Ephesians 3 Prayer

This is my favourite passage of scripture, so I thought I'd have a little play with it this morning.

We kneel before you, Father

We’re named in your love, our whole family in you

In heaven and on earth.

Out of your glorious riches, too exquisite to behold

May you restore us with your power

Through your Spirit in our inmost being.

May you, Christ Jesus, abide in our deepest hearts

Through faith alone.

And may we who are rooted and grounded in you,

Established in the love which never gives up on us

May we grasp the power you freely bestow,

Together with all the saints, now and forever through history and eternity,

The power to seize hold of

How wide and long and high and deep

How immense and immeasurable and boundless and profound

How sweeping and towering and soaring and unfathomable

Is your love, Lord Jesus.

And may we know this great love that transcends wisdom

That outweighs knowledge

That eclipses learning –

That we may be filled to bursting point

Saturated with copious profusion

Completed with the fullness of you, our God.

Now to you – to you, our glorious God, to you who is able to do

Immeasurably

Boundlessly

Limitlessly more

Than all we could ever ask,

And all we could ever imagine,

All we could even conceive of or envisage or wildly dream of,

According to your power

At work within us, around us, without us, in front and behind,

Dancing with us, all-containing, everywhere we go and everything we do,

To you be the glory!

To you be the honour, the praise, the acclaim and the exaltation,

In the church, your bride waiting for you with baited breath,

And in Christ Jesus

Throughout all generations, through history, stretching back and forth to eternity,

And eternity.

Amen.

If they won't I will

There's a lot going about on Twitter at the moment about the death figures for those claiming ESA in the past five years. It makes for some fairly scary reading. It's prompted a  UN inquiry into grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights

I'm just completing an edit on my first novel. I've been a bit reticent about sharing it with people, because it feels all vulnerable to get out there and say 'I've written a book.' But the book speaks of my fears of what a society might look like if this kind of thing was taken to the extremes - if violations of rights were taken much, much further than even this report warns. It's a YA story set in a dystopian version of England. There. I said it. I'm not saying a lot more, as I'm in the process of sending queries to agents and waiting for the inevitable knock backs. I'll tell you more when I self-publish it on Kindle :)

I know my story, and others like it, are glimpses into something that couldn't possibly happen. Well, I hope they are. Remember the Nazis? Stalin? Mao? It doesn't take much to look around and see that humanity really can be capable of the worst of atrocities. We can look around at our fairly moderate country, and say 'don't be daft. Nothing like that could happen here,' but I wonder if it could, actually, and I wonder if some of these stories about folks dying after being found fit for work could point to the fact that we are going downhill. I'm not one to go in for hysteria or accuse IDS of longing for the Workhouse society, (some days), but we do need to respond as a society to these figures and what they mean - it's unclear, as yet. My book reflects my experience of how the weak and the vulnerable are sometimes treated, but I'd hope that as a society we would be making better choices about how we care for those who most need it.

Psalm 82:3

Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.

I say, #iftheywontIwill 

I hope that this investigation will be a trigger to something new, something good, where people in Government really listen to those struggling with sickness and disability, where voices are heard at last and where the weak are upheld and defended in our land. That's what I dream of. I need to ask myself how I can help make that happen. Retweeting stuff on Twitter isn't enough, is it? What can we do to really mean this? Praying is incredibly important, I believe, but prayer without action is not enough.

What am I doing? What are you doing?

Good Friday. Yes it is.

So we went along to an Hour before the Cross service earlier on which Adventure Bloke was leading. In between keeping the Adventurous Pair separate and relieving Adventure Boy of a smuggled in Pick Up Stick (you'd be amazed how much creativity one eight year old can achieve with one Pick up Stick) I found something resonating deep in my spirit.

I've not been finding much of that kind of resonation (is that a word?) of late. It's all been a bit...meh. I'm not sure why, but I've been somewhat lethargic in prayer and in belief in general, despite trying. Sometimes we just have to keep taking one step after another, despite things not seeming to happen, and that's what it's been like. I could ponder for a while on why we have seasons like this, which are in all honesty fairly rubbish, but I won't, because I simply want to rejoice at the wonder that is Good Friday and let my spirit a bit free again. It's Nice.

When Adventure Bloke was reading the reflections some words struck me as being so profound. Talking about the moment Jesus died, he referred to this moment not being all beautiful and glorious, but being steeped with misery, loneliness and isolation, of being forsaken by his Father. Things didn't suddenly get wonderful. Not only had Jesus taken every sin, every sadness, every bit of man's inhumanity to man, every tear, every loneliness, every call in the dark upon himself, but on top of this was faced with a sudden and utter desolation, that of separation from God. I suppose this is why we can know God is indeed in this mess with us. Jesus actually knows. He did it all and he knows. He isn't standing by someone's hospital bed saying in cliched manner 'I really know how you feel', because he actually does know. And in a deeper way than anyone else possibly can. This is part of the mystery of his death.

It amazes me and has floored me anew today. I have times when I feel God has departed and wonder where he has gone, especially in times of acute physical illness, but Jesus actually experienced God really departing. We'll never experience that, God will always be with us - even when we don't feel it. Our faith is in God as present with us. We have an amazing hope.

So I think Good Friday was and is pretty good really. I think God did something about the suffering in the world and continues too. I think God suffered in a totally inexplicable and profound way we can only begin to glimpse. But those glimpses give us something to hold on to, to hope, to keep taking those steps.

And I can't wait for Sunday.

Being (sometimes) beats doing.

I'm having a poorly week. Lungs infected again and this time it's hit me pretty hard. For nearly 4 days I've hardly been able to crawl out of bed, though I made it downstairs last night in a somewhat jelly like state. What it did mean is that I couldn't do anything on the To Do list I'd been stressing over at the end of last week, and had to leave things be.

Now, at first, this frustrates me greatly. I am far too much an activist to be ill, and yet I'm ill so much you'd have thought I'd have learned by now to sit back and be graceful and lovely or something. But instead I mutter and annoy Tim about the mess downstairs and the to do pile. That is unless it's a really bad day, in which case I'll say nothing at all and give him some peace ;)

This time however, I've found something different. I found I could connect with God again. How does this work? In the last few weeks I've been busy but praying, but finding God's presence just...well, wasn't there. Or was, but not anywhere I could find it. Even in the asking. But it's when I get really poorly I finally find what I have been searching for. Just gently, just whispers, senses, something changing in the atmosphere, and suddenly I know it. God's with me.

Now, I know, of course, that this is always the case, but let's face it, it's not something that's always tangible. So here's the question: Why is it that it's in the time of the most suffering that God reveals Godself more tangibly? God could just heal me, or something, but instead there's this amazing grace, this gentle love, this awesome presence weaving through my pain. I almost think these times are a gift in some way.

Now, this doesn't happen every time I'm ill, don't get me wrong. There will be those times I just feel devoid of it all and wonder where God is anyway and grumble and feel generally sorry for myself. But just occasionally there is this grace, if I allow it. And it's pretty good.

So where does that leave me? Is being poorly better than being well? Is being better than doing? Well....hmmmm. No, being ill is not better. I'd have happy lungs if I could. But I think we could all do well to stop sometimes. To slow down and be, and let God find us in that vulnerability and lack of activism.

When I get better and get up will I remember this? Maybe. Or maybe I'll start stressing about my to do list. There must be a balance somewhere, I feel...

Tapestry ponderings

At our Thursday coffee group today we were thinking about waiting for answers to prayers, and waiting for God to act, and what about when God doesn't, and all that. We looked at the stories of Sarah and Hagar in the bible, thinking about how Sarah must have felt, having been promised for years that she would have a baby who would be the first of many descendants, and yet the promise seemed unfulfilled, and impossible now, having gone through the menopause.

If I were Sarah, I think I'd have shouted at God a little. 'You promised...but nothing. Are you there? I've had to live through years of hurt and humiliation. How can I trust in you?' Can't blame her really for taking matters into her own hands and trying to make it happen by getting her servant to sleep with her husband. The wait was far from over then: Often I've read this as Sarah having Isaac pretty well straight after Hagar had Ishmael, but it struck me this morning that it was another thirteen years before the angels visited to remind them of the promise, and who knows how long after that before Sarah was actually pregnant. She must have given up any hope, really.

One of the girls at my group reminded me of a poem I'd heard yonks ago about tapestries. The premise being that we see the back of the tapestry, the mess, the chaos, and have no idea of the big picture. So what we go through often seems to make no sense, and we cannot understand why God doesn't answer our prayer as we hope, and why God lets us go through such times. We see glimpses of shapes and colours, and catch edges of hope and beauty. But with this image we will one day see the beautiful picture. It's in the chaos now that we need to trust in the promises, and let those tiny glimpses of hope carry us and enliven us and thrill us.

I found a version of this poem often used by Corrie Ten Boom, a Jewish Christian lady who survived one of the Nazi death camps, Ravensbruck. For her to utter such words takes them above the cliched, the monotone, the obvious. She saw more suffering there than most of us ever see, yet believed and trusted in God's great plan.

My life is but a weaving between my God and me,
I do not choose the colours; He works so steadily.
Oft times He weaves in sorrow, and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper, and me the underside.
Not till the loom is silent, and the shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas, and explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful in the weavers skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.

There is something profound in this, something that speaks of living through dark times, of not knowing why, of more than we understand. It's not a 'God always knows best, just accept his plan' thing. More of a 'there is so much more than this. So much we could never know, and we will trust, we will hope, we will know that one day we will see clearly.'

For now, I am content to see edges of sharp colours, shadows of exciting shapes. I'll probably keep shouting 'why?' at God, and questioning, and rightly so.  But I'll live in the hope seeing 'the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned'.


Thanks to Pauline for the tapestry analogy today :)