom of a snake,
like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears,
that will not heed the tune of the charmer,
however skillful the enchanted may be.

Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
tear out, O LORD, the fangs of the lions!
Let them vanish like water that flows away,
when they draw the bow, let their arrows be blunted.
Like a slug melting away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child, may they not see the sun.

Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns -
whether they be green or dry - the wicked will be swept away.
The righteous will be glad when they are avenged,
when they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
Then men will say,
"Surely the righteous still are rewarded;
surely there is a God who judges the earth."

I don't know how well I've done at painting a little picture of people like Bonhoeffer. I don't know as much about him as I'd like to know. All the same, it thrills me reading such passages of the Bible to see people in modern days acting on them, and it saddens me at the same time to see people ignoring them, as the majority did in Nazi Germany. The example of Bonhoeffer and other such martyrs makes me want to stand up just as he did, and I hope and pray that if I had to I could.

attack mode

I happen to have been going through a pretty stressful few weeks. I've just been pushing myself very hard with my studies, so I am always sleep-deprived and tired. Then the whole start of the university year - there's all these things to organise and get sorted. I'm working ten hours a week tutoring, which actually takes up quite a lot of time and effort and I'm beginning to wonder how I'm going to get through the whole semester.

The thing I've found the hardest is this: I am doing two English literature papers, on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Drama and on the Twentieth Century Novel. Just about every second class the main topic of discussion is "what is silly about Christianity" or "what is hypocritical about Christians". So it's not phrased like that, quite. And I'm probably exaggerating the problem. And the lecturers are actually quite fair-minded and we're only critiquing the religion featured in the books, ostensibly. But - it does always turn into a discussion about religion in general, by students in the class, and basically I feel like every day I am under attack. I don't want to be melodramatic but I'm actually finding it really, really hard. This constant attack on the mind. Essentially I can't defend myself or I'll be told I take things too seriously, I need to be more tolerant, etc etc. The only times I have tried to join in the discussion people look at me like I'm mad. Examples:

Drama lecturer: "Where does the saying 'the truth will set you free' come from?"
Me: "The Bible."
Lecturer: "I don't know if Karl Marx would agree with you about that."
Me: "No, it's an actual verse in the Bible. 'You will know the truth and the truth will set you free'. Jesus said it."
Lecturer: "Oh. Well, I was meaning the Enlightenment." Continues.

Novel lecturer: "Why is it bad when religion and politics mix?"
Random girl, oh-so-originally: "Well, look at all the wars religion has caused, throughout history."
Me: "But if you look at Nazi Germany, it was the Church's refusal to get involved in politics that laid it open to criticism later."
Everyone looks at me strangely and then continues without a response.
[Actually I agree that religion and politics shouldn't mix but this conversation had been going on for about twenty minutes and it was irritating me!]

I am just having trouble getting out of my defensive mode. I don't know when to let things go and when to stand up for what I believe. It's very confusing.

if it's allowed...

Here is a list of some of the people I would like to meet in heaven. Assuming it's possible to meet other people in heaven, and leaving out the obvious choices of family and friends, I make this list without passing any judgement on who has gotten there; this is simply a list of dead people I would like to meet, who are not Bible characters, and since I feel half-confident most of the time that I'm going to heaven, it seems a likely place to meet them.

1) Of course, Jane Austen tops the list. This is the one person who I really, really hope that I'll get to meet one day. When I read her books I feel like I'm reading something a friend has written. She is always there, hidden behind the words, with a little smile on her face. I know that sounds very, very weird - it just is that way.

2) C. S. Lewis. This is probably not a very original choice. All I know is that I love the Narnia Chronicles and one of my most vivid ideas of heaven itself comes from the last in the series, The Last Battle. The things he has written have helped me so much, and I think he would be a very interesting person to have a chat and a beer with. Besides that, the writing group I am a member of is named after his!





3) Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Usually known as Mendelssohn. I have no idea what Mendelssohn's religious leanings were, but when I play or listen to music of his such as 'Hear My Prayer' - especially 'Hear My Prayer' - I am absolutely certain that he understands the call of the human heart for God. It is quite possibly my favourite piece of classical music, and definitely my favourite vocal classical music. I would like to talk to him and tell him how much his music means to me. In this category, special mention goes to Handel. His Messiah has also influenced me very much, and I would love to discuss it with him.


4) Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre is one of my very favourite novels, and I will always feel indebted to Charlotte Brontë for creating characters so compelling despite being unattractive physically. I think it's taught me a lot about writing well. Also, I am very curious as to why she disliked Jane Austen's writing and if she ever changed her mind about that! Special mention in this category goes to William Thackeray, whom I would like to meet, and discuss Vanity Fair with.




5) Oscar Wilde. He strikes me as one of the cleverest, funniest people that have ever graced the English language with their wit. I think he must have been an electric person to be around but at the same time I don't see him as a self-obsessed or selfish man. Not that I would have any fair judgment of the case at all, but that's just the feeling one gets. I also have a lot of sympathy for him, and what became of him. I see it as very sad that someone so talented and clever became so unacceptable to other human beings.

Other special mention goes to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Grieg, Bach, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Wycliffe, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Corrie ten Boom, Gandhi, and probably many more that I cannot think of right now.

gossip

The other day I met up with a friend from church, JP, for coffee, and, as you do, we got talking. Sooner or later, she started telling me what someone #1 had told her what someone #2 had told them. A certain man at our church is rather disliked by someone #1 for saying something slightly unkind about their father, and someone #1 told my friend that this man was getting an African mail order bride who was somewhere between the ages of 12 and 20, who couldn't speak English, whom he'd never met before, and who was being paid for in cattle and sheep. I found this almost unbelievable and shocking, and just a little bit disgusting, and listened in awe.

But when I went away, I started feeling really guilty for letting JP tell me this. It was absolutely none of my business and I shouldn't have listened. Someone #1 has a bit of a knack for exaggeration and I shouldn't have even considered it to be reliable until I heard anything about this that wasn't gossip.

Well, tonight I heard from the man himself, and I came away feeling even more guilty. The woman this man might become engaged to is African, but apart from that, nothing JP told me was true. She speaks good English, she and this man met in Africa, she's definitely over 20, and she is most definitely not a mail order bride. I can't believe that the gossip I heard was so far removed from the truth. Usually gossip has some element of truth in it, but this - definitely not. It's really taught me a lesson. I guess one of the things I dislike the most about gossip is that it leaves you unable to form your own impression of a person; your first acquaintance with them will always be marred by someone else's negative words. In this case, there wasn't even an ounce of truth in what I heard. I can really see why God hates gossip so much now. From now on, I want to really try never to gossip myself, or to allow anyone to gossip to me.

persecution western-style

Okay, so last night on the news, or rather, the discussion show that follows the news, they featured an Englishman who has been writing a few articles about the racism issue raised by the famous Celebrity Big Brother scandal in Britain. One of the things he said struck me quite a lot. He said that a lot of people say that making fun of Christians on comedy shows, etc etc, is actually disguised racism. Why are we allowed to do this when we're not allowed to make fun of Muslims, Hindus, etc? His answer was that the context is different; Christians are already in a position of power and don't need to be protected. However, when Muslims or different races are attacked by the media or by popular entertainment, we need to think about the effect this might have on the way, for example, schoolkids treat children from other cultures.

To some extent, I think he makes a very good point. It is very true that Christians are seen as more normal, and living in pseudo-Christian cultures, us in the west get off quite lightly when all is said and done. That's why it's worse to lightly mock people who don't have anyone to defend them, or don't have the political or social strength to ride through such attacks with ease. Personally, I quite enjoy the satires done of Christians. Christian authors themselves have done this extremely well, such as Adrian Plass, and I don't mind non-Christians mocking us as well. Satire is an extremely good tool to expose hypocrisy in the Church, which surely we should be trying to rid ourselves off. In my opinion, we should take such mockery as a spur to make us rid ourselves of all the things they are accusing us of. Only then can we complain of persecution.

All the same, there's a point where mockery goes too far. I hate, hate, hate it when someone mocks Christ himself. I often hear non-Christians saying, it's only a joke, don't be so wound up, etc etc. It's just that they are mocking someone who doesn't deserve to be mocked. Allright, so I have to accept mockery of myself because I am not perfect. But mocking Jesus is like mocking the ideal. How can one do that successfully? Anyway, most of the satire people create about Jesus just displays their glaring ignorance of the man himself. I can't explain the way I feel about this fully. But whatever the context is - whether the Church is powerful or not - I don't like it when people mock Christ himself.

me, myself and I

[spoken by John the Baptist] The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.
The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. John 3vv29-31 NIV.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire". Hebrews 12vv28-29 NIV.

Lately I've started writing down my prayers to God in what you could probably call a prayer diary. I've never been great at praying because I get distracted so easily but this is a really helpful and important step for me and I hope it lasts.

The point is, however, that I've had the unavoidable problem of seeing the sort of things I write and the sort of things I ask God. Me, me, me. Despite being so exhausted today that I had to take strong black coffee to church in a thermos, the service today reminded me of the sort of God my God is. A consuming fire who doesn't exist merely to placate me from my worries about the future and to give a big tick to the things I've already chosen to do. I don't want to be the sort of Christian anymore who is always thinking about myself. So I've had a few problems. It's not original. God hears it every day. I want to have a real, exciting, consuming relationship with God, and yet I don't want to enter into it lightly because I know what being consumed by God entails - thinking about others first. Right now I have to think out and decide what my priorities are. I have to pray and find guidance from God that doesn't, as I already mentioned, simply verify the things I want to do already. I have a few plans for the next decade or so that I haven't really run past God, and I don't want to enter so far into them that I can't extricate myself when I realise I'm not where I'm supposed to be.

I just counted and there are twenty-seven "I"s or "me"s in those last two paragraphs, not including the one at the start of this sentence. Let me rephrase it into one short sentence. I have to decide how much I want my life to be about me. In some ways it's very tempting. In other ways I already know it doesn't fulfil me or make me any happier. I will make no promises to God because he takes them very seriously but from now on I want to change.

Christmas + death

Okay, so I grant you that it's a little late to be talking about Christmas. By this time of year, everyone is heartily sick of Christmas. (And then Easter eggs creep into the shops.)

It's just that Christmas has been a little different for my family this year. My mother died two days after Christmas last year, so memories of last Christmas, which was not like Christmas at all, were bound to crop up. Around the same time last year a few people from my church died. This year, some people at church also lost family members, including a tiny newborn baby, and one of my good friends lost her father just two days before Christmas.

It always seems to shock people when things like that happen around Christmas. It just seems such a bad time. As one of the only annual, major celebrations we have, if something happens then, it sticks with us every time we celebrate in years to come. Heck, my mum's death has stuck with me every single day over the past year.

All the same, as much as I was expecting the Christmas of 2006 to be pretty bad, it just didn't turn out that way. It probably helped that we were away from home. But at the same time, there's something about so much death suddenly coming at Christmas, for myself and the people I know, that makes me see so much more clearly why it was that Jesus needed to be here. Which isn't a bad thing, when you come to think of it.

Death is not the opposite of Christmas. It is the reason for it. When I'm getting sick of corny Christmas jingles and materialism, death is the wake-up call that makes me see through to something more raw, more essential, about Christmas.

the power of Jesus

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life - only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. - John 10vv17-18.

One day as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law, who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, were sitting there. And the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said, "Friend, your sins are forgiven."
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, "Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?"
Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, "Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...." He said to the paralyzed man, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, "We have seen remarkable things today." - Luke 5vv17-26

In thinking about these passages, and about other ones like the raising of Lazarus from the dead, I can't help thinking about my own response to the power of Christ. If Christ can raise dead men and cure paralytics and rise from the dead himself - how then can I question my own saved-ness? (Okay, so that's not a word!) So often I find myself doing or thinking something disgusting and wrong and I can't see how I am possibly allowed to get away with it if I ask for forgiveness. But as Christ said in the second passage quoted above, he has proved his authority, his enormous power to forgive sins, so if he says he has forgiven me, who am I to doubt it?

Not so easy to get into my head sometimes, but it helps me when I really sit down and think about it. Being forgiven goes against almost everything you learn in life in this world. It is sometimes very hard to accept a gift like it; a crucial part of the accepting of the gift is your acknowledgement of your own unworthiness. But I have a feeling if there comes a time when I never doubt my own acceptance into God's family, the power of Christ will be able to flow so much more fully that I could really do some amazing things.

My brother-in-law was telling me once about a girl he was talking to at his work. She said, "I could never be a Christian because I hate all the don't-do-this stuff." He replied (and he thinks that the Holy Spirit really must have been talking through him as he couldn't come up with this sort of stuff on his own) that it's not so much about what you don't do, it's more about what you can do when you have God in your life. I really like that story.

truth

I have been three weeks in a summer English course at uni, on New Zealand Literature. The thing that is starting to annoy me a little (or sometimes a lot) about it is that the lecturer seems to have very strong opinions on the nature of truth and to always read the poetry and prose we read in a way that affirms his ideas. It's like on one hand he's saying, there is no such thing as truth, and a whole lot of external factors influence what we think we see. Truth is relative and unknowable. On the other, the way he says things makes you feel like an anti-intellectual if you don't agree with him. Which cancels out all his ideas to begin with.

In some ways I agree with him. Humans are so blinkered by various things about us; our culture, our time period, our genetic makeup, our experiences, our emotions... We cannot trust ourselves to come up with an absolute and all-encompassing truth.

However, what he refuses to acknowledge, or allow the possibility of, is the existence of a being or beings who could reveal truth to us. This is what Christians believe. Sometimes we are accused of being blinded or hiding away from reality or being brainwashed, because we are prepared to accept some things on authority. It seems to me, however, that people, like my lecturer, who advance opinions like this are blatantly contradicting themselves. To explain: My lecturer says a) that human beings cannot possibly come up with an objective truth; but he also says b) that if we consider accepting truth from someone who can, we are not being reasonable or logical. If it's impossible, how can you discern truth at all except on authority? How can you "logically" come up with an argument against God if you have already admitted yourself incapable of seeing things properly?

I have a very high regard for logic and for reason. I do think, however, that they can only take you so far. No one is objective all the time. At some point, you have to accept someone else's judgement, or lose your mind in a morass of contradictory arguments.

Ahhh, postmodernism. What lengths we could go to in discussing it. But it is time for me to go to bed. Goodnight.

bad words

Here's a quote from Tony Campolo that got me thinking - how compassionate am I really?

"The United Nations reports that over ten thousand people starve to death each day, and most of you don't give a shit. However, what is even more tragic is that most of you are more concerned about the fact that I just said a bad word than you are about the fact that ten thousand people are going to die today."

I am a very idealistic person and I would like to think that I have compassion for the starving and attempt to do practical things to help them.

This really made me think about myself, however, because what stood out for me about the first sentence of this was not that ten thousand people die of starvation every day.

the future

One verse has been sticking in my head the last few weeks:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. - 1 John 3:2

1) We're going to be like him. Hooray! No more fighting, fighting, fighting against myself. No more battling myself to be the person I want to be. When I think about heaven like that I can almost start to catch a glimpse of what it perhaps means, in part, to be there, to feel that my sinful nature has no hold over me anymore, and the fighting is done with.

2) But even more interesting to me is that we are going to be like him, because we will see him as he really is. When I think about this, it makes me wonder... just setting eyes on Christ (figuratively speaking as I have no idea whether we have eyes or not in heaven) is apparently enough to stop us even considering sin ever again. In the past I've sometimes had an experience that has made me think, "Phew. I am never doing that again." But it's never been enough to stop me. The sight of Christ has got to be pretty amazing to make me become like him. The mind boggles. Also, what sort of scales are over my eyes now so that I can't see Jesus as he really is? What's stopping me?

Panic

I'm a firm believer in being absolutely honest when it comes to spiritual matters - although I may fall short on my own principle many times. So it embarrasses me to admit it, but sometimes I feel very, very scared about the future. Not just my future on this world, but I start thinking, what if I'm wrong about what happens after death? What if? What if?

Somewhere in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis talks about this, and what he said helped me a lot. I've just been looking for the quote but can't find it, so I will paraphrase it as best I can: Everyone has moments of panic or disbelief, or a feeling of abandonment. This does not change the fact that you have made a choice and a decision to follow Christ. The moments of disbelief are a matter of moods; but the choice is a choice with a foundation.

In fact, Lewis also writes, in The Screwtape Letters:
Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the most faint and mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. ... He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. ... He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

I find these particular quotes very empowering. They are part of the reason I don't want to tell lies about my spiritual state. Sometimes it can feel, when you are with other Christians, that everyone else is a spiritual giant, in hourly communion with God, while you are a weak miserable little imposter who needs to pretend to be like them. If, however, we are more honest about our feelings, perhaps we will intimidate less people, and be able to personally face up to our feelings, and as Lewis says, still obey.

Besides, the fact that someone like C. S. Lewis, one of the most famous Christians of the twentieth century, felt like this at numerous times makes me feel a lot more relaxed about my own spiritual state.