Episode 106 - The Great Escape

This week I’ve been having a great time visiting a friend in Cornwall. My friend has a house cat called Hugo. Being a house cat Hugo always stays within the house. This includes the back garden which has a tall custom made fence with spikes on top to prevent any attempts of a break out. Remarkably this works; Hugo can’t get out, neighbouring cats can’t get in and Hugo is safe. Hugo doesn’t seem to particularly like this however. Admittedly it’s difficult to be sure of what exactly Hugo does and does like as he is quite possibly the grumpiest looking cat I have ever set eyes on. Still, the way that he paces along the garden fence, circles the perimeter and sticks his face into every little gap he can find seems to suggest that he has a break for freedom in mind. In fact every morning I half expected to see him riding a motorcycle at full speed towards the fence a little like Steve McQueen in the great escape. Sadly this never happened.

One day however, Hugo did escape. An open window was left unguarded and after a while of not having seen him, once we saw the window we knew he must have taken his opportunity whilst it was there. At first a great wave of worry hit us as we thought about how far away he might already be and about what trouble he could get himself into. This concern was only short lived though, as when we left the front door to look for him we immediately saw him lying on the grass in front of the house. 

The ridiculousness of the situation was apparent to all; having finally got the freedom he has searched for for so long and now having the freedom to go anywhere he wanted to, he chose to stay exactly where he was. I couldn’t help wondering what Hugo was thinking. Did he realise that life outside of his walls wasn’t so great and that he longed to be back in the safety of his home? Or was he regretting not making more of his opportunity to get away from the walls which hold him in? Funnily enough, it’s not just Hugo’s walls that I can’t make my mind up about, but it is also my own. Sometimes I struggle to tell if the boundaries that surround my life are holding me back or keeping me safe; whether or not God wants me to break them down or stay inside them. I guess instead of sneaking out the window I should just ask the Builder and if He wants me to leave them then he can just open the door.

Episode 105 - Flying on Wings Like a Boeing 747

This weekend I went to the Blackpool air show. I've always enjoyed watching aeroplanes. Not just when they do awesome tricks and upside down and do barrel rolls and loop the loops although that is super cool. But I really also enjoy just seeing them flying normally just sitting in the air as if by magic. I think it's amazing. Something so big somehow able to keep afloat on top of nothing. Now I am a massive geek and a trained engineer, so of course I know Bernoulli’s principle and understand why planes can fly. But that doesn't matter. That for me doesn't take away from incredible fact that they do fly, nor does it take away from the spectacle of seeing them do so. Even more so, as I watch the planes career across the sky it doesn't matter whether at not I understand why they stay in the air, they still will.

This is amazing to me. This incredible thing is happening which allow these mammoth tin cans to float seemingly weightlessly and yet the pilot who needs great amounts of knowledge and skill to control the plane needs no knowledge of the laws of physics which allow it fly to do so. If I watch a huge passenger jet traverse the wide open sky the chances are that very few if any of the passengers on the plane are aware of Bernoulli’s principle, the foundation upon which a planes ability to fly is built upon and yet for the sake of their ignorance it won't suddenly drop out of the sky. Planes fly. Whether you understand why they do or not, they still fly.

Sometimes I can get carried away with the why's and how's of life and sometimes they can be important and useful and helpful. And sometimes they don't matter. Not really. I'm not devaluing knowledge,I would never do that. But sometimes some knowledge is more important than other pieces of knowledge, and sometimes some knowledge is just extraneous. In the case of a passenger on a jumbo jet, knowing that planes CAN fly is much more important than knowing why. Sometimes you just need to trust that the engineer knows what he's doing, leave it to him and just enjoy the ride. I try to follow God through this life but sometimes I get distracted or unbalanced by not how or why everything will work. I should learn a lesson from the aeroplane, trust the one who engineered life itself and just enjoy the ride.

Episode 104 - Driving Each Other Up the Wall

This week I drove a car for the first time in 19 months. The last time I drove I was driving back from the clinic in Papua New Guinea for them to look into whether or not the little jerks I got occasionally were anything to worry about – I even got pulled over by a police man, don’t worry, it was just a routine check. I have to say, getting into the driving seat I was quite nervous, but everything went very well, I didn’t even get pulled over by the police! Beforehand I was worried that I may have forgotten some things or lost my driving instinct but it all came straight back to me. It was just like riding a bike – except with very different pedals and a steering wheel instead of handle bars. 

As I was getting my confidence back, I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that everyone else driving around me had no idea about my circumstance or experience. I was just another faceless driver to them. And likewise, so were they to me. They could be having the best day of their lives, or their worst. And I wouldn’t know. They may have just been given a promotion – or the sack. They could be on the way to the hospital, to visit a new born relative or a dying one. Or they could just be having a really normal day. Should I treat them any differently depending upon how their day has been? Yet truthfully it seems only fair to have more patience with someone if they’re having a bad day. Should my ignorance to their circumstance be an excuse to my lack of patience? 

It’s easy to dehumanise the other drivers on the road, but I fear that I can be just as flippant with the humanity of all the people I meet during a regularly day. It’s easier not to consider them as people so as to excuse my cold behaviour towards them and even at times allow me to pour out my frustration towards them. And yet allowing myself to feel negatively towards them does nothing to lighten my burden or to cheer my mood. Strangely however, if I stop just seeing the retail worker or the postman or the cold caller, but instead see; Dave the guy who’s just started a new job, or Lucy who’s been walking for three hours in the pouring rain, or Mike who’s got a poorly little girl at home who he’s worried sick about, then something changes inside. Because we’re all people, we all have our frustrations and problems, just as we can all be frustrating and all make mistakes. And so I feel less inclined to feel frustrated and impatient towards them and more likely to feel compassion towards them. The negative feelings that slowly gnaw away at me are replaced with love, which actually feels pretty nice. It changes how I behave outwardly, but it also changes how I feel inwardly and it is without doubt I who benefits the most. I will never know the half of what is going on in the lives of those who pass me by, but I won’t allow that to be an excuse to discount their humanity.

Episode 103 - Unboxing the Past

This last week I have started going through old boxes of my things that my parents have lovingly kept in their garage for years and years and years. Amongst it all there were a few boxes of stuff from when I was in school, mainly books and projects. As I went through it all I found memories coming back to me that I didn’t even know I had. Nothing very solid, just glimpses of the person I had been. To be honest I wasn’t the most street-wise or socially aware of children, in fact in many ways I could be quite naïve and ignorant. I remembered (not too clearly) some interactions with my friends where looking back, I wished I had behaved differently. I can’t help thinking that they must have been hurt by my actions even though I was totally unaware of it. I really do wish that it had happened differently. And yet I remember no fallout from those incidents, and looking back through the evidence in my boxes it’s clear that we were not only friends afterwards, but that they cared an awful lot about me too.

It makes me feel very grateful for those friends. It also makes me realise how easy it is to regret mistakes we make in our relationships with other people. I know that there have been many times that I’ve worried that I should have done something differently or responded to something better. But looking over these things, I can see that whilst it would have been better if I’d had followed a different course, in the long run it really didn’t matter, and worrying and wishing has never changed anything (although a good apology can be worth more than gold). My friends have never loved me because I didn’t make mistakes, but they’ve loved me despite them. I’ve always been blessed enough to have friends who understand that my mistakes don’t define me but rather what I define as mistakes determine who I am. Perhaps I need to start being a little easier on myself when I mistakes and see it as an opportunity to make them shape me into who I want to be.

Episode 102 - Three Cheers for the Class of 2018

On Friday I had the privilege to be at my old college as the degree students who started when I started my short course nearly three years ago had their graduation service. It has been amazing to be back with them again, having fun just like we did when I was studying there. Being back again, it was impossible not to think about the two and a half years that had passed since I finished studying at All Nations. It’s strange to think of what I had imagined my future was going to be and then to compare it to what is now. It could be easy to think that I had planned so much but find myself exactly where I was. But of course our plans are not always God’s plans, as it says in proverbs; in his heart a man plots his course but the Lord determines his steps, and God’s plans are always best!

Also, it would be wrong to say that I am in exactly the same place. Yes, the buildings are pretty much the same, the atmosphere is as electric as ever and I’m surrounded by many of the same amazing people, but those same people are not the same as they were. They still have the same unmistakable characters that made them who they were and define who they are, but they are different. They are more. The last three years has changed them. Shaped them. Grown them. Taught them. And I am so incredibly proud of them, not just for getting their degrees, but for who they are. And not just them, but me too, I am not the same. God has changed me. My classes may have looked a little different but I have had the same God shaping me. With God there is no going back, only going forward, even when He takes you back to where you have been before.

Episode 101 - The Unfamiliar Places of God

I’m currently in the middle of three weeks that I will spend volunteering at my old college. I have mainly been helping in the kitchen so far. I have never worked in a kitchen before. And before you say it, yes I have cooked before! But working in a kitchen is very different, they have deep fat fryers, and food mixers the size of normal ovens. Everything is much much bigger and most meals are made for at least sixty people as opposed to six at most. And it’s not just the equipment and the scale of everything which was new to me. All of the tasks are new to me too, even the simple things needed to be explained thoroughly so that I understood exactly what I was required to do for each task. 

At first it is quite uncomfortable being in a totally unfamiliar environment, not just not knowing where anything is kept, but also not knowing what most of the stuff there is either! On top of that there is the not knowing how to engage with your surroundings, how to do even simple tasks, not knowing how to do the very work that you are there to do. It must be said that in many of these respects it’s not too dissimilar to doing “missionary” work abroad! I have to say that although not comfortable at first, and a little frustrating, I think it has been good for me.

For most of our lives we spend our times in places that are familiar to us doing things that we have done many times before. Even when we do go to new places or try new things they usually have aspects of familiarity to us and we usually only engage with them for a short time before returning to more familiar places or activities. Being immersed in the unfamiliar for long periods of time has helped remove some of my self-reliance, my pride, my inward focus and my blinkeredness to others. It has helped me to cultivate under used skills, not just cutting carrots and peeling potatoes, but things like asking for help and advice.

There seems to be a sort of sweet spot in the world of the unfamiliar. Just beyond the overwhelming disorder but before familiarity sets in, where something special seems to take place, where all of this seems to happen. And I can’t help noticing that all through our lives God seems to keep bringing us to that place, to new and unfamiliar things. Partly this is undoubtedly because He always has so much more that He wants for us, but I’m also starting to see that perhaps he wants to help keep us in that place; a place where we come to Him rather than looking to our own wisdom for the answers. I just wonder if sometimes I let my own comfort keep me in my familiar places and stop me from following Him into the unfamiliar places of God.

Episode 100 - More Frogs

I’m not really much of a reader. I read slowly, I get easily distracted and I generally find it hard work. Despite this I love stories and I even love books, I just don’t read them much. But there is one book that I read a little bit of every day. My Bible. I read it every day because I genuinely believe that God speaks to me through it and that He uses it to help me become a better me. Now I have read it before (so you don’t need to worry about giving me any spoilers), but unlike the other books on my shelf that I’ve read once and have ever since been collecting dust (or that are collecting dust as they still wait to be read for them for the first time), I keep coming back to my Bible. And the incredible thing is that no matter how many times I read it, God always shows me something new (or sometimes something I’d forgotten…).

Recently I’ve been reading about how God brought the people of Israel up out of slavery from Egypt. In the story Moses comes before Pharaoh (who is enslaving the Israelites) to speak on God’s behalf. Moses would tell Pharaoh that unless he let the Israelites go, God would do something bad to Egypt. Pharaoh would ignore Moses, something bad would happen, Pharaoh would plead with Moses to ask God to stop, God would stop and then the whole thing would start all over again. This happened ten times until Pharaoh finally gave up. It’s a story I’ve heard hundreds of times before since being small and even so, this week I noticed something in the story I’d never noticed before.

At one point in the story Moses tells Pharaoh that unless he lets the Israelites go, God will send a plague of frogs upon Egypt. Pharaoh refuses, and so a plague of frogs appears and there are frogs everywhere. The stories in the bible never fail to amaze me. Often it’s the Character of God and the choices He makes, sometimes however, it’s the people in the stories and the crazy things they do. Upon arrival of all the frogs, Pharaoh calls all of his magicians and wise men to come before him and respond to the crisis in the land. And respond they do. How? Why by summoning more frogs of course. MORE FROGS! Why would anyone think; “I know what this situation requires – more frogs!” I mean if I was Pharaoh, I’d be saying; “that’s just great guys, thanks so much for making the situation exactly twice as bad as it was before you started”. The strange thing is that he doesn’t seem to respond at all. Pharaoh’s not a nice guy. He’s the kind of guy who would have anyone who displeased him killed, along with their families, but it seems that this was actually what Pharaoh wanted them to do.

Well this just seems crazy to me. Or at least it did. Until I really thought about the question that wouldn’t seem to leave me alone; WHY!? Why on earth would anyone do that!? And then I realised that I had made a terrible assumption. I had assumed that Pharaoh, the most powerful, revered man in all of the land was trying to fix this problem that had hit this land which he was supposed to look after. He wasn’t. He had no interest in preserving his country, only his pride. He was used to ruling the roost, giving out the orders and doing what he pleased. Suddenly this guy came along, challenged his authority and told him what to do in his own palace! Pharaoh felt he needed to show his authority and power, to show that Moses (and indeed God) had no business telling him what to do, to show that whatever God could do, he could do to. Even if that what was causing havoc in the country he was supposed to be looking after. Pharaoh’s folly seems obvious to us but it was hidden from him. It would be easy to condemn Pharaoh but the truth is that I can’t say I haven’t wreaked havoc to myself and those around me trying to save my pride. I guess we all have a bit of Pharaoh in us, and we have something to learn from Pharaoh’s foolishness.