Wow, what a weekend!

Wow, what a weekend!

On Saturday we had one of our community weekends. On usual community weekends those of us who live in my shared Christian community house invite a few friends over to stay and we spend the weekend doing stuff together as a church family- countryside walks, big breakfasts, bonfires, that sort of thing.

This weekend, however, we decided to do something together to build community outside of the walls of our shared house. We asked everyone who's part of our house church (but not living in the house, sorry if that's confusing!) if we could help them out for the day, do some work at their houses.

After juggling around places, vehicles and people we ended up mowing lawns, cleaning out houses and sheds, digging flowerbeds and cleaning ponds. All good fun.

Then came the main event on Sunday afternoon. Josh has been coming around to Anthem for about three months and has come alive in his faith in Jesus, it's pretty amazing and refreshing to see. Naturally he wanted to be baptised.

As our Sunday evening meeting didn't have any space for baptisms we crowded along the banks of a local river, just downstream from a water mill, to join in the celebrations.

About 120 of us turned up, at a guess. It was a beautiful time, even in spite of the rain.

Disturb us, Lord

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

Sir Francis Drake

God Make Me Weak, God Give Me Lunch - The Enemy of God pt5

God loves to stack the odds against Himself and His people.

God loves to put all His eggs in one basket, and He asks us to do the same with Him- throw everything recklessly in to His kingdom. Faith is impossible without trust Faith is trust.

Think of Gideon's army- God whittled them down from 32,000 to 300. That's, like, 0.9% of their original number. He deliberately and openly thwarted their natural strength because He wanted to be their strength.

Then think of the incarnation- Almighty Creator Eternal made visible, touchable. And how does he choose to arrive on the scene? As a weak, naked baby, born to a couple of nobodies who soon become asylum seekers.

And ultimately, let's consider the cross- just some middle eastern carpenter hung on a tree, at the very turning point of history. Again naked, weak, bruised and torn with a heart turned to wax (See Psalm 22, the prophetic poem Christ invoked as he died).

God's moment of greatest victory is His moment of greatest weakness.

Triumphalists and people looking for an easy, self serving God will put that statement the other way around- "God will change your weaknesses, He will make your life lovely again." And of course, they're right in part- Jesus heals the broken.

But lean closer, here's where it gets interesting.

God doesn't simply succeed or help us succeed despite our weakness, he succeeds through weakness.

Why? In part, because that's truly poetic and beautiful, and in part because God winning with and for us through weakness and suffering allows Him to change us fundamentally inside through it in a way nothing else can.

And maybe it's also because God loves a challenge, He loves to rescue us. I'm sure God sometimes engineers adversity to throw His church back to Himself. God wants a people who don't trust their natural strength but who work to be strongly-weak and dependent on Him.

As God has all the resources of the universe at His disposal but needs our willingness; He can do less with our resources than our empty, open hands. In fact, it's possible for us to edge God out with organisational efficiency; we no longer need Him because the machine rolls along happily. But the machine is dead. God is not in the machine but out on the water, where we're too weak to walk out of the boat without His authority, given through His call.

And walk we will, because He's calling, and because that's the only way to follow Jesus.

Let's get back to a place where we need God, where we'd actually go hungry, poor, stuffed without His help. I'm not joking. Then watch Him show up and provide for us, redeem us and immeasurably bless us because that's what He's been longing to do for years.

Now let's make it practical.

If we don't learn to trust God in small, everyday things, how will we manage to trust Him with bigger things when He leads us into the risky place He's pulling us with benevolent delight? How about not taking lunch (or lunch money) to work for one day every week, and asking God to get you some lunch?

Of course, it's best not to tell anyone you're doing it, that would be untrusting!

Just trust God and see what happens :-)

We Are David. Safety- The Enemy of God pt4

This is pt4 of the 'Safety- The Enemy of God' series of posts that I'm writing to express several threads of thoughts that God's weaving together in my spirit, a growing conviction. Read pt 1- man to monument cycle, pt 2- skunkworks & pt 3- a Jean Vanier quote.

God made me realise something recently, or to use christian jargon- "I had a revelation".

My generation is David struggling to put on Saul's armour before battle.

The teenager David's dad gave him the day off tending sheep to deliver a lunch of bread, cereal and cheese to his elder brothers in the paralysed Israelite army (see 1 Samuel 17).

Horrified that the army sits motionless in fear before this giant who's daring to curse God David offers to take down the warrior, who's breastplate alone weighs 9 stone, maybe not much less than David.

King Saul sends for David and remarkably hears him out and offers David his own armour, which proves too heavy for him.

There is a generation stepping up to fight in the battle, stepping up to take their place in extending the rulership of the kingdom of heaven on this dark earth. Of course, individuals graduate from this rising generation but this generation always exists, it's perpetual.

My generation is the young David.

When the David generation unelegantly heaves their elder's helmet over their head some older onlookers in the church may say "look at them, are they really strong enough to fight for what's dear to us?"

When the David generation strains under the weight of a heavy breastplate some will say "give them more, they must grow stronger."

When the David generation discards the clunky armour with relief some may cry "they don't want to get their hands dirty!"

Just give us five small stones and send us out.

[ source ]

No, we don't trust our own strength either, but there's a giant in the land and we know a God who loves to stack the odds against Himself and His people so He can win through for them.

That's a word to my elder friends, now a word to my younger friends.

That giant is our future on this earth and beyond him is what we're fighting for- the future, eternity, our promised land. We'll never defeat the giant with our hearts set solely on him, we must keep eternity in our hearts.

Now, it can be easy for us youngers to feel encumbered by the administration and heavy provisions of the church, the slow moving beaurocratic systems that aim to keep us safe. It's easy for us to despise what we haven't built. It's easy for us to want to throw off the heavy, restrictive helmet. But can we echo David when he told the King of how he'd learnt to trust and rely on God?

"Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.’
Saul said to David, ‘Go, and the Lord be with you.’
1 Samuel 17:34-37

Those of us who are young, can we say we know God's heart, that we've been communing with Him like David did, psalming with his lyre while tending sheep in the hills? Can we say we love scripture, that we love the word of God, that His word runs and grows in our hearts and we're filled to overflowing and passionate about living out His call on our lives?

If we can then we can drop the armour and go with a few small stones of faith and take the future.

Let's know God and let's be bolder than lions.

We Got Chickens!

We got 6 chickens.

We initially decided to get a flock of chickens as they're excellent at clearing ground. We have been battling invasive weeds in our veg patch with weed killer and a strimmer since we moved in two years ago to no avail.

I designed and built my own hen coop which you can download if you have Sketchup.

Wales Trip Developments - Running Through Sprung Doors

Hello.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my amazing mission to a man on a mountain, which ended with a pretty flabbergastish encounter. We were on a reconnaissance mission checking out locations for an upcoming trip with 40 teenage lads to Wales and God gave us a pretty splendid sign of where we should be (read about it).

What? Did I hear someone say 'Skunkworks'? Surely not...

After Kevin (the "man on the mountain") gave my friend and I each a brew he suddenly remembered something- "Ooo, there's something I want to show you, if you have time? It's a place up the road I've got ideas for."

Still in his jimjams he pulled on a pair of boots and we walked with him to a splendid old Methodist church on the mountainside, on sale for just £80,000.


He told us all about it- quite run down but with massive potential. He has ideas to work with a few local groups in the community- putting on open days, green living classes, dance classes, that sort of thing. He's put in a bid of £50,000 for the property on behalf of the agency that owns the hostel he runs and we'll see what comes of it.

My friend and I left the visit buzzing- God had spoken to us through a random man wearing pyjamas on a mountain in a far flung corner of Wales, a man who doesn't have much money but has plenty of vision.

A couple of weeks passed.

I called Kevin to book the hostel but he apologised as another group had booked the hostel in the meantime. Poodles. Kevin knew them quite well as they'd visited the hostel before so he rang them up to see if they could rearrange, but alas, they couldn't.

I guess it was a lesson in not being complacent. When God clearly blasted a door open and said "GO!" we chilled out and left it for later. Sometimes a door God opens is on a strong spring so you gotta run at it before it slams. I should have said to Kevin on the spot "we'd like to book this place". Of course, I'm sure we'll be able to go there in future years as it's a very good all round bunkhouse.

Anyhow, the place we're going to now was our next stop on the recon trip, and I dare say it's nearly as good- splendid scenery, great facilities and lots of space.

Live and learn, and run through any door God opens.

Peace.