James’s Blog: The End.

James’s Blog: The End.

So this is it – my final blog post after five years. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll be back, but I’ll be taking the rest of 2020 off at least. We’ll see what happens, eh.

There’s not going to be any profound words of wisdom in this post, no poem or parable. It’s just going to be me saying “Thank you” to everyone who’s taken the time to read what I’ve written, even if it’s only been once. Thank you if you took the time to comment on anything I posted. Thank you if you ever shared anything I’d written with someone else, digitally or not. Thank you for being a part of this particular leg of my journey.

I hope that something I’ve written over the past five years has been personally encouraging or challenging in some way. In short, I hope that neither of us has wasted our time.

There have been some exceptions, but on the whole I have been happy with everything that has appeared on these pages. The ones that haven’t been very good have invariably been so because the well of ideas had run dry for that week, despite me having committed to posting something regardless – but there have been a fair number of posts that I’ve pulled out of thin air at the last moment that have ended up being much better than they had any right to be. Of everything that I’ve written here, I don’t have a favourite, but I think the one that means the most to me is ‘The Man who Sold me a Pear’, which appeared on these pages in year one. I guess I peaked early.

I’m not going to ask you to post in the comments what your favourite entry has been (this isn’t YouTube) but I imagine that – if I’ve been doing this properly – it will have been different for each person. I’m the one sitting here tapping the keys, but ultimately I have always hoped that this was just another means of building the Kingdom of God. If it has been then I’m sure that the Holy Spirit will have His own selection of favourite posts. Hopefully, the list of posts that He didn’t like is a short one.

So, one final time, thank you for being a part of this. May God continue to bless you all.

James’s Blog: When We Feel Wronged by God.

James’s Blog: When We Feel Wronged by God.

Poor old Job. He gets a bit of a raw deal, losing everything that he had in such a short space of time. He has a lot to deal with but the author of the book is keen to point out, even though Job is confused about the source of all his trouble, that “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”

That’s chapter one and chapter two anyway. From chapter three onwards Job gets a little less…stoic. Here are some of the things Job throws at God:

“He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason…”

“Does it please you to oppress me, to spurn the work of your hands, while you smile on the schemes of the wicked?”

“God assails me and tears me in his anger and gnashes his teeth at me;”

“…know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”

There’s more. It’s quite a long book. If Job avoids sin in the early chapters by not accusing God of wrongdoing, then he’s going to be in for it once God gets around to reading the rest of the book.

Now, I’m sure that a first-rate lawyer would pour over Job’s words and argue that “my client, Your Honour, doesn’t ever explicitly accuse God of wrongdoing (except maybe in that last bit quoted above, though he was under immense strain at the time)…”. We, however, are not under the Law but under the Spirit, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the spirit of Job’s words are very much about wrongdoing. God is to blame for his plight and He’s not being fair. God is unjust.

So, we’d expect that when God finally shows up, Job’s going to be in trouble and, sure enough, God has something to bring to the table. Namely, four chapters of “Job, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And yet…God reserves His anger for someone else. It’s Job’s friends who get it in the neck because, as God says, “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

Really? After all that stuff Job said about God crushing him unjustly and smiling on the wicked and wronging him? “You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.”

I suppose I can think of two possible explanations for this. One, God tunes out and stops listening when we go off on a rant. He wouldn’t be the only parent to adopt this posture. Or two, when we’re struggling, when we loathe our life and give free rein to our complaint, when we’re dealing with genuine tragedy and just want to scream and shout and find someone to blame, God cuts us some slack.

I know which of those two I think it could be.

James’s Blog: Encouraged by the Past.

James’s Blog: Encouraged by the Past.

I’ve touched on this subject before. A while ago I wrote about how beneficial journaling has been to me over the years, while more recently I wrote about the way that the past can ambush you and make you feel irrationally discouraged.

When I say that the past can ambush you, it’s really your memory of the past that is doing the ambushing, and your memory is pretty good at lying. A year or so after I started journaling I decided that I would set myself a task in response to what God was doing in my life at that time. I made a list of all the Bible passages I could find that related to the topic of ‘suffering’, and decided I’d study them. By that, I mean I spent a week on each passage (regardless of length) and jotted down my thoughts and conclusions on how it related to the subject at hand. I took some time off in the middle of it all somewhere, but in two and a half years I had applied this method of study to 72 different passages from the Bible.

Recently, I’ve been revisiting those passages and my studies. Like most things that we did when we were younger, there’s a bit of embarassment in facing up to it. I didn’t really understand much when then, but I thought I did. The difference now is that I know I don’t. But still, there’s some good stuff in there, and this time I find myself being ambushed by unexpected wisdom. When I remember those days, my memory doesn’t always paint me in a particularly good light. When I actually read what was going on, and not just remember it, I surprise myself. God has always believed in me more than I have.

However, the cherry/icing/giant sparkler on the cake was on the very first page. Before I began the studies, I wrote a little introduction explaining what I was doing and what my goals were – and that stuff is excellent. I mean, what I hoped for and desired 24 years ago is pretty much unchanged from what I hope for and desire now. It almost brought a tear to my eye to read how earnest young James was, and how much of young James is still here in the heart of old(er) James. And it encouraged me, because it made me realise that – despite my youth and the things I wrote that are a million miles away from what I would write or think now – there was a solid, unbreakable core in that fragile young man, and that core would carry me all the way through the years, half-way across the the world and back again, to where I am now…and that same passion is what will carry me the rest of the way. It was a surprise to me, but God’s always known.

James’s Blog: The Desert is Good.

James’s Blog: The Desert is Good.

I know that the title looks like I mispelled ‘dessert’, but it’s actually correct as it is.

Being in a spiritual desert doesn’t sound appealing, and certainly anyone who has experienced it will know full well that it’s about as fun as it sounds, and yet…

Luke 4:1 tells us that Jesus, being full of the Holy Spirit, is then led into the desert by that same Holy Spirit. It’s like the closer you get to God the more likely you are to end up in the desert – and not because you took a wrong turn, but because it’s where God was wanting you to be all along.

Jesus is in the desert to be tempted, or tested, and in this way his journey mirrors that of Israel herself. Deuteronomy 8:2-3 tells us that Israel’s time in the desert was that they might learn humilty and be tested, and that they might understand that we don’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God…hang on, I’ve heard that somewhere before…

What I’m getting at is that desert time proved to be a central part of Israel’s identity. It was in the desert that God provided for them out of nothing, it was in the desert that He gave them the Law, it was in the desert that they learnt what it meant to belong to Him. Equally, the desert was Jesus’ training ground, where he learned what it meant to love God and get his identity from Him alone.

In short, if you want to grow, deserts are inevitable, because it’s only in the desert that you learn this type of lesson. As much as we wish otherwise, you can’t learn what it means to follow God from the comfort of a sofa, TV blaring and a cream cake in your hand.

But the desert is not supposed to be our goal. It’s a stop along the way, but it’s a crucial one, and a good one. Every now and then, you might find the Spirit of God steering into the dry wilderness once more, in order to be reminded of a precious lesson that you are in danger of forgetting, or to sit another exam, but He’ll always bring you out, stronger and fitter than when you went in.

I’m not telling you that you have to be happy about it, but the desert is actually a good place.

James’s Blog: Repairs.

James’s Blog: Repairs.

I once met a man, a connesieur of D.I.Y. if you will. I watched him at work, skilfully carving, cutting and fixing. The thing I noticed is how old his tools seemed. I’d expected him to be equipped with the latest and best, seeing as how he was an expert and all, but instead he used a patchwork of old, venerable tools.

“Why don’t you chuck that lot away and get some new stuff?” I asked him.

He looked at me as though I was an idiot.

“Why? There’s nothing wrong with these. The blades are still sharp, the heads still solid. They get scuffed and damaged over the years, and need to be patched up – a new handle here, a sharpening there – but they’re still good. Better than good actually.”

“Ah, sentimental value,” I said.

He nodded. “A bit, but not just that. They do the job, and do it well. Those new tools are alright, but they don’t make them like this anymore.”

I knew a man in Christ who had been broken but got up again, and been broken but got up again, and been broken but got up again. He limped his way along, leaving the fragrance of the Kingdom of God wherever he went.

“Why don’t you use someone else, God?” I asked. “That guy’s had it.”

He looked at me as though I were an idiot.

“I don’t throw things away, James.” Then He looked at the man with such love in His eyes. “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

James’s Blog: Winding Down.

James’s Blog: Winding Down.

The end of October will be this blog’s fifth year anniversary. That means I’ve been posting something more or less weekly for five years now, and I’m feeling it. That’s around 260 posts, whether I had something to say or not, whether I wanted to post something or not. I’m not delusional enough to think that I have a limitless supply of wisdom to distribute over the internet – I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long, to be honest.

But I have made a decision. The Law of Diminishing Returns is a real thing and five years is long enough. This means that I’m going to take a break once we reach the end of October. I don’t know for certain what this break will look like – whether I’m hanging up my blogging pen for good, or if I’ll be back after a break, or if I’ll just hang around indefinitely, posting something every now and then. I’m not sure. It’ll also depend on what works for Lioness Publishing and Elsa – after all, it’s her site.

I didn’t know what was going to come of all this when we started it. We’d just published The Listening Book and this blog was supposed to be its companion. Like most authors, I nursed a secret hope that this might be the beginning of something huge, but I’m far from disappointed with where we’ve ended up. God has been very gracious to me, mostly through Elsa and Mark and all of you who have taken the time to read what I’ve typed up every week. Thank you.

So I hope you enjoy the blog posts that follow over the next month, and will join with me in giving thanks to the God who created everything and gave us the gift of being able to create our own little worlds.

James’s Blog: Lines in the Sand.

James’s Blog: Lines in the Sand.

We’re pretty good at drawing lines in the sand, but I wonder where God draws His. What’s God’s deal-breaker? Maybe it’s a good thing to not be able to provide a concrete answer to that question – after all, human beings have a tendency to take lines in the sand and turn then into a box and then to wish hell upon everyone who’s on the outside.

Take ‘Statements of Faith’ for example. These can be helpful things for organisations and churches. They can help individuals find a home where they can grow in some measure of security and comfort, without having to navigate tricky conversations every day. You know what you’re getting. They’re like stablisers; training wheels as we learn how to relate to and love others.

But they can also consist of nothing more than ornate lines in the sand, drawn by human hands; the stone cold truth about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Sin, Humanity, the Bible, Heaven, Hell, Predestination, Women in Leadership, Baptism. Death by bullet points.

Those lines can become a box, or perhaps more acurately, a cage, where what you think about the person and work of Jesus Christ carries as much orthodoxy as what you think about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and someone who thinks differently to you on whether or not women should be allowed to preach is as much ‘in error’ as someone who thinks that God is a cola-flavoured ice lolly.

(Sigh) I’m not against theological wrestling, by no means, but I remember one of my lecturers once saying that the goal of theology is not to provide answers but to categorise mysteries and I think there’s a lot of mileage in that. Certainly, it helps us deep thinkers with the old humility problem. No, what I’m against is drawing lines in the sand in places other than where God might have drawn them.

As I’ve pondered these mysteries, I have adapted my views and changed my positions over the years, and I have no doubt I will continue to refine my worldview as I continue to better understand the rhythmn of God’s heart. But here’s the thing: God has been with me and guided me and helped me and blessed me and used me all the way along my journey – regardless of my views on predestination or tongues or baptism. God has remained faithful while I’ve stumbled along, sometimes holding views that were quite damaging to myself and potentially others. So God must draw His line in the sand somewhere other than along the denominational or theological boundaries that have provided the framework of my faith for so long. Otherwise, at some point in my journey I would have been persona non grata to Him for some belief I held.

I think God does draw lines, and I think there is a point where God says, “You and I can no longer do business together”, but I think this has much more to do with Jesus than it does to do with all those other details that take up so much space on the page – after all, you know who you find in the details…

James’s Blog: Small Lies and Big Truth.

James’s Blog: Small Lies and Big Truth.

Recently, I’ve found myself dwelling on mistakes that I’ve made in my relationships, and not in a healthy way. It’s like I’m being aggressively confronted with the 10% that I got wrong rather than the 90% that I got right. I’ve spent a lot of time out of my depth with people, but the truth is that I have very few drowned relationships to my name. These thoughts don’t seem to care. They just seem to want me to feel guilty about something, anything. It’s odd to find yourself thinking about somebody with whom you have a good relationship, somebody who you know you have helped and has expressed gratitude for the help that you have given them, and yet immediately be thinking of the little ways in which you feel like you failed them, or things you wish you had or hadn’t said or done.

These thought patterns often crop up when I’m praying for people, and have the fingerprints of accusation all over them, so these days I file them under ‘spiritual warfare’ and try to deal with them appropriately. How I go with that depends on how well tuned in I am to what is true.

We all make mistakes in the way that we relate to others, we might damage relationships and make less than perfect decisions at times, but that’s rarely the whole story. I want to remind myself, and you dear (and not-so-dear) readers, that our relationships are not usually as bad as we think they are, our mistakes not necessarily as damaging as we fear they might be, our failures not the giant blots on our record that we suspect they are, and that we have done more good than we know just by being a friend to someone. We can’t necessarily stop those accusing thoughts from coming, those regrets and should-haves, but we don’t have to give our failures too much credit, and we don’t have to give the enemy an easy victory.

James’s Blog: The Love and Pain of Starting a New School.

James’s Blog: The Love and Pain of Starting a New School.

So this week Parker started secondary school. I’ve been anxious about this moment for a while, not because I’m having trouble adapting to my children getting older but because – as long time readers of this blog will know – Parker is autistic. Covid-19 has thrown the normal school transition process out of the window, and if any of our children needed the chance to get acquainted with a new school, it was Parker. On the plus side, Covid restrictions mean that he’ll probably spend all his time with the same people in the same classroom. That’s a plus.

As it happens, day one went well. That helps a lot, and day two is a lot easier with that success behind us, but there’s still a way to go before both dad and child feel confident and comfortable with this new era.

Obviously, he’s the one facing the big changes and the new situation, but I’m anxious about his anxiety. I’m the the parent in charge of the school run, so the responsibility for managing his meltdowns falls on me. I’m not good at it. Ruth is so much better at this kind of thing. She’s much better at parenting generally – and coping with stress.

Part of the problem is my that own autistic tendencies don’t help. My experiences allow me to empathise with Parker and his struggles, as the things that cause him stress are the same kind of things that cause me stress, but in reality it just means that I can see the trouble coming. It doesn’t mean I can do anything about it, or even help Parker navigate it.

I can look back on my own childhood with the wisdom of age, and I can see how I worried about things needlessly, and how I could have much better managed the things that I did need to worry about. But have you ever tried to use your wisdom to override a child’s experience in the moment? It doesn’t often work, so I mostly just get to experience his stress without having the having the power to influence it. His stress becomes my stress, and then we’re both just stressed.

It’s the universe’s cruelest joke, to make you care for another but unable to live their life for them – to have to suffer vicariously. Love unlocks new ways of pain. It’s one thing to suffer yourself, to suffer as a result of your own choices. It’s another thing to see someone you care about suffer, to share their pain, and to know that they don’t have to suffer. If they were just able to see the world the way you see it for a moment…but instead you’re both left with the suffering.

But that’s how it’s supposed to work, loving your children and carrying their burdens even though it doesn’t really benefit you at all. That’s the example that we’ve been set. It blows my mind that God had a choice, and that this is what He chose for Himself.

James’s Blog: Like Us or Like Him?

James’s Blog: Like Us or Like Him?

The heart of the gospel speaks, I believe, to all people, regardless of culture, creed or race. Because of this, we can make the mistake of thinking that the gospel belongs solely to us; to our culture, creed or race. If it speaks to us, then God meant it for us, right? And if He meant it for us, then you have to be like us to fully appreciate and understand the gospel, right? Then we find ourselves in a position where we assume that being a true follower of Jesus means fitting in with a particular culture – or as Steve Taylor puts it in I Want to be a Clone, ‘if you want to be one of His, got to act like one of us.’

This was perhaps at its most blatant in past missionary eras, where the line between ‘Christianizing’ and ‘Westernizing’ was blurred at best. In the 19th century, the London Missionary Society established a mission in Bechuanaland in Africa, and the Missionary Magazine reported on its progress in the following way:

‘The people are now dressed in British manufactures and make a very respectable appearance in the house of God. The children who formerly went naked and presented a most disgusting appearance are decently clothed…’

Of course, it’s easy to look down our noses at the missionary pioneers of the past, but we’re guilty of the same crime when we insist that there’s only one ‘proper’ way to do worship, one ‘proper’ way to preach, one ‘proper’ way to look and sound. We’re too quick at times to slap the label ‘Biblical’ on things that turn out to just be cultural traditions, and too slow to deny the implied criticism that traditions which differ from our own are therefore ‘Unbiblical’. Our cultural perspectives enable us to share something of the truth of God with others, but not everything of the truth.

In this blog’s first year, I posted a ‘poem‘ (I use that term loosely), suggesting that sometimes an author will write a book about what Jesus is really like and, what do you know, it turns out that Jesus is just like them.

There’s something in our humanity that seems determined to repeatedly recreate God in our own image, to want to turn Him into one us – whatever we are. The irony is, of course, that God has already turned Himself into one of us, through Christ. When we do it, we make God smaller. When He does it, He makes us bigger. We do it to bring God down to our level, to make Him easily digestible. He does it to bring us up to His level, to make us more than we are.

We can’t help but be shaped by our culture and history, but we can certainly try to make sure that it’s God who is shaping us more.

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