Category Archives: Reflection

Advent Reflections #2 – Strange place

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“What a strange place to put such a special baby”.
These were the words of my 7yr old daughter when considering Jesus being laid in a manger. I later discovered she was quoting a line from her upcoming school Christmas play, but the line struck a chord.

It is indeed a very strange place to put such a special baby.
But that is perhaps the point. The two ways in which the power of the universe – the Logos – could have entered this world in a noticeable way would have been to either come in splendour and glory, a bit like the angelic host appearing to the shepherds, or in a remarkably understated and strange way, a bit like being laid in a manger. He chose the latter. And that was the point.

When the first angel appeared to the shepherds he said, “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” Luke 2:12 ESV
The ‘strange place’ becomes the sign.

The shepherds quickly found the baby and the manger and it seems that the manger wasn’t so strange to them and helped them go directly to where the baby might be.
In contrast the heavenly apparition of the angels was strange and filled them with fear, but the ‘strange place’ of the manger was neither strange nor fearful.
It was a place of great joy which resulted in wondrous worship.

Is our response to Jesus being laid in the manger one of strangeness and surprise, or a place where we know we can find the One we’re searching for?

This Advent may the ‘strange place’ of the manger be a place of discovery.
May you find your saviour, not in the familiar and safe places, but in the unfamiliar and unexpected places.
May it be a sign to you, as it was for the shepherds, that leads you to the place where you will find Him.

Advent Reflections #1 – Like us, like Him

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Advent is all about waiting. Waiting for a ‘coming’, for an arrival.

For most of us the focus is on the immediate, near future; the 24-day countdown to the ‘arrival’ of Christmas Day.

For Christians the focus tends to be more on the past with the arrival of the Logos coming into the world, taking on skin and fat and becoming the newborn baby we know as Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem.

Whilst both of these foci of Advent are valid and good, there’s another focus which is equally valid, and arguably far more exciting.
This is the Advent of Jesus coming again to bring this age to a close and to establish, forever, the life to come in the age to come. It’s integral to our understanding of who Jesus is and what He has done for us that He returns. It’s the natural end to a supernatural reality of resurrection. It reminds us that Jesus isn’t just a Divine entity from another realm, but that He also remains today the wounded flesh-and-blood man who resurrected from the dead.
If His first Advent was significant because God became like one of us, then His second Advent is significant because now we become like Him; the “perishable putting on the imperishable”.

This Advent, may you awaken to the truth that God became like you so that you might become like Him.
May you find yourself waiting for His coming with joyful anticipation and expectation.
May you know that He who began a good work in you will bring it to perfect shalom.

Believe

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I want you to believe something.

Before I tell you what it is I want to tell you why I want you to believe it.

I don’t want you to believe it because I want you to, but because YOU will want to.
I don’t want you to believe it because I wish it was real, but because it IS real.
I don’t want you to believe it because I say it’s true, but because it IS true.
I don’t want you to believe it because I can PROVE it, or that anyone can’t DISPROVE it – that wouldn’t be belief, that would be knowing.
I don’t want you to believe it because your family, your friends, your peers or someone you respect believes it, but because deep down you know it’s right for YOU.
I don’t want you to believe it because it’s simply A truth, but because it’s a BEAUTIFUL truth.

So what is it that I want you to believe?

I want you to believe what you know to be true:
That we have an amazing gift of life, full of opportunities to love and act lovingly and yet we more often choose to act selfishly and hurtfully.
That we sometimes find that when we do our best it simply doesn’t last.
That even when we’re at our best we remain our very worst, because all the bad things we do don’t simply disappear, however much we try and atone for them.

I want you to believe something else which is also true; in fact it’s somehow MORE true.

I want you to believe that although we know we can be good AND bad, hopeful AND despondent, up AND down, loving AND hateful, that ultimately it’s OK.

It’s OK because you’re loved – just as you are – and love always has the power to bring beauty out of ugliness, light out of darkness, hope out of despair.
Love ALWAYS wins.

You’re loved by the same love that holds everything in being.
Whatever idea, name, shape or concept you have for “GOD”, HIS transcendent reality is one which IS love, and which comes to us not as a FORCE of love, but as a loving PERSON.

The love which you are loved by is completely personal and deeply intimate.

This love cannot be measured, or reasoned or even described, but it can be felt, and every one of us has at one time – or many times – felt this love, and it has felt completely personal.

When you see the splash of yellows as Autumn breaks out in the trees.
When you gasp, breathless, looking down on clouds from a mountain summit.
When the sky is on fire with outrageous pinks and oranges as the sun sets again to rise again tomorrow.
When you discover that mathematics is… BEAUTIFUL and how pine cones, triangles, circles and curves all share a universal language of perfect complementarity.
When another human looks into your eyes and tells you – with delight – that they love you.
When you experience that first kiss and your heart is thumping more life out than you knew you had in you.
When your child is born and the emotion is like the final crescendo of a symphony written in the outer cosmos visiting your soul in a momentous surge.
When you hold your dying mother’s hand and reassure her that she can go now.
When you see a child dying in some remote place ‘over there’ and your heart is moved to compassion ‘right here’.
When you look into the depth of your own soul and know that you are more – significantly more – than your skin and bones and even your ‘consciousness’.

This is a love which cannot be described but can be seen at work.
This is a love which cannot be rationalised but which makes perfect sense – sense of itself and sense of everything else as well.
This is a love which comes to each one of us to know and be known – person to person.

This love is from the ONE who IS love and who has created everything IN love and FOR love.
This love is so spacious that it can hold belief and unbelief in perfect tension and not be improved on or reduced by either.
This love is so embracing that you cannot place yourself outside of it however little you may love yourself, or however little others may love you.
This love does not understand labels, or lifestyle choices, or orientations, or belief systems because all it understands is to love anyway.
This love cannot be contained, or owned by anyone, or any one group, or any one religion but is always, perpetually seeking to expand our understanding of what love is and to invite us to love likewise.

This love is not abstract, just as the GOD who is love is not abstract either.
This love has taken on flesh and blood, like you and me, and continues to take on flesh and blood whenever and wherever we receive and express this love.
This love has come into the world but the world has not received it; at least not fully.
This love has come to be like one of us, with all our limitations and all our doubts and fears:
Yeshua of Nazareth, born into poverty in a land under foreign Imperial occupation, into a religion which had truth but knew not the love which sets men free.
Yeshua of Nazareth who healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, reached out to the outcasts and even raised dead people to life, and yet who was put to death because his radical demands to love GOD and to love your neighbour were simply too radical to stomach.
Yeshua of Nazareth who loved his enemies even as they were putting him to death, and who entrusted himself to that universal, transcendent love as he drew his final breath.
Yeshua of Nazareth who didn’t stay dead but resurrected to prove that love IS stronger than death and that life IS more than what we know.
Yeshua of Nazareth who left us so that we might live out the same love for ourselves and follow his way of love.
Yeshua of Nazareth who IS that same GOD who IS love and who is coming back as that same man who walked out of his own tomb to finally redeem all things and all people into an eternal reality of love.
Yeshua of Nazareth who is here, now, every time we help someone in need; every time we feed the hungry; every time we clothe the naked; every time we fight for the cause of the vulnerable and the outcast; every time we forgive and are forgiven; every time we love our enemies and not only those who love us.
Yeshua of Nazareth who today takes on flesh and blood in you and me when we receive and express that same love for which he first came into the world.

I want you to believe that Yeshua is alive today, in you and me, in the love we know and the myriad ways in which we experience it.
I want you to believe that, because it’s love, Yeshua makes no demands of us and will not compel us to anything.
I want you to believe that, because it’s love, you will want to worship, and follow, and love-likewise because that’s the nature of what this love is like and what it can do with a fractured life like ours.

I want you to believe because deep, deeper down, you have always known this love and known this truth.
I want you to believe because belief awakens us to the truth, and opens our eyes to see the light.
I want you to believe because this is good news which makes all the bad news you’ve ever known seem somehow smaller now.
I want you to believe because I have believed and I want you to have what I have, except that what you will have will be entirely yours, as personal as your fingerprints and your DNA.

Just believe and know for yourself what that freedom you didn’t know you were yearning for actually feels like.
Just believe and receive that love which has always been there for you, and always will be.

Moment

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Slow beat walking,
Breathing each breath,
Seeing everything in sight;
Letting each moment have
Its unrepeated moment.
We think that speed is
Measured as distance covered
Divided by the time it takes,
But often in speed we do not
Take the time
And we instead divide ourselves,
And the only distance we cover
Is that which takes us further and
Farther away from ourselves
And our eternal Father.
In the slowness you can see
That although the bush is burning
It is not consumed.
In the slowness you can join the
Swell of each moment as myriad
Of things and thoughts praise
GOD who has made that moment
That moment.
In the pause you can hear the
Applause of angels giving tribute
To the wisdom and power and glory
And strength that sustains
The universe moment by still,
Small, momentary moment.

Burning bush

Diving for pearls

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As I was lying in bed the other night, on my way to falling asleep, somewhere between semi-conscious thought and dream I saw a scene in my mind’s eye of a pearl diver.
What was apparent to me was that the depth at which the diver had swum was at the utter limit of his reach, experience and breath.

In this scene, at the very edge of the diver’s limit, just inches beyond, lay the perfect pearl – the parabolic “pearl of greatest price” (Matt 13:45-46).
In order to reach the pearl the diver would have to go beyond the limit of his breath, beyond the limit of his experience, and risk blacking out, or even dying if he was to possess the pearl.
It was in going beyond his limits that the pearl was possessed. The diver took the pearl and ascended back towards the light of day and the fresh air above the water’s surface.

As I reflected on this scene in the following days I was aware of how much of what I do, and what I believe is possible, comes from my experience as a human being bound by the physical laws of this universe.
But there are so many things – too many things – in our lives which simply don’t fit the categories of physical natural laws.
But then that is consistent with the truth that the material universe is not all there is and physical laws aren’t the only laws even if they are the most prevalent and dominant in our day-to-day reality.

As I reflected more deeply I was drawn to the necessity of breath for life and how for the pearl diver his last breath was always potentially his final one, and yet his last breath was like a doorway either to the next breath and life as normal, or a doorway which leads to death itself.
The pearl diver was bound to his last breath for everything he was hoping to achieve. Surviving on that last breath alone was for him the difference between finding his pearl and returning or exhausting it and dying.

But what if he decided to go further? What if he decided to go beyond his last breath and the outcome wasn’t death but more life? The fear of his last breath running out would prevent him from ever finding out if there was life beyond that last breath, and whether a final breath of one kind could be the beginning of another kind of breath.

So the pearl plays its part, because it’s only in the pursuit of the pearl that the diver will risk everything on his last breath. The invitation to live beyond his life-limit comes in the form of the pearl of greatest price.
To possess the pearl he must risk everything.
In risking everything he possesses the pearl.

The gospel writer notes that on the cross Jesus drew his final breath, and then he died (Mark 15:37). He wrote this so that we know that Jesus had died. This is important because unless he has died then the fact that he is alive again on the 3rd day isn’t resurrection but some form of resuscitation.

In John’s gospel he writes about Jesus coming to his disciples after his resurrection. Jesus breathes on his disciples and says to them, “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22).
Having previously taken his last and final breath, Jesus is now breathing on his disciples with a new kind of breath; a breath that transfers to them the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Whether there is a literal transfer or not, the image of Jesus breathing is intentional. The presence of GOD ‘in’ us by His Holy Spirit is like our own breath. Our breath is so close to us; it’s in us; it permeates into our entire being and transfers in and out of us, energising the body and keeping it alive. So it is with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus had to breathe his last breath and risk everything on that last breath to know for sure that there was a different life beyond; one where he would go on breathing but in a completely new way.
But the last breath isn’t necessarily the final one; it’s just the last one. Every day we have the choice to take our last breath in all manner of circumstances or situations. Whenever we feel that we are reaching our limit and the thing we know we need and are reaching for is just inches beyond that limit, in that moment we have to choose whether we will risk everything on that last breath and discover the life beyond, or whether we’ll give in to fear and pull back to the surface.
This is the life of faith because you simply cannot know until you are in that beyond-place. Faith turns our beliefs into actions that take us beyond our limits.

I  believe I saw that dreamlike scene so that I would recognise that I too need to risk everything on that last breath to discover that I can breath beyond it, and in doing so I too can possess the pearl of greatest price.

This is a reflective poem I wrote to try and capture some of the soul of what I saw and to creatively reflect it back to GOD as a creative gift of insight, love and life.

The Pearl Diver
Down into the deep
The pearl diver descends.
Like a stone pillar he drops
Through fathoms vertically,
Searching for the pearl;
The one of greatest price.
In the deepest depths,
Where even light
Is crushed to darkness,
His life reaches its limit;
His last breath exhausted,
Depleted;
His mind and body
Saturated by toxic spent air.
It’s only when his limit reached
And blackness covers his
Consciousness, as the deep,
And death’s cloak begins
To shroud and coldly grip,
That he will find his pearl,
Just out of reach. But,
Pushing through and dying
To that fear in full surrender
Will extend his fingers – just –
To grasp the pearl and draw
It heavenwards; letting go
In buoyant ascendency
Until the light appears,
And deep returns to shallow.
Where once he had, since,
Breathed his last he now
Can breathe once more.
But now his breath is freer
And his life aliver still,
For he found his pearl and
With it found his life;
The one that lived beyond
That final breath and hid
Deep below with that
Seasoned pearl, worn round
In perfect grace-filled suffering:
His pearl of greatest price.

The place of peace

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Peace is not about accepting:
Peace is about embracing.

Peace is not the absence of trouble:
Peace is the active presence which shields us from and overcomes trouble.

Peace is not a way of thinking, or an emotion:
Peace can still both heart and soul.

Peace is not an ideal:
Peace is real.

Peace is not a concept:
Peace takes on flesh and blood in you and me.

Peace is not the end of a process:
Peace is a continuing way of life.

Peace is not what we hope for:
Peace is what we make if we choose to.

Peace is not something we move towards in order to attain it:
Peace comes close to us so we can receive it.

Peace is not FROM GOD:
Peace is the presence OF GOD.

“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”
Isaiah 26:3

Jesus is on the cross

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When brother takes up arms against brother,
Jesus is on the cross.
When children are rejected and abused,
Jesus is on the cross.
When war rages and lives are wasted,
Jesus is on the cross.
When the strong do injustice to the weak,
Jesus is on the cross.
When the poor are neglected and ignored,
Jesus is on the cross.
When a world of plenty leaves many without,
Jesus is on the cross.
When so many are so lost,
Jesus is on the cross.
When hope has gone and despair abounds,
Jesus is on the cross.
When we find the truth that we need a saviour,
Jesus is on the cross.
When we need a way back home,
Jesus is on the cross.
When we want a life worth living,
Jesus is on the cross.

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
John 3:14-15

Leader

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They say a leader is one who leads
But I say that if no one is following
Then you are a loner, not a leader.
In all my gifts, talents, ideas and charisms
It is the vacant gap behind me—
A huge sinkhole prepared for years—
Which amplifies the truth like a loudspeaker
That I lead no one except myself
And I go into a delusional place where
The lonesome and the ludicrous meet
To play the game and act the part.
Influence! Confront! Lead!
The lines are learnt and awkwardly rehearsed
But no one watches this performance
Ready to mimic; no understudy waits in the wings,
For I am but an actor, a charlatan
Who knows as much about leadership
As the night knows about the day.
Make the curtain call; drop it fast
That I might take my leave of
This pantomime of curated folly
And instead sit in silence; humble, close-mouthed,
And wait until I able to see what a true leader
Looks like, walks like, talks like and is like.
Maybe then I can stand up, dust myself off
And follow.
Maybe if I can learn what a follower is
Then I can know what a leader is.

Come to rest

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Let the falling leaf, work done,
Come to rest where it lands.

Let the weary bones laid out
Come to rest on your couch.

Let the floating ark of family life
Come to rest as the waters subside.

Let the furrowed brow of concern
Come to rest in abandoned trust.

Let the restless, relentless pace
Come to rest in long, slow breaths.

Let yesterday and tomorrow’s tomorrow
Come to rest now in each moment.

Let everything you create and do
Come to rest in everything you are.

Let the questions, doubts and needing to know
Come to rest in being known.

Remember the sabbath to keep it holy;
Come to rest and let YHWH take care
Of the rest.

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
(Deuteronomy 5:12-15)