Episode 70 - Words of Wisdom

This week I was talking with friends about how odd English sayings and expressions are (after using the expression "someone walked over my grave" to their complete confusion) and this started me thinking about some of the expressions I had heard during my time in Papua New Guinea and so I thought that would share some of them with you this week...

Work won't run away

Knowledge is only a rumour until it's in the muscle

Plant a Banana (meaning going to the toilet)

Number eleven (meaning a runny nose)

A saying from the Cassowary to her chicks:  Whatever falls from above is always the fruit of the tree, take and eat, but avoid anything from the ground moving towards you, because it will bring you harm.

Time can not wait. It goes and goes completely.

Six pocket (Cargo shorts)

I must have heard hundreds of expressions, but that seems to be all I can remember right now. Please tell me any you might know and I'll update the list!

Episode 69 - Driven By Purpose

Nobody sets out on a journey without a reason (even if the journey itself is the reason). In fact no-one does anything with something motivating them to do so. Purpose is a fundamental part of all of our lives and it drives everything that we do. At the moment I’m not really able to do all that much and as such my sense of purpose has diminished. It’s not that I feel I have no purpose, for in all things, wherever I am in life, I always feel that my purpose is to do whatever I am doing for God’s glory as Paul urges us to in the book of Colossians. The trouble is that when I feel unable to do anything, I feel unable to fulfil any purpose and so in a way feel purposeless. I feel like a raft bobbing up and in the middle of a wide ocean with no direction and no way to move myself forward.

How the Horizon Sometimes Feels...

This is not the first time in my life that I have felt like this. In this instance this feeling comes from not being able to do much, but the feeling of purposelessness can have many sources. It can come from feeling that you are making no progress in what you have set out to achieve, or even by achieving it. It can come from a change in circumstance or from there being no change at all for far too long. It can come from defeat and it can come from success. Whatever the reasons I have felt this way in the past, I can see that God has always lead my out of it and used this time to reenergise and redirect me. So I may be a powerless raft stranded at sea, but God is the power that moves the oceans currents, and I will draw strength by remembering His constant faithfulness all throughout my life.

One of the benefits of feeling purposeless because I’m not able to do very much, is that it gives me plenty of time to think about it. To think about what gives us purpose, and what our purpose is. We are all of course unique and as such, we all have a unique purpose, one that no-one else has, and one that changes throughout our lives too. But whilst we each have our own specific purpose, we also all have a universal purpose that never changes, the very reason that we as individuals and mankind as a species was put on this earth. Simply to know God. Now it should not be surprising that this is something that is easily overlooked in a culture that puts great worth on achievement above all else. But God didn’t make us simply to achieve something. If God was looking for results, He would just have done it Himself. He’d do it all a lot better than any of us could and have it completed with effortless speed too. He doesn’t just want us to do, but to be. With Him. To know Him and to spend time with Him. I have to confess that whilst I have always known this, this is something that I all too often and all too easily forget. And so, I will rejoice in this time of lost purpose, and use it to once again find my original purpose; to be with God.

Episode 68 - Words of Hope

I'm afraid I don't have much to say this week, so I thought that I would share with you the words of one of my favourite pieces of scripture that seems to keep coming up recently - Isaiah 35

Wilderness and desert will sing joyously,
the badlands will celebrate and flower—
Like the crocus in spring, bursting into blossom,
a symphony of song and color.
Mountain glories of Lebanon—a gift.
Awesome Carmel, stunning Sharon—gifts.
God’s resplendent glory, fully on display.
God awesome, God majestic.

 Energize the limp hands,
strengthen the rubbery knees.
Tell fearful souls,
“Courage! Take heart!
God is here, right here,
on his way to put things right
And redress all wrongs.
He’s on his way! He’ll save you!”

Blind eyes will be opened,
deaf ears unstopped,
Lame men and women will leap like deer,
the voiceless break into song.
Springs of water will burst out in the wilderness,
streams flow in the desert.
Hot sands will become a cool oasis,
thirsty ground a splashing fountain.
Even lowly jackals will have water to drink,
and barren grasslands flourish richly.

There will be a highway
called the Holy Road.
No one rude or rebellious
is permitted on this road.
It’s for God’s people exclusively—
impossible to get lost on this road.
Not even fools can get lost on it.
No lions on this road,
no dangerous wild animals—
Nothing and no one dangerous or threatening.
Only the redeemed will walk on it.
The people God has ransomed
will come back on this road.
They’ll sing as they make their way home to Zion,
unfading halos of joy encircling their heads,
Welcomed home with gifts of joy and gladness
as all sorrows and sighs scurry into the night.

Episode 67 - What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – or at least that’s what Nietzsche said. Of course he went mad in the end, which makes you rethink the wisdom of these words. I must confess that I think that sometimes I believe this phrase a little too much. There is no doubt to my mind that times of difficulty produce opportunities to grow in character. In fact, I can testify that the times of greatest personal growth in my life have come from the times I found the hardest. But that alone doesn’t make the statement true. Difficult times are by their nature unpleasant, and as such no-one seeks them out. I can appreciate what was achieved through my past struggles, and even be glad that these struggles happened in the past, without wanting any more. And so when I see difficult times coming, I have a tendency to avoid them as much as I can, to interact with the trouble as little as I can, so as to prevent being hurt by it. 

Of course you can’t run away from your troubles, but you can to a certain extent let them pass you by. This is no guarantee that you will avoid the pain of the situation, in fact, it often just delays or even prolongs it. But there is even more to this. I seem to think that however I get through this, either by facing up to it, or by burying my head in the sand, the reward is still the same – as in Nietzsche’s promise – all you have to do is not let it kill you. But this isn’t the truth of the matter. Like so much of life, ultimately what you get out is what you put in – even if this isn’t always immediately obvious. This is because this difficulty induced character is produced as a result of learning how to deal with these difficulties, learning how to grow to embrace and overcome them. If I just let them go by and ignore them, then I can learn nothing from them.

An adorable picture to illustrate the point...

I think I have written about this tendency of mine to hide from my troubles before, and it’s a tendency I suspect I will have to fight until the day I die. It’s hard because sometimes I don’t feel strong enough to face up to the struggles of this life. That’s because I’m not. But God is. And He never leaves me on my own to face these struggles. I just need to remember to keep my eyes on Him and not my problems. The ironic thing is that I can’t beat the struggles of life by fighting against them. I can only overcome them by letting them come.  Letting them wash over me. And I can only do that if I trust God completely. And I will only make it out on the other side if I follow Him as He leads me all the way through

Episode 66 - Well Cultured

When we talk about being well cultured, we often talk about going to the theatre or listening to the opera. It’s often about the arts and what past times we enjoy, but this of course is not the true depth of culture. Culture is much more than that. Culture is a set of ideas and customs within a society that form a foundation for the behaviour of those people. It’s like a list of (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) unwritten rules for how to behave. The funny thing is that as well as these unwritten rules that are placed upon us by our society, we also have these inbuilt tendencies for behaviour in our character or personality, and there is nothing to say that the two will match up at all. I sometime find it a cruel irony as I watch people I know struggle with their own culture when it fits so ill around them. There are many aspects to British culture, but one of the most famous is our inability to ever say what we actually mean. We are very rarely direct, we have a habit of skirting an issue and can often be can quite figurative in the way we speak. I find this quite poetic. My sister on the other hand is a times the most literal person I know. The other day she was talking about having  a very frustrating conversation when her husband asked her if she had to bite her lip. She looked at him bewildered for a while before simply asking, “how would that help anything?” As for myself, I’m not sure that I have ever felt like I particularly identified with my culture, but nor that it was ever a hindrance either. My relationship with my host culture changed dramatically however when I moved to Papua New Guinea.

 

His reflexes are to fast, he would catch it...

Unsurprisingly, Papua New Guinean culture is different to British culture in most aspects of life. I have to say that overall this new culture matched my character much more closely than my British culture. That felt rather strange to me, but it was incredible to be in a place where everyone said hello to you and you didn’t get strange looks when you smiled at strangers and that relationships came before everything – even work. Those things had never been seen as normal before (not that that ever stopped me). And so with this in mind you might think that I felt much more comfortable and at ease in this new culture, but the strange thing is, that I didn’t. At least to begin with that is, it should be said that I grew more comfortable with every passing day, and please don’t get me wrong, I adore much of Papua New Guinean culture, so why then did this new culture feel so strange to me if it came so much more naturally to me? The answer was simple, because it was new. Whilst much of what was acceptable behaviour in Papua New Guinea came naturally to me, it was not normal to me for this to be the acceptable thing to do and so I had to keep checking myself because the unwritten rules had changed. I’ll be honest, up to this point in my life I think I had always seen culture as a hindrance that stopped people behaving as they wanted to, but this gave me a new found appreciation for culture. You see regardless of whether it comes naturally to us or not, culture provides us with a framework to build relationships upon which help prevent us from making others uncomfortable. And so from now I will continue to try to make people feel more free to act according to their natural character, but I will also endeavour to respect the foundations for relationship we call culture a little bit more.