by James Webb
Ho hum, I think it’s fair to say that lockdown has not been particularly good for my mental health. At first I was quite optimistic – I have been practising social distancing since I was a teenager, and I do quite enjoy the school holidays when wife and children are home with me. Read more
(Once again, I wrote a devotion for our church’s week of prayer. Once again I’m using it as my blog post for this week.)
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” (John 17:24)
This morning the streets of Canterbury, in the early wind and rain, are almost deserted. It makes a nice change after the Christmas excess. Read more
I’m sitting in a cafe, with my notebook and pen, trying to come up with something for this week’s blog. I’ve got a hot chocolate in front of me, and I’m waiting for God to show up. Maybe He’s down the road, with the street preacher, whose muffled but earnest words drift in through the open window. I feel guilty. Why aren’t I out there, on the street, preaching instead of sitting here with an empty page and a hot chocolate? Mentally I list the reasons, both good and bad. I offer up a quick prayer for the young man trying to get something of God’s love out into the world.
I ask myself why I feel guilty. I wonder if it’s got something to do with my view of God. I imagine myself in one of those fairground mirror funhouses , but instead of rows and rows of mirrors distorting my image, I’m looking at dozens of distorted images of God. Is that what it’s like? I scribble that down.
Thoughts and ideas zoom through my imagination, like wasps at a summer picnic. I spend a moment wondering if Belgian chocolate is really that much better than other chocolate, or if it’s just a triumph of marketing. I go back to the funhouse mirrors, and wonder if the issue is not so much false views of God, but rather false views of myself. I picture my own distorted image instead. That’s just as much a source of misplaced guilt and confusion as distorted images of God.
I look at what I’ve written. I feel like there’s something in the funhouse mirror idea and that I’m on the cusp of putting together a blog post, but the idea just won’t firm up. It’s a mist that disperses when I try to grab it. I’m distracted by the couple on the table across from me. She’s reading out the titles of articles in her magazine, while her husband (I assume it’s her husband) listens mutely. One of the articles is wondering about the real reason behind JFK’s assassination. I wonder what magazine it is, as the couple don’t look like conspiracy theorists. Maybe that’s what they want me to think…
I try to get back to the blog post. I write some more thoughts down. How do we view ourselves in the mirror of guilt? How does that distort who we are? It’s not real. It’s not how God sees us. I pause. I feel like that’s something it would be good to pray for – that I’ll see myself as God sees me, as I really am. I would pray right here and now, but I’ve just decided that I’m going to write this process up as my blog post, and I know that I’d only be praying so that I could write it down and put it in the blog because actually praying reads better than just intending to pray.
I momentarily feel a genuine yearning for the freedom of being ‘disillusioned’, and seeing myself as I really am, and seeing God as He really is. I reflect, not for the first time in my life, that it’s not actually much fun being a deep thinker. But we’re all complicated in our own way, and we all make things more complicated than they need to be. God likes simple things, I write. I notice that I’ve actually written “God likes simple things, I write”. I decide to stop before I get too clever for my own good.
The hot chocolate is gone. The street preacher might still be there. It’s time for me to go. I think God probably did turn up, in some way.
