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.

 

 

Give peace a chance

Peace I leave with you, Jesus said to his disciples. My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. John 14 v 27

I have got this rest thing all wrong. Been looking in the wrong direction. I have imagined and fantasised rest as an absence of doing, a break from activity. A stretch of time outside normal life, with stress receptors on pause. Hard-won respite from reality.

But without peace there can be no rest. When I finally reach that plateau called rest I am so exhausted from the climb and so tense from the preparation that I cannot actually rest. And resent those around me who can. Forced rest, like forced love, is empty and superficial. A pretty husk. Ultimately pointless. And tiring.

This year has started fuller than last, with a new job adding to the usual stuff that comes with a houseful of children and a micro(scopic) business. I’m working very hard, but despite a well-developed vocabulary for stress and anxiety, I’ve not much use for it these days because, in truth, I’m neither stressed nor anxious. No more than momentarily. Home life is shape-shifting as the children become more independent, more able, sometimes even willing. We’re all growing.

The anxiety of whether I’m good enough, whatever that actually means, is losing its relevance. I wonder now why I wasted so much time on it. I think I now believe that I am able and that such a belief is both appropriate and healthy. Talking to my husband a few weeks ago about work challenges up ahead, I heard myself say that I was going to learn a huge amount over the next few months. There was a pause while we both tried to recognise the speaker. This was new, for me to see opportunities to grow instead of mountains to climb. To be still before the unknown with openness and expectation, not clenched with fear and foreboding. It was like new language had been downloaded into my mind without my having to learn it. A strange tongue.

This didn’t happen overnight. To quote my favourite Bible teacher, Joyce Meyer, there’s no such thing as a drive-through breakthrough.

They who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall rise up on wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40 v 31

And I have been waiting. Expectantly. Like waiting for the man to come to install the heating system or unblock the pipes, I have been clearing my stuff out of the way so that God can get to work. He has heard my often tearful, snotty prayers to please help me stop going around in circles of self pity and introspection, blind to opportunities, blessings and gifts. He has reminded me of the power of worship to refocus and refuel. He’s given me some new practical strategies, too. Instead of staring at the problem until I’m paralysed, I step away for a while. And I have been asking God for help with specifics – that phone call, or phrasing that tricky email, that child kicking off. I get perspective by asking myself where this problem sits in the hierachy of The Worst That Could Happen. Death? Injury? The Wrong Envelope on Oscars Night?

I fall into bed exhausted and sleep deeply, rising earlier than I would like with a whole stack of tasks for the day ahead. But I don’t wake with a knot in my stomach these days, genuinely grateful for each day. The routine stuff of home that used to fill my time and take all day now gets done in a flash or not at all. So much more to do and so much more getting done.

Yes I’m boasting about God because what he is doing in me is worth boasting about.

He has poured peace into the place where anxiety used to smash me up like the blades of a blender. This peace grounds me instead of grinding me,  reminding me who I am. I use it to sift the thoughts that come. I consciously and regularly remember who God is and how he feels about me by reading and thinking about what his word says. And in those foetal moments when I run out of words and ideas – yes those still happen – God’s peace wraps itself around me like a blanket.

Perhaps all the time I wanted rest I really needed peace. The gift direct from Christ himself. I think of how Jesus breathed into the disciples just as God breathed into Adam. It was like Jesus was conferring a new kind of life on his followers. My God-breathed peace is becoming my default, replacing the darkness and negativity I lived with so long. In God’s peace I have space, room to manoeuvre, the choice to respond rather than react. Strength. Energy. Even courage. And in the midst of everything, rest.