Episode 150 - Only an Apple (or other non-specific fruit)

A long time ago, in a garden far far away, Adam and Eve ate something that God told them specifically not to. As a consequence, they got something far worse than salmonella. They sought to be like God, and in one particular (and unfortunate) way they did. In doing what God had told them not to, they chose to follow what they thought was best rather than what God thought was best, they seized the authority to determine for themselves what was good and what was bad, and with it the responsibility to suffer the consequences of those decisions. This is a (questionable) privilege the whole of humanity then inherited from them. The trouble is, that we unlike God, are not very good at it. When it comes to defining what is good and what is bad, God never gets it wrong. Us on the other hand get it wrong a lot. At this point in my life I have got quite used to this fact, along with the cycle of making mistakes, getting knocked down by them, and then dragging myself back up (with the help of God) to try again. 

 For the most part these definitions I make, I make for myself alone and so the elements from which I make this decision are simple enough. I look to my life, my needs, my thoughts, my feelings, my circumstance and I bring them to word of God written in the Bible and I pray about it asking God to guide me and do my best to make the right choices. Being for myself, these conclusions not only come just from myself, but their consequences also affect only myself. And I’m okay with that. I don’t mind paying the cost of my mistakes (although mercifully Jesus paid the true price which I could never pay). But life isn’t always so simple. Sometimes life throws people together in such a way that their choices make huge impacts on each others lives and our definitions of what is good and bad must come in equal parts from each other. That just doesn’t seem fair. How am I supposed to know what someone else is feeling or thinking, or needs, or what God is speaking into their lives? It’s hard enough working out that stuff for myself let alone for someone else. And what if we don’t reach the same conclusion, how do we reach peace about it? 

Whilst living as we do, the times that such situations occur so strongly are rare, but the difficult thing is that the more entangled or lives become the more often they arise, and God made us not for life as individuals, but as a group of people whose lives are intertwined and supporting one another. I’ll be honest, I struggle with that. Perhaps that’s why I can be so reclusive at times. And yet as hard as working out such things can be, it’s actually a much simpler question that I tend to struggle with; not what to do, but rather to do or not to do. The course of inaction always seems strongly tempting. Whether right or wrong, I always eventually seem to be able to come to a conclusion about what the best thing to do is but deciding whether or not to do it seems much more difficult. Studies have found that in a hypothetical situation in which a loose rail cart is on course to hit 5 people and certainly kill them, but where the respondent is next to a lever which would divert the cart into the path of another individual who would die instead, most people would do nothing and leave the loose rail cart on its initial course to the group of five. It’s strange, but it’s not that anyone thinks that the lives of those five people were less important than that of the individual, but rather we seem to have a misguided view that whilst we are responsible for the consequences of our actions, we are somehow not responsible for the consequences of our inaction. 

 I have to confess that I have been using you as a sounding board, so thank you for listening. I didn’t know what I was going to conclude, but I wrote it because I wanted a conclusion, not just for you but also for myself. As I’ve been writing, I have been reminded that the confidence I have in following through in what I think is right to do when I think about decisions that affect only myself is borne from knowing that I cannot find peace in myself if I don’t, and that I have the security of knowing that in God’s grace and overflowing abundance, there is nothing that I can do to stop God fulfilling His purposes for my life. I now realise that I can be confident of that truth for other people too.

Episode 149 - Not By Sight

 This weekend I am staying at my parents caravan trying to fix one of the caravans legs which hold it steady. To do this I first needed to remove the leg, and to do that I needed to undo the nuts which held it onto two fixed bolts. Unfortunately the nuts had become rusted in place and when I came to undo these nuts, the fixed bolts became, well, unfixed. To further complicate things, the head of the bolts were completely inaccessible. I had to use every trick I could think of to hold the bolts in place and loosen the nuts and yet they wouldn't budge. So I did it all again and still they wouldn't budge. And so I tried again and again and again. And still nothing. There was no sign of anything changing, no reason to think it would and no reason to continue. But for some reason (probably my stubbornness) I continued.

Then out of the blue some time later,the nut began to move on the bolt. Not a lot, in fact only a very little, but still it moved. And suddenly there was a reason to keep trying and continuing no longer seemed like a hopeless endeavour. It became much easier to keep going because I could see the progress being made. It's funny because most of the progress was made before this point, where rewards of my labour were unseen, but it's only ever the achievement we see (or think we see) that spurs us on rather than what we have actually accomplished. I wonder how much I've given up on thinking I wasn't able to succeed because I couldn't see the progress I was making. I also am starting to realise how easy it is to be dissuaded from things I've felt sure God has called me to do because it doesn't seem like I'm able to make any progress. I can understand why Paul (of New testament fame) said that Christians live by faith not by sight.

Of course there is another sting in the tale (misspelling intended). It's now Sunday as I write this and I still haven't got the caravan leg off because after the nuts came looser, they then began to bind again. I suspect because of a combination of dirt and damage caused to the bolt from measures taken by me to hold it in place. I'm not sure what I'll do next. A complete change of tac may be necessary.I also don't know what this adds to my thoughts although I'm sure there's something. But I do find myself wondering if actually the outcome or the perceived progress should matter to me when I feel God has called me towards something. Surely the fact that He asked should be enough.

Episode 148 - Have You Ever Made White Sauce?

 Some weeks when I come to write my blog I know exactly what I'm going to say. Other weeks I have no idea what so ever. This week my thoughts have literally been given to me by a friend of mine who had a revelation whilst she was cooking, and so left me a voice message telling me all about it. You know it's going to be a great message when it begins; "have you ever made white sauce?" You see the thing about white sauce is that you put everything in the pan, put it on the heat and stir. And stir. And stir. And nothing seems to happen. You take it off the heat, put it back on the heat, keep stirring and still nothing happens, and nothing that you do makes any difference. Then suddenly seemingly out of the blue, in an instant, it thickens and you have perfect white sauce. "That's just like life!", my friend astutely pointed out, "sometimes you're busy trying to make it work and all you need to do is wait and let God deal with it, and then it all comes out perfectly".

 

The particularly amusing thing about this is that the vast majority of the times that I make white sauce I get to the point that I've waited so long that I convince myself that I mustn't have put enough cornflour in and so I add some more. This doesn't make the sauce thicken any quicker at all. What it does do is that once it thickens it becomes so thick that you could stand your spoon up in it. I then need to add more milk to it to thin it out and end up with twice as much sauce as I actually wanted. Maybe God's trying to tell me that trusting Him to do things also means not interfering...

Episode 147 - Work in Progress

Recently at work I’ve been documenting some of the projects which have been made in our mechanical workshop. This comprises of taking the original design sketches, measuring up the completed projects and then using a computer to create a design so that an exact replica could be made if it needed to be. The difficulty with this is that the original sketches were only meant as a guide to help the mechanical engineer work out how he was going to make it and so interpreting it is a little like trying to decode a secret treasure map written in a foreign language. On top of this lots of the parts, faces and cuts on the finished projects are not easily accessible once it’s been assembled so making accurate measurements can be difficult and often end up being calculated guesses. I enjoy making technical drawings but for a short time I was getting frustrated as I seemed to be spending most of my time going backwards and redrawing things as I realised that the drawing wasn’t quite right as it wouldn’t work properly with the dimensions I had given it. It seemed like I spent more time erasing than I did drawing, like I was completely facing the wrong direction and making very little progress, but then I realised that I was looking at it all wrong.

Everything I deleted was part of my progress. I wasn’t just repeating the same thing over and over again, each time I was making something new. The changes were very small but significant. They took something that looked good but wasn’t quite right and brought it closer to being what it was meant to be. For me one of the joys of drawing is seeing something come in to being from nothing. Too see something new take form and grow into something. So to have something that looks complete and then spend more time editing it than I did drawing it in the first place for it to barely look any different was hugely disappointing. But when I began to look at it as taking something that was right on the surface but practically unusable, and then watch as it slowly became perfect and able to fulfil its purpose, I took a great sense of pleasure. Sometimes I feel like both I and my life are so close to being what they should be and yet I seem to spending most of my time fixing little mistakes that I make rather than actually doing anything seemingly useful. In those seasons I need to learn to watch with joy as my maker helps prepare me so I don’t just look useful, but am actually ready to fulfil His future purpose for me.