So..looking carefully, fixating…

What are the things you tend to get lost in? I don’t mean complicated one-way systems or finding your way back to the restaurant after you’ve been to the loo!

Yes – I am talking from personal experience!

But rather the activities that find you losing track of the time, even missing lunch (that never happens to me!) or forgetting an important job that needed doing – like collecting one of your children – (well I didn’t forget, but I have stretched the meaning of late…) The moments when time flies rather than dragging its feet like a horse pulling an overloaded cart up a steep hill.

For me this would definitely include reading a good book and writing. It would also include an engrossing job like packing, or preparing for a talk. Sadly it doesn’t generally include praying and meditating on God’s wise and saving and sustaining word. I don’t often get sidetracked by eagerly awaiting the Lord’s return. I like to get lost in something with a very clear perimeter – preferably marked by a very tall mental fence. I love an activity that allows me to shut out the big wide world, tuning into a single channel for once. Having a break from the noise of all the other frequencies. But why that focus, that fixating tends not to be on the Lord I am not sure.

In theory (and actually in practice when I ‘get there’) it should be, and of course it is, the ultimate retreat, the one true safe place with one main focus – the Lord Jesus. However when I feel the need to either retreat or go off-duty, I instinctively shy away from time with the Lord.  As an option it feels more like throwing open the windows and exposing myself to a vast array of…. well the best word I can think of is ‘stuff’. Massive stuff, stuff that I need to remember, do, apply,  articulate, weigh up, absorb….rather than shutting me in somewhere either safe and/or off-duty.

In a horribly wrong and twisted way, time with the Lord feels like being called back into the office or up to a child that won’t go to sleep just when you thought you could collapse with a cup of tea, rather than the most precious part of your day that you are longing not to be interrupted from.

Which means that I have made it all about me. My relationship with the Lord is yet another thing I have to do, to work out, another person to please, something else to worry about getting wrong…and therefore the last place I would flee to for refuge.

And so my meditations and moments of mindfulness; my safe places and times of refreshing fixating are the things I can carefully control – tv programmes, books, writing, the things with a lock on the inside…

We noted before that watching one thing intently is often at the expense of watching something else.

Watch where you are going!

Stop watching the clock.

Or is just fruitless as in:

A watched kettle never boils.

Our generation and society are notoriously bad at stopping and staring at all – but when we do what do we stare at?

We pay people to make us more ‘mindful’, to teach us the art of so called mediation and then we squander those moments and habits on rubbish. We stop and focus on a moment so we can delight in….what? Ourselves?…Emptiness?..Our personal idea of ‘god’ or ‘inner peace’? We have one eye on the time to make sure that we don’t miss Bake Off, or one ear on the driveway to hear a loved one’s car approaching – but fail to keep watch for the Lord. We clear an evening to give our full attention to….. but skim read the bible while mentally planning the day. We have eyes in the back of our heads and senses which are hyper-alert to mischief when it comes to our children, but barely manage a moment of reflection and repentence ourselves.

Yes – let’s give our lives more space to stop and stare. Let’s stop worshipping busyness and constant multi-tasking. I can highly recommend a recent series on being busy that has been on Radio 4 recently – Oliver Burkeman is Busy. Yesterday I caught a bit of a programme on ‘mind wandering’ and the massive role that mental drift plays in the acitivty of the brain. Let’s daydream more! BUT the question is  – where does my mind wander and what does that say about what I delight in and crave?

Dear Father God,
Please realign my loves and mental drift. Please may my default attitude to long to and wnjoy glorifying you in all things. In my full schedule and tight deadlines AND in my moments of space and rest. Help me to constantly lean on you, thank you, accept your will, trust you, submit to you, and generally relate to you in all that I do and think. In my preciious rescuer’s name, Amen.

 

Of course all fears are troublesome! A large part of this for me is that they are so hard to pin down. Once you can pin a fear down and bring it into the daylight it is so much easier to face! To plan for, act upon, think through and above all take to the Lord. BUT more often then not the fear-feelings overwhelm me (a bit like the hanky soaked in chloroform in an old movie) before I can identify my attacker.

The troublesome fear that I an currently trying to unmask is my fear of getting things wrong. This one disguises itself as stress, anger, overplanning and over thinking. I suffer from high anxiety about whatever it is I fear I may be getting wrong and long to run away from it even though the ‘thing’ itself is not actually scary at all. A sign saying “your problem here is that you are terrified of getting it wrong, causing difficulties and making people cross” would help me face my adversary head on. But I seem to have lost that memo yet again and all that remains are the fear-feelings.

So this week I have felt tired, overwhelmed and a little sick for a lot of the time because as the children go back to school, and particularly as the One and Only goes to secondary school, there are a whole new sack of things that I can get wrong.

Warning – I am about to unload my worries – feel free to rejoin me later!!!

Am I driving the right way to school?

There are at least 5 options! Which is best in terms of time, money, fuel, wear and tear of the car, stress, safety……

Will I forget that the boys need to be dressed as characters from Roald Dahl books next Tuesday?

How on earth am I going to listen to The Court Jester read three times a week?

Have I chosen the right task to do while I sit in the car at the boys’ school for half an hour?

If I don’t go 30 mins early I don’t get the right spot for a quick get away to get the One and Only.

Did I choose the wrong school for the One and Only?

Am I allowed to drop off and collect the One and Only here or am I breaking the rules?

I got a very long, rather heavy handed letter about the rules from school recently!

How can I make sure I don’t neglect the boys now that I am spending 2 hours a day in the car?

Should I try the bus or a lift share for the One and Only? But then I may get that wrong…..

And so it goes on.

By the way – welcome back if you are rejoining me at this stage.

I think one of my problems with change is not so much the fear of the new, but the increased risk of getting things wrong.

So facing the fear head on – in God’s eyes what would be wrong?

Driving too fast or unsafely; deliberately neglecting to help them be ready for the day ahead; laziness; deliberately failing to think through the wisdom of different choices with the NTV once we have settled into the new term a bit; choosing to be unwise once everything has been weighed up; continual lack of planning that wasted time (of course it would be ok to plan to do nothing!); mistrusting God’s sovereign purposes and direction that have got us to this point; doubting God’s ability to provide..

Well – there is nothing here that I can’t receive God’s forgiveness for, therefore wrong is not frightening.

Most of what I have been having fear-feelings about is not wrong.  Mistakes, imperfections and the realities of life are not wrong. Right does not equal smooth perfection (sounds like a description of a pudding) but rather relying on God’s grace and forgiveness and aiming to do what we can, in his strength, with the resources, information, energy, opportunities etc. that he has given us.

I am safe! God is for me, so no matter what mistakes I make, however messy my day is, and even whatever wrong I do – I am precious and loved and forgiven and safe in God’s perfect will.

Thank you dear Father that this week everyone has got where they were meant to be, with what they needed to have and we haven’t gone into debt with fuel costs in the process. Please give us what we need as we go on working through these issues, help me to act wisely, but without fear, trusting you to provide all we need. Please help me to know and feel safe in your love and care. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Sorry to abandon our current fixation thread – normal service will resume soon!

What do you fixate on?

We have done a lot of driving recently and the children have had their in-car DVD player on. If you turn around and watch them you get a perfect example of people transfixed. With their earphones on and the screens in front of them they are in their own world where their laughter or comments or surprises are purely related to what they are looking at.

Or you might have seen the french film Amelie and remember the scene early on in the film depicting her likes – one of which is watching her fellow cinema goers transfixed on the screen.

That sort of fixation takes you right out of your life and deep into another world. Alternatively we can fixate more internally.

One of the positives, medically/psychologically speaking, of things like mindfulness is that it aims to fix us in the present. Generally speaking, our thoughts and emotions and energies tend to run around like headless chickens scurrying around over the past and the present, the near and far, the personal and the global in a frantic, unending circuit.

To stop and breathe and be still is a wonderful contrast to this. There are lots of ways we can be more in the present. To taste what we are eating, to experience it rather than inhaling it. To go on a walk for pleasure rather than just getting from A to B. A child completely engrossed in a lego construction. A stimulating conversation. It is not so much escaping reality (as we might as we read a book or watch a film), but rather sitting in a moment of our reality and being fully there.

So the whole stopping and being present thing is definitely beneficial and I think rather neglected by most of us, but on its own it is only offering us at best a partial reality or potentially a false reality.

How, and on what, does the bible teach us to fixate, to pay careful attention to, to keep watch for, to watch out for, to be alert to?

Watching one thing intently is often at the expense of watching something else.

Watch where you are going!

Stop watching the clock.

Or is just fruitless as in:

A watched kettle never boils.

So just aiming to stop and stare – whether internally or externally is not a failsafe. Our blind, deceitful and wandering eyes need more guidance than that!

 

To be continued….

Do you ever find that the things you chase after end up chasing you? As in a game of tag, you chase and chase and finally lay your hands on it, but instead of the game being over – you are the one now having to avoid capture and on and on it goes.

Jesus said:

³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.  (Matthew 6:31-34)

 

I ended my last post ‘Hide and Seek’ with some questions:

• What does it look like to take refuge in God?
• What else do I take refuge in and what does that look like? What light does that shed on what it looks like to take refuge in something?
• Does the object of my fear influence where I take refuge? AND.. if it does what do my caves tell me about my fears?

Basically I am asking: How do fears and refuges function in my life on a daily basis?

Hmmmm….

I hear my daughter telling the NTV that she doesn’t like praying with anyone anymore – she just wants to do it on her own. I fear that she is pushing us away from instructing her and training her in her walk with the Lord, I fear that she will stop praying and turn away from Jesus. My heart starts beating faster, I am frozen on the spot like a rabbit in the headlights and whatever I was doing or feeling or thinking gets chased away. It is just me and my fear and even as I unstick and continue it travels on through the day in the pit of my stomach.

The later….

There are 6 tasks all insisting on sitting at the top of my list. I start to do one, then I realise that I could just progress the other while I am waiting for something or other, I pause on that to kill a fly, realise my first choice was not the most urgent as there is something more pressing, but in order to do that I need to clear and tidy the kitchen, but that just seems too daunting a task, meanwhile I spot another fly and have to kill that! I stop because I just can’t order things in my mind. I feel I need the order that doing all the tasks will bring about, but I can’t order my thoughts enough to make it happen. I fear running out of time and not only remaining in disorder, but getting further and further into disorder as the next set of things start clamouring to get to the top of the list.

Next….

An email comes in and I don’t know how to take it, and/or what time to give to it, and/or how to draw out the action points from it. How do I love that person? How do I decide if I can help? How do identify the answers that are needed, then start to piece together the information required and do all of that without forgetting it needs to be done, and yet not just dropping something more important to get it done. Here the fear can be about the relationship, but also fear of not managing.

Meanwhile ….

I know that the NTV isn’t there that evening for bible study and that I need to be in a state to host, and possibly facilitate, and that the children’s bed times and the tidiness of sitting room need to be appropriately advanced in time… Here I think I am fearing not so much what other people think of me, but rather the experience of stress that I will have trying to host in a mess at the same time as trying to be a patient loving mummy.

And so these lead balloons of fear and anxiety sit in the pit of my stomach and I am poised to fly like an animal being hunted or worse, to attack.

What is my refuge and strength in these moments?

• Getting out of the house – if I am not there I am somehow safe
• Tea or coffee – if I manage to enjoy something and give myself something nice then I exist outside of the stress and can resource myself
• Sleep/reading/doing a brain taxing puzzle – I have given myself that time and everything else waits outside. While I am ‘off duty’ the day moves on and there is less time to decide what to do with afterwards
• An engrossing TV programme that grabs my attention and tells me what to feel and promises to resolve it all for me (at least be the end of the series please!)

In other words my main fear is suffering mental/emotional discomfort and my main refuge is self comforting.

Even in the case of my daughter’s faith I think so much of my fear is about the feelings and pain I will suffer..

(I hated typing that – how horribly selfish and just wrong, but it is also horribly true. It isn’t the whole picture of my thoughts and feelings, but it is what is there in terms of the stabbing fear I feel in those moments)

Which is why I seek the refuges that I do. The escapes that numb and offer respite from the exhausting, gnawing anxiety.

I WANT to rest knowing that everything is done and everyone is safe in the Lord Jesus. That is when I feel good. So I FEAR (or at least want to avoid) anything that gets in the way of that. So I HIDE in a place where I can at least ignore the undone and the out of control.

Sorry about the specifics, but I hope they will take us to something more general. Why not pause and work it through for you? What do your days and habits and patterns of life tell you?

What do you WANT? What do you FEAR? Where do you HIDE?

So can we say that a refuge is..

A place of safety from, or at least separation from what we fear.

?

You fear a bomb dropping on your home, your refuge is (or rather would have been!) an Anderson Shelter
You fear a bull in a field, your refuge is the other side of the fence.
You fear getting fat, your refuge is eating less and exercising more.
You fear feelings of being out of control, your refuge is either order and staying in control or escaping to a place where you don’t need to be in control/it is easy to be in control.
You fear getting told off, your refuge is keeping all the rules perfectly, or running away from the person in charge.

Putting it the other way round: The refuge we are offered by someone in the know reveals the nature of the danger we are facing – whether we realise it or not.

So the refuge offered by a perfect and wise and loving Father will reveal the real danger we face, and also where our fears are the result of idolatry and pride.

So if God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble and if the one who fears the Lord can be confident, how do we need to assess our fears? How can we learn to live fearlessly in godly fear of the Lord?

More to follow….

Did you ever have a great hiding place when you were little?

An aunt and uncle of the NTV have a house in France that has been in the extended family since before he was born. We often eat in the old barn and from where we sit we can see an opening high up in the wall between one section of the barn and another. It was on the ledge of this opening that one boy found a brilliant hiding place for an epic game of ’40 40 in’ amongst the gang of young children (all grown up now) staying there at the time. From his perch he watched as others tried and failed to sneak past the catcher to the base just below him. Then he saw his moment and lept down to claim victory. Whether the victory was worth the broken leg he suffered from as a result is up for debate – his mother I’m sure didn’t think so! Some hiding places are much easier to get into than out of!

Beware where you hide! Outside of the competitive realm of children’s games hiding places should be places of refuge and safety. Sadly adults often take their refuge in perilous places that are even harder to extract themselves from.

Where do you hide when you are fearful? Do you hide IN God or FROM God?

So often we are like Adam – we know we are ‘naked’ and we hide. We cover our eyes with our hands like little children who think that we can’t see them because they can’t see us. But even at that dreadful moment of disobedience and reckoning the only true place to hide for Adam was IN God – in his mercy and his promises and his help.

In his excellent book ‘Intentional‘ Paul Williams describes a time when he scared his young twins (unintentionally!) as a game of ‘bear chase’ got a little too exciting. He recounts that while it was he who had terrified them, it was to him that they ran for refuge. He then shares how this helped him in his understanding of fear of the Lord. To fear the Lord is to run instinctively to him – whatever the fright. To be so deeply aware of his rule and might and trustworthiness AND of his goodness and love that even though it his sovereign will behind the roar we fear we submit to him and shelter in his arms.

In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge. Proverbs 14:26

The Psalms are full of the idea of taking refuge in the Lord – but while it is a very clear image, I’m not sure what it looks like practically.

It may help to start by looking at the everyday things I take refuge in instead of God. If I can visualise myself crawling into the safe places of a gripping tv programme, an after lunch sleep, a cup of tea, a blitzing house tidy then surely I can find some clues to help me find refuge in the Lord.

Does what we fear influence where we take our refuge? If it does what do my caves tell me about my fears?

 To be continued 

A follow on to last week’s post – Something Old Something New

I don’t think we are very good at gazing. Well I know I’m not. Too often I’m doing too many things at once and when my focus is on one thing it is rarely the sort of thing you can gaze at.

To gaze: To look steadily and intently, especially in admiration, surprise or thought.

The puritan, John Owen wrote about seeking the face of Christ.

In contrast so often I find myself seeking the end of my to do list, or the bottom of the washing basket or the completion of some preparation. Like the hotel cleaner my head is down, the clock is ticking and the view goes unheeded.

What is it that stops us gazing?

Fear?

Do we have such a strong suspicion of practices of meditation that are less than biblical, that are more influenced by eastern religion than by Scripture that we are walking away from what we are commanded to do in Scripture?? 

Fear of what will happen if we stop doing? In other words an element of pride? 

Fear of not knowing how to do it or of trying it and it not ‘working’? 

Laziness/Inertia?

Bizarrely stopping can be harder work than keeping going!   

Disdain?

Contempt for anything too familiar, or passe?

And so we miss out! We miss out on daily revelling in the glorious gospel, we miss out on exploring the bottomless love of God, we miss out on enjoying the beauty of our Lord and saviour, we do battle with the new without equipping ourselves with the old, the unchanging constant.

And do we as a result end up talking more about Christianity than about Christ? Do we speak more of what we have discovered in a bible passage than how God spoke to us in his word as we encountered him there? Does what we read quickly get lost like a piece of paper in an overly full intray because we don’t spend the time and the love on fixing it in our minds and hearts, filing it carefully so that we can access it with ease?

 

 

In the NEW heavens and the NEW earth – will we grow tired of looking at Jesus for all eternity? Will that view ever grow OLD?

In the centre, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. ⁷ The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. ⁸ Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying:

 

The answer seems to be NO!

Boredom doesn’t seem to be a problem, repetition doesn’t seem to be the enemy to joy and praise, novelty doesn’t seem to be necessary.

Of course there is more to the information we have about life in God’s perfect new creation than this snippet grabbed from Revelation chapter 4 and there is even more information that we just aren’t given. I’m not claiming that this is literally what we are going to be doing all day and I realise that here in chapter 4 the view is of God’s throne room before all things are renewed, before the wedding of Revelation 21 . Nevertheless, surely we can take from it, and from other such passages, that worship of God is going to be a major theme of our resurrection lives! AND that the repetitive worship of the Lord God Almighty is not dull to those casting their crowns before him!

So why do we get so tired of looking at him now? Why does repetition scare us off? Liturgy becomes despised, a song that is over-used quickly makes us groan and even the Lord’s prayer is pushed away because it just too familiar.

Is it our love of novelty that turns us off anything smacking of repetition? Is it only the new that can hope to hold our demanding attention? And if so, how long does it have before the novelty wears off?

And…are we really such fans as novelty as we make out? I wouldn’t want to meet new people every day and never see the same people again. I like having meals that I have eaten before and going to places well known to me. I like knowing where things are in the supermarket and I love traditions. Now I realise that I my love of routine and the familiar is stronger than it is in others – but the question remains..  In the core areas of our lives do we tend to reject repetition or enjoy living within it? Is it more in the area of holidays and entertainment etc. that novelty becomes the treasure we seek? And if so, what does that say about our worship of God?

They say familiarity breeds contempt and I know what they mean. You look at a spectacular view from your hotel window for the first time and your breath is taken away – you stop what you are doing and just gaze. In contrast, the hotel staff who go in and out of your room day after day, week after week may not even pause for a second look. The view itself is no less stunning, but who is doing the viewing makes all the difference.

The hotel guest has invested time and money in this view (or someone else has for them!). They are there (at least in part) for the very purpose of enjoying it. The hotel staff are there to get the same old job done so they can go into another room and do it all over again.

Which viewer best describes you on a Sunday morning (or whenever your church family gathers)? Sadly I think that for me, the description of the hotel staff is far too close for comfort.

Once again a bit of a meander of a blog post, but I hope it will be a worthwhile one. To be continued..

For another idea for creative praying check out the Resources page.

So colouring in seems is back in, cleverly marketed for grown-ups! I’m not sure that I’m convinced, but the following illustration it provides has proved helpful to me.

As I have been looking at the reformers and what they have to say on prayer I have been collecting rules. Calvin even calls his pointers ‘RULES’ – and they are great.

As you may know – I like rules! They are like the lines you need to keep in when you are colouring. If the lines are well drawn they help you create something beautiful. Calvin’s lines are well drawn:

• Rule 1: Fear the Lord. Fear of grieving him, messing such a meeting up, not a fear of him being angry with us, but a fear that comes from joy and delight.

• Rule 2: Recognise our brokenness, come as the mess we are, no ‘Sunday Best’. Sin is a chaos within.

• Rule 3: Submissive trust. Leave all hopes and desires in his hands.

But his last rule is best of all! Rule 4 is that, in one sense, there are no rules. The last rule is grace.

We can have confidence and hope as we pray – not dependent on ‘the neatness of our colouring’.  God tells us to ask for things, he loves us, and he loves to give us things in answer to prayer. In fact prayer is ‘the safest way to receive something’ from God. ‘It protects us from self sufficiency and we have the freedom to ask all and then know that he is wise and will only give us what is good.

My love of the rules can paralyse me. I dare not make a mark on the page unless I have the rules memorised and totally understood. (You can see where the All or Nothing gets it from!) But swing too far the other way and we merely scribble over something day after day and miss out on some of the beauty of the picture God is making with us. It is right to stretch and straighten our muddled, sinful our thinking and to challenge it with more and more truth. It is right to speak deeply into our hearts to open them up to the light of God’s word so that we can pray from the depths of our hearts more and more in tune with God’s heart. It is right to labour to this end in recognition that it is the Lord who works in us.

BUT… the mistakes don’t matter. They don’t count against us. Jesus has done the perfect colouring and intercedes at the Lord’s right hand. His Holy Spirit prays within us so the perfect prayer alway travels to the Father.

It is OK to make mistakes, AND it is wonderful to experience more of what God longs for us in prayer. We can go on scribbling in brown, the picture is worth no less to our Father, and at times it is all we can muster – but why not see what other colours God has put in your pencil case, and what amazing pictures you can produce with him?