Listen. Notice. Appreciate. Enjoy.

Like every new year, this one has started without asking my permission, checking my readiness, or waiting for me to complete my do-list.

The words come as I walk along a hot Melbourne street with half of the family. It feels uneven. As the eldest emerges into adulthood and the youngest out of infancy, the two in the middle are on their own adventure, reconnecting with wider family overseas. Our never-tidy life, unpacked and repacked in moves large and small, planned and unplanned, is re-reconfiguring. It always feels strange, although this time it’s the most predictable. In all families eras pass quickly, but each one seems more decisive. As we move awkwardly through the new year crowds at Flinders street four words parachute into my mind.

Listen. Notice. Appreciate. Enjoy.

I can stress with the best. Strain towards whatever I imagine passes for the ideal. I tend to imagine that I just have to flap really hard to fly, forgetting that part about being seated in heavenly places with Christ. So I immediately start trying to apply these four words to the family members I’m with. There are only two of them, how hard can it be. I try to listen to, notice, appreciate and enjoy them in a very deliberate and let me just say exhausting fashion. No surprise that I end the day on my last nerve. The following day I realise my mishtake.

You meant me to apply these words to You.

Listen to what You are saying. Notice what You are doing. Appreciate who You are. Enjoy You.

I no longer expect to know when You are saying new things to me. A quirky memory and shrinking attention span makes everything new. Whatever their vintage, these words land noiselessly from elsewhere, like raindrops on parched earth, come to refresh. Or commandos, come to do a stealth job on the enemy. Either way, they are not for punishment or correction. This is not a setting straight. This is a place setting. At a feast. In the presence of my enemies.

The performer in me is frustrated by this but also challenged to do the best listening, noticing, appreciating and enjoying that I can. But these words invite contemplation, not action. They assume Your sovereignty, Your activity and Your permission to engage not in doing, but in being. An invitation to receive who You are and give You the attention that is due to You not just in dutiful Bible study or prayer but in a delightful search for Your footprints, the traces You leave in the world You made and love and came to re-engage.

Handing over

My last post spoke about the new adventure I was on, training for the priesthood. You could call it chickens coming home to roost as many years of church nerdery made the pathway plain. When near–strangers started telling me they thought I was already a priest it was time to face reality.

Been a messy old time since then. Have to admit that saying yes to God has unleashed a new level of internal chaos, a sometimes harrowing reality check, as my ‘stuff’, my weaknesses and hangups and the like, has decided to parade through my mind, out of my mouth and into my behaviour like my own personal mardi gras, leaving trash, debris and hangovers in its wake. Old weaknesses have taken on new energy, former issues long buried turn out to be alive and kicking, and people I considered forgiven have been discovered still residing in the dark places of my heart.

So much for my yes to God. I clearly need a priest.

I also lost my innocence during this last year. I considered myself a woman of the world, with my carry-on bag of carefully-remembered slights, petty misdemeanours and immature actions of others against me. I had travelled a bit, and read a bit, and thought I knew a bit. Then God brought me up close with the results of deliberate cruelty, wilful brutality and calculated damage in a human life.

It took my breath away. Shut me down.

My words were too flimsy and brittle for the weight of it. I could not trust them to betray my own impotence. So I stopped writing altogether.

I was right. My words could do nothing. But God’s word? That was different. And that was his gift to me. To see God’s word salve, bring hope and give a measure of peace to abject grief and profound sorrow. To see my own words distract and confuse where God’s word invariably comforted, encouraged and embraced. Whether received or not.

So as John the Baptist said, I must decrease and God increase. Not to play-act piety, but to get out of the way so that he may be clearly seen and heard. To let others experience the word that brings life. That is life.

 

 

The shocking generosity of Grace

Someone told me that he relies on his intellect and common sense to deal with his own issues. If I’m unhappy, he says, it’s because I’ve f-d up somewhere. So I just need to go back and work out where that was, and fix it.

Prayer, he says, is pointless. Don’t imagine God will listen to your prayers, he says. God has a credit and debit sheet for your life, he tells me. Unless you are in credit God’s not listening, he says.

So he doesn’t bother. Waste of time, he says.

All you people in the churches and the mosques praying you’re all hypocrites.

Then he cites with disgust the example of a man who turned to Christ and became a priest after a life of crime. This man is a hypocrite, he tells me. The father of one of his victims vomited when he heard about this man’s conversion, he adds.

If I believed God was keeping a balance sheet of my good and bad deeds, I might as well give up now. Watch daytime TV till my heart stops. Or party like I had no hope.

My friend seemed comfortable with the idea that his own actions had doomed him in God’s eyes. Given the tools for the job, ie, free will and the knowledge of right and wrong, he had only himself to blame and only himself to rely on to fix things. The idea that God would intervene to the extent of granting forgiveness was unthinkable, at best naïve and at worst presumptuous. As far as he was concerned, God offered no mercy, no forgiveness and no second chances.

I agree that we usually know what we should and shouldn’t do. But knowing is not always enough. That old Christian cliché of relationship not religion truly shifts our motivation. When I do the right thing it’s because of a relationship that has changed my nature and motivation. I want to honour the person of Jesus, not simply keep my account in the black.

This strange and awkward conversation showed me the power and the shock of grace. Grace – undeserved blessing – violates our sense of natural justice. It dishes out reward instead if punishment. After all, why should we get forgiveness for our mistakes? Why not be made to live as cautionary tales for the generations to come? But if God is our father, then that natural law flexes under the weight of this father’s love. This father who tells us himself that he will forgive the truly contrite, the one with the courage to face Him with the wrong they have done. And once we have been shown compassion, it naturally follows that we in turn show compassion to others. Grace leads to more grace.

But really, grace? Seriously? It’s illogical. It’s anomalous. Why should a perfect holy God tolerate let alone pardon sin in people who know right from wrong and choose wrong? It’s another question for that interview in heaven. But maybe it’s because without receiving we cannot give. And a lack of compassion is poisonous. In individuals. In families. In nations.

I want to live in the peace God gave me. So I receive God’s compassion in order to be more compassionate. It doesn’t always work. I sometimes forget, both to receive compassion and to extend it to others. Wallowing in failures/mistakes/sins has a certain payoff for a while, but then the air gets a bit stale. I am learning to receive the fact God loves me and move on instead of enthroning my issues as if they were more important.

I am not my mistakes. Nor my successes.

I am a child of God. Loved and forgiven.