Month: September 2020

James’s Blog: Winding Down.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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