reflection

James’s Blog: Self-Pity and Lolly-Sticks.

Lioness Writing Ltd Uncategorized , , , , ,
James’s Blog: Self-Pity and Lolly-Sticks.

Like all the best people, I’m prone to self-pity. “Why me…?” I might say, or maybe “Everyone else has it better than me…” or “They never have problems, unlike me…” and sometimes “Why can’t I just get a break?” etc. It feels quite good, but it’s really just a way of saying, “Life isn’t treating me the way that I’m entitled to be treated”, and as such self-pity is nothing more than cleverly disguised pride.  Well, for me, at least.  I’m sure that for you your whining is entirely justified. Read more

James’s Blog: Newsworthy.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , , , , , ,
James’s Blog: Newsworthy.

A friend of mine once told me about a small group of young people from his church that had gone and done some praiseworthy good deed. Local television sent a news crew to ask what had motivated them to do such a noble thing. Most of the group gave safe answers, but one girl talked about how her actions were an expression of her faith in Christ. I’ll let you guess which was the one piece of footage that they didn’t use when they ran the story. Read more

James’s Blog: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , , , ,
James’s Blog: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

I was discussing with someone who suggested that, as an atheist, he at least was ‘…thinking for himself’. I pointed out that, unless he had invented atheism, he actually wasn’t. None of us really think for ourselves, I told him. There are thousands of years of history and debate and experience behind each of us, and all we can ever do is just pick a side. Read more

James’s Blog: Gam Zeh Ya’Avor.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , ,
James’s Blog: Gam Zeh Ya’Avor.

Life has its own rhythms. There are creatively fruitful times, where the inspiration flows; there are times where I feel jaded and uninspired. There doesn’t always seem to be any reason for the transition. Sometimes, it’s just suddenly different. A couple of weeks ago, I had ideas. This week, I don’t have any, and the ones I had a couple of weeks ago sit there on my desk like paperweights. What to do when it feels like you’ll never have a good idea again? Read more

James’s Blog: Walking with God Again.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , ,
James’s Blog: Walking with God Again.

I was out on one of my walks one evening, and I saw something unusual. Down below me, in her front garden, was an elderly woman, wrapped up against the cold, standing behind a lawn mower. It was a strange sight, seeing this tiny old lady about to start mowing her front lawn in the autumn twilight. Read more

James’s Blog: Thin Places.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , , , ,
James’s Blog: Thin Places.

I believe in Thin Places. I have two favourites. One is old and one is new. One is inside and one is outside. One is here and one is there.

Canterbury Cathedral is old, at least in terms of this country and its identity. It’s been rebuilt several times over the years, but for nearly one and half millennia it has been a site set apart for the service and worship of God. As you wander around it, you can be thinking about the excesses of the established church, the corruption and insipidity of the Anglican faith at its worst, but why should you not be awed by this building? By the size and the beauty. By the devotion that its construction required. (The idea that God cannot be glorified by good old fashioned ingenuity and hard work is nonsense by the way). Even in this enlightened day and age, hundreds of visitors are daily looking at stained glass windows and reading Renaissance graffiti. There is something special here. Fifteen hundred years of prayer and song and liturgy? That has to leave a mark.

I will stroll down into the crypt and amble to the Chapel of St. John. I may pause to look at the prayers that people have written to be placed on the altar. I will sit and look at the window that shows the harlot drying Jesus’ feet with her hair. Even though there may be tourists, I can be silent and listen. I can meet with God. Fifteen hundred years of prayer and song and liturgy, and I add mine to become part of something greater than myself. A blink of the eye for God, but an eternity of praise.

The second place is on the other side of the world. On a small farm on the Belubula, in a place called Canowindra. Many of you won’t have heard of it, or of a missionary couple named Ian and Irene, who gave part of their farmland over to Cornerstone. Over forty years ago they planted a grove of poplar trees on that farm. I believe that the plan was for the trees to be sold for matchsticks. That was the plan, but those trees are still there, dead and dangerous, and still very flammable. But that grove has seen more than twenty years of prayer and worship and weddings. I have been involved in all three. Australia is a beautiful country, yet so alien compared to England’s green and pleasant fields, and I have sat in the silence of that grove on many a summer morning. I have shed tears and sang songs. I have sat with kangaroos and sheep and birds. I have heard God in some very specific ways, and He and I have wrestled in that place many times. He usually won, but not always.

Thin Places, the Celts called them. Places where the boundary between this life and the next is worn and frail and the freshness of the Kingdom bleeds obviously into the mundane beauty of this world. These places are real, and so is the God who can be found in them.

James’s Blog: Chicken and Egg.

Lioness Writing Ltd Author , , , , ,
James’s Blog: Chicken and Egg.

Evangelical Christians don’t have a Pope, nor believe in papal infallibility, but sometimes you wouldn’t know it from the way that some of us talk about Martin Luther, or John Calvin or our favourite authors or a particular leader or church. It’s par for the course for us human beings. We struggle to hold conflicting things in tension, we seek order and patterns in everything, even when there are none. We are happiest when something is clearly 100% good or 100% bad, black or white, right or wrong; when our heroes and villains are undiluted.  When we’re young, and we lack experience, wisdom and courage it’s easiest for us if we can attach ourselves to someone and let them do our thinking for us. We all have this subconscious desire to be discipled by something. For some of us, we buy wholeheartedly into a church and adopt uncritically its interpretation of the Bible on faith, love, sex, prayer and God.

I remember once I was doing some teaching to some visitors at Cornerstone. One of the people listening found something I had said difficult to accept in light of what he had been taught by his church and, to his credit, he came to talk to me about it. I took him through one of the New Testament letters which had been influential in shaping my thinking about the topic. I could see, as we went through the letter together, that he wasn’t convinced. His knew and respected his church leaders, and who was this nobody trying to tell him that they were wrong? At one point in the letter we came across a verse that, to be honest, may as well have said, “That thing that James is telling you? Yeah, it’s right, and that means that what your church has taught you is wrong.” He looked at me and said, without a single drop of irony in his voice, “So I just need to find a way to interpret that verse”. That was when I knew that I’d lost.

I’d seen it before, in victims of cults. You present an alternative interpretation. It shakes their worldview a little and makes them uncomfortable, so instead of unravelling the thought, exploring it and seeing where it takes them, they run to a church leader who performs some complicated exegetical gymnastics in order to be able to say, “That verse that says that thing – it actually means the complete opposite”. And all is right with the world again.

I see it in myself and in others, where instead of letting what the Bible says shape our theology, we let our theology shape what the Bible says. A sad day, when truth knocks on our door, and we just hang out a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.

%d bloggers like this: