Episode 44 - Acheivements

As swiftly as it came, another week has gone. Last week I wrote about how spurred on by my western culture, I always have a longing to have a plan. A plan and a set of objectives. Hand in hand with that comes the desire to achieve, or more correctly, to successfully accomplish a set of achievements. Just as here in England the changing of the seasons out of my window mark the passage of time, so too often I feel that the amount of objectives with a tick next to them mark how much I have achieved. As I look back to what I have achieved over this last week, the list is startlingly short. I have had some friends over for company, but we didn’t really achieve much in the usual meaning of the word. I have spent most of it lying in bed. And most of what I haven’t spent in bed I’ve spent lying on the sofa. And most of what I haven’t spent lying on the sofa I have spent talking with friends and family. Now please don’t get me wrong, this is a quite pleasant way to spend my time, but it doesn’t achieve anything, or at least not by the way that we tend to like to measure such things. And I know that I’m not well and that I need to rest and its okay not to achieve anything, but sometimes, it can all seem like it’s all just a rather big waste of time. Or at least it does by such a measure of achievement.

But there are some things, some achievements, that can’t be measured or monitored, that can’t be written on a list, that can’t be ticked off or often even seen at all. And there are journeys that can’t be mapped out, whose progress can’t be charted or measured by milestones. And life is one of these journeys. I find that God uses these times when I stop trying to achieve things, to achieve things in me, to change me in a way that I could not change myself. A man never became stronger by walking into a gym and just feeling the weights, he has to pick them up. And not just once, but again and again wrestling with them. I have seen so much in this world and heard so much of God’s word. I have picked up learning from them, but rather than wrestle with them, I pursued the list of achievements that I made for myself. Never seeking to understand what these things might mean for me, or to find out who they might make me. But as I stop chasing after my endless lists, these things find me and it turns out that I don’t even need to wrestle, they just fill my mind where I leave space for them, without me even realising. Now I can’t make a list of what I’ve achieved this week, the truth is I’m not really sure and I certainly couldn’t put it into words if I could, but I know that I’m not quite the same person I was at the beginning of the week, I don’t see the world in quite the same way either, and on top of that, I see God a little clearer too. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you don’t achieve anything at all.

Episode 43 - When Life Doesn’t Go Exactly to Plan

When life doesn’t go exactly to plan. When. This title of course, is said with no small amount of irony, for in my experience the rare moments are when life does go as you might have foreseen it not when it doesn’t. Even so, it still seems to take us by surprise and leave us feeling a little lost. Now being a good child of western culture, I like to have a plan. To have targets, aims and objectives. To have a sense that I know where I am going and what I’m trying to do. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, but it is perhaps naïve of me to believe in the false sense of complete control that I sometimes like to try to give myself. I’m a pretty laid back Englishman and I’ve been following God long enough to realise that trying to second guess God’s plans for me rarely leaves both He and I on the same page. My friend once told me that it is best to hold one’s plans like a butterfly; hold them too loosely and they fly away, hold them too tightly and they die. It’s advice that I like to think that I live by and I like to think that all of my plans are free to change and never tied down, it’s only when they are challenged and brought into question that I realise that I have set these idea so firmly in place.

My plan in life is generally pretty simple and free flowing; follow God. And what I’m expecting to achieve is I used to think pretty simple and free flowing too; keep doing whatever you last felt certain God wanted you to be doing with life until you feel certain that He’s telling you to do something else. That last instruction was join MAF as an engineer working for CRMF in Papua New Guinea. Yet right now, my life doesn’t look like the plan. Not at all. Or at least not how I envisioned the plan. I’m not for a second saying that the plan has changed, that God has a new task in mind for me, and yet geographically, I couldn’t be further away from the plan without wearing a spacesuit. Or at least further away from what I had unwittingly assumed that plan looked like. You see, I had thought that I had left God to draw up the plans for my life, but when He gave them to me, or at least the next part of it that I needed, I filled it up with details based upon my assumptions without even realising it. Assumptions like serving CRMF in Papua New Guinea required being in Papua New Guinea, not being in England for an unknown amount of time without any clear reason according to the piece of the plan that I have, only six months after moving to Papua New Guinea. Now that doesn’t sound unreasonable, in fact it sounds like a fairly sensible assumption to me. But God doesn’t think like man (and just as well too).

My plan, my visualisation of God’s plan for me has been brought into question, because I have been taken by surprise by this. But God is never taken by surprise. It’s not possible that God’s plan has been foiled by something He didn’t see coming and so it must be part of the plan, just part that I didn’t realise was there because God hadn’t told me, because I didn’t need to know. But it felt wrong to me because I had decided for myself what this plan should look like, because whilst wanting to be a follower of God, I still wanted to be the leader of my own destiny. There is nothing wrong with being proactive, but these two things are at odds, and pursuit of both will ultimately lead to disappointment. I’m tempted to pursue both because I too easily feel that to achieve God’s plan, to achieve what He wants for me, I must really want it, to chase it, and to take control. But I cannot achieve any of this. And I cannot understand or even imagine the fullness of God’s plans, and I certainly cannot lead myself there. No. I can’t do the things that God wants for me by pursuing my own destiny, no matter how eagerly I pursue it. Nor can I even get there by pursuing God’s plans for me. But only by simply pursuing God. And so in this time, as my world has been literally turned upside down and the horizon does flips, I can let go of all of my presumptions and the things that tie me in knots, the things I wrongly think I need to do and things that I cannot do on my own. I can take a deep breath, fix my eyes on God and know that here looking at Him is right where I need to be.

Episode 42 - In a man's heart he plots his course...

So 2017 hasn’t started exactly as I expected for me. As you’ll have read from the blogs that Nomes has written for me I’m currently not very well. Instead of starting the New Year in PNG getting stuck into all the work that there is to do there, I’m here in England struggling to find the energy to do anything at all. Even responding to e-mails or writing this blog feel like a task too gargantuan for me to achieve (but one of the benefits of being ill is that you have plenty of time, even if you don’t feel like doing anything, so I have been able to spread writing this blog over the whole week). I’m very fortunate that my illness doesn’t come with any pain, just the frustration of having little energy and shaking like a children’s Christmas gift from the 90’s (does anyone else remember Furbies?). I also have some twitches in my legs which do make me at times pretty unstable on my feet and make me look like I’ve come straight from Monty Pythons ministry of silly walks – something which brings so much joy to my girlfriend, that it makes it impossible for me to be resentful of. I’ve also discovered that taking a walking stick with me should I ever have to venture into public spaces changes this behaviour from perceived lunacy into quite acceptable behaviour.

Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks

In fact, when one stops to look at it all, it is quite hard not to see the funny side, even the fact that I occasionally punch myself in the face. And the blessing of the fact that I am now at home with my family should not be over looked. Nor that I got to spend Christmas with them and my girlfriend (all be it in a hospital bed) was beyond anything I could have hoped, the best Christmas gift I could have asked for and literally brought a tear of joy to my eye. That’s not to say that as much as I love them, I don’t want to get back to PNG as soon as possible, because I really do, and I miss my family there too. But even though it has all been very frustrating and I’ve felt it all battling inside me, I am very aware of the blessings of this time too, and have always been certain that in some way that I still can’t see despite my greatest efforts, that this is in some way all part of Gods plan. And as I’ve wrestled with this frustration and endlessly questioned God, I have found no answers. But I have found my frustration lift and His peace descend. For I know that my ways are not His ways and my timing is not His timing, and I know that His timing is perfect. So although I really have no clue as to what all this is about, I know that God does, and I will rest secure in this knowledge and trust that His plans are far better than anything I could ever imagine.

Episode 41 - Resolutions

Nomes again, but this time I’ll try to make the blog a bit more about Joey than last time!!

So, some of the more observant readers may remember Joey talking about something he calls a Scrum Board. I don’t remember it; I’m not entirely sure I’m spelling it right, but for the purpose of this entry, that’s what it’s called.
The Scrum Board has such a brilliant function that I want to write to you about it. It’s one of Joey’s ways of managing his team. At the start of each fortnight they get together and write a list of all the things they’d like to get done, and then as a team they decide how much priority should be given to each. They put the list up in order of priority on the To-Do list on the Scrum Board.

Over the course of the next two weeks, whenever someone finishes a job, they don’t have to go to Joey to ask what he would like them to do next, because they already know – they go to the Scrum Board, see which is the highest priority task in their skillset, and move the item from “To-Do” to “In Progress.”
“What has this to do with Resolutions?” I hear you ask. Well, it’s that time of year when people who are wont to do so, write a list of resolutions they’re determined to accomplish in the next 12 months. For the first time in my life I wrote such a list for 2016, and achieved the first on the list about half an hour before I fell off a cliff and relegated the rest of the list to unattainable status. So this year I’m going to learn from Joey’s example, and my only resolution (well, apart from getting my shoulder strong enough again to do 10 pull ups, and, you know, organising a wedding) is to get my own Scrum Board.

I have the habit of focussing on the “urgent” and not the “important.” For example, I usually leave washing my socks until the situation is urgent. So if I need to do a load of washing, everything else has to wait. But if I was to really think about it, I’d say that having clean socks is actually less important than having time to pray without distractions. Over and over in my life the things that are really important get side-lined in favour of what seems at the time to be urgent.

So I’ve convinced Darren to buy into Joey’s idea, and we’re setting up a Scrum Board, with a list of things we want to accomplish each fortnight in order of priority. At the top of the list is at least one night a fortnight when we do nothing but spend time together, chat about what’s going on in our heads, what we’re anxious about, connect with each other (we’re actually  very good at doing all of the above on more than a fortnightly basis, don’t worry!)  - and then pray together about it. If we haven’t prayed together it doesn’t get ticked off the list.

Whatever your judgements about Darren’s and my shocking neglect of prayer, I hope you understand my point about priorities and can take Joey’s system and adapt it for your own situation, and that for all of us 2017 is a year where we prioritise what’s really important.

Episode 40 - Happy New Year

Hello all, Nomes again since Joey is still unwell, though he’s now at home which means as well as me having Christmas dinner with Darren’s family on Christmas day, I also got to have another Christmas dinner  yesterday with my family. That’s a win!

My fiancé and I have a tradition of going to the midnight service on Christmas eve and walking back to his house along the canal. Two years ago we went from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend on that walk, and this year Darren planned on proposing to me on our anniversary. Then one day in about October I said that I didn’t fancy continuing the tradition since it meant I didn’t get much sleep before having to prepare Christmas dinner, and Darren’s proposal plan was scuppered.

Instead he proposed in November in the Lake District on the most amazing and romantic weekend of my life. When he told me about his original plan to propose on the walk back from church I was very happy indeed that I got the romantic getaway complete with afternoon tea, live jazz and sledging instead. But now I realise that if I hadn’t made that one off-hand comment, I still wouldn’t be engaged. The night he was supposed to propose, according to his original plan, he drove me back from the hospital and I cried all the way, so shocked and upset that my brother was ill and going to wake up Christmas morning in hospital. Instead of going to church that night he made me a light supper and a hot toddy and tucked me into bed.

I like to think that God, knowing that Joey would be in hospital Christmas day, and knowing my tendency to be easily overwhelmed, prompted me to make that comment so that when I needed Darren most, I would already have the security of knowing that 2017 promises hope.

Episode 39 - Home for Christmas

This Christmas certainly hasn't been quite what I expected! There's plenty that I could write, but to be honest, I don't have the energy. I expected to be spending my first Christmas away from my family - 10,000 miles away to be precise - and yet somehow, quite amazingly, I spent Christmas with my family. Equally surprisingly, I spent it in a hospital ward (don't worry, it doesn't seem to be anything too serious).

Ever since moving to PNG life seems to become more and more unpredictable, and the more I accept this, the more unpredictable life seems to become! It's certainly not boring, but God has taught me to enjoy the highs and not to worry about the lows This time of year seems to be a good time to remember why my hope rests secure: because of He who was fully God, yet became fully man, who was born to die so that I might truly live, and live this life to the full.

Episode 38 - Half Way Around the World

Nomes here. Joey set me the task of writing this blog from a different perspective: What’s it like having a missionary brother half way around the world?

Now, I could tell you that life is more fun with Joey around and that games nights aren’t the same without him, but you probably already know that.  I could tell you that I miss him like crazy, but the truth is that now I have a smart phone I’m actually in more frequent contact with him in PNG than when he was at All Nations College this time last year.

Weirdly, the one thing that’s really different is this very blog. Joey’s not a writer, so it’s odd reading whole paragraphs by him at all. It’s even odder getting my information about him at the same time as any other person with access to the internet. But if I’m totally honest, the weirdest thing is that sibling rivalry wells up in me.

You see, since Joey left my life has been pretty awful. Less than a week after waving him off at the airport I fell off a cliff and was airlifted to hospital with a fractured skull and dislocated collarbone. Seven months later and I still don’t know if I’ll need an operation. Three months after the accident I was too physically and emotionally weak to return to helping disabled children or those with learning difficulties in mainstream schools, but I was also stone broke, so I got a minimum wage job in a shop.

Now before we go on, I’m not looking for sympathy here. There have also been some truly amazing things in my life. I have a medically trained fiancé who saved my life when I fell, and my job has been excellent physio for my shoulder. But reading blogs about how wonderful it is for Joey to be exactly where God wants him and doing such remarkable things to make the world a better place has often made me selfishly feel like a loser. God called Joey, not me. It seems like God doesn’t really mind what I do. Maybe doesn’t care.

I asked a vicar friend about this and he rather unhelpfully explained that God does call some people, like Joey to be a missionary, and him to be a vicar; and other people like me don’t have such a direct calling. They are to use the wisdom God gives them to make their own choices and so long as they don't sin, he doesn’t mind what they do. He and I aren’t really friends any more.

So I asked my much wiser best friend about it and she sat me down and opened her Bible at the concordance at the back and we trawled for about an hour until we decided that God does not show favouritism and that if he calls some people he must call us all, just to different things. Maybe he will give us a choice and allow us to use our wisdom like my vicar friend said, but that doesn’t mean he is indifferent.

One day, unrelated to the above, Mum mentioned that we’re all part of Joey’s ministry because we support him. Maybe, I thought, that’s my calling. So I looked up Philippians 2 and a dude called Epaphroditus. The Philippian church sent him to Paul to look after him and Paul said of him, “He risked his life to make up for the help you could not give me.” In a way I sent Joey to PNG to make up for the help I can’t give them. Supporting missionaries is a calling in itself.

Then one day my fiancé said to me, “I’m so proud of you for getting up at 5am to do a job that doesn’t fulfil you instead of just giving up.” And it all fell into place.

Paul didn’t say to the Philippians, “Well done, you sent Epaphroditus! Your work is done now and God doesn’t really mind if you work in a shop or with disabled children.” He said, “Look not only to your own interests but to the interests of others… Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose… Shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life.”

In Athens he put it very poetically. “From one man God made every nation to inhabit the whole earth, and he decided the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not very far from each one of us.”

So if like me sometimes you read Joey’s blog and feel lacking, please be encouraged. Yes, God is doing amazing work through Joey. But Joey’s work isn’t more precious to God than yours, whether that’s working in a shop on minimum wage, caring for disabled children, knitting jumpers for Romanian orphans, looking after the grandkids, or like I was for a month or two after my accident, sat at home unable to hold a conversation but just about able to pray with emotions rather than words.

So what is it like having a missionary brother half way around the world? Challenging, but not in the way I expected. But God has used it not only to help the people of PNG know how much he loves them, but also to tell little old me that same thing. God wants me to obey him no matter how menial the calling seems to me.

This Christmas may we all shine like stars as we hold out the word of life in whichever place God chose us to be in.