Celebration

This quote really struck me this morning in Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster from Harvey Cox "modern man has been pressed so hard towards useful work and rational calculation he has all but forgotten the joy of ecstatic celebration....."
Foster then goes on to say how as Christians we justify ourselves into thinking we have joy because we got to a church service once or twice a week, do some bouncing and dancing and singing to worship songs and think we have ticked the joy box.
I remember reading about a prominent Jew who said he couldn't become a Christian because they always looks so dour whereas Jews will use any excuse to have a party. Just look at the history of some of their festivals. We can even turn Easter and Christmas into a bit of an embarrassing event that we don't quite know what to do with and then invite people along to.
Foster does not discount that we can have hard lives, that there are struggle and things we do have to deal with and that we must be careful not to get into false celebration and ignore the trials of life. But I look so often at the things we do have, the stuff that does on in our lives and I think that we are so blessed, so spoilt in this western world and yet I look around and see such miserable faces. My own included at times.
I really do want to take on board that "the joy of the Lord is my strength", that Jesus did die for me no matter what Robbie Williams says at the end of Bodies, and that because He died for me not only do I have an amazing eternal life to look forward to but I also have a life on this earth with the King of Kings to walk through it with me.
Oh Lord help me to get my head round this!

Banks!!!

Not so sure if this one is going to be too positive!

We are trying to do teenage budgeting, an interesting experience - as in teaching our teens to budget not budgeting our teens which could be interesting. Must think on that some more :)
We are not being helped greatly by the organisation they must keep all their wages in - namely the bank. Ok so it is the fault of the individual to overdraw but surely safeguards must be in place to help a new user of the bank. But no. Bank charges can be gathered up to about £150 a month, a statement is given at the beginning of the next month to let on about the said bank charges, but then the charges do not come out til the following month. So say charges run up in Sept do not come out the bank till November. And for someone who is struggling to budget this then just leads to another month of being overdrawn and being charged from it.
You can see how the banks manage to get all their nice healthy bonuses.

I did wonder whilst praying about this whole economic crash being God punishing for the way we treat money but mainly those who got hurt were people who'd been allowed to take on too big a mortgage, people struggling anyway and those in the developing world.
I changed ages ago to Reliance Bank, a Christian bank, because of its ethics with money but now I am getting the teenagers to change too just because they will get looked after a people not just a meal ticket!

No Dig Gardening

My friend has got me in on a newish thing from her organic market gardening boss - its called No Dig Gardening, so something like that. That is the principle anyway.
So on Weds I get a big pile of cow manure which I have to put on the designated space and then cover it with cardboard. At some point I think i also need to put on some compost from the recycling centre and again cover with cardboard and put stones on said cardboard to hold it down. Then by the spring I can start planting. It turns out this method means that the weeds don't come through because actually weeds, or at least the seeds of weeds, are encouraged to grow by the whole process of digging. Occasional ones do pop up but one just pulls them out. And also this method can be planted continuously for a whole season, then covered with compost again and then it all starts all over again.

We were talking about it all this morning as I was trying to plow through another Christian self help book (oh that sounds like a contradiction in terms - surly it is God how is meant to help us. Hey ho!),this time on finances. I must admit I think the guy who wrote it may have some issues.
But as with so many of these Christian inner healing books there is a lot about digging and weeding out things. Now I have done some inner healing stuff and know I have gained a lot from it but I do wonder if at times we dig too much.
I know with my garden if i put this manure over a huge thistle or nettles then they will poke through and I will have to pull them up first. In fact my friend has been working hard pulling things up, old plants, weeds, etc before she puts the manure down. I'm putting mine on grass so no big deal there.
But yes we do need to pull out the big weeds in our lives. But once we have covered ourselves with Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the Cross, and waited for a season then we can be ready to be planted and to produce a crop of 30, 60 even a 100 fold. But if we keep on digging once we have put Jesus on we rake up things that actually just by being covered with Him could've been killed.
I also think so often we bring people to know Jesus and then expect them to start producing straight away but like this method maybe it would be good for us all to wait for a season to just be covered and then we would be so much more effective.
Also with this method even though it produces so much more than the digging/weeding method it cannot keep going forever. There has to come a point where it is left to just lie under the compost, under the covering of Jesus.
Interestingly in a lot of the readings I am doing on mystics, Celts and other great leaders, they very much saw there lives as a rhythm of resting with Jesus, going out and being productive, resting with Jesus. And this resting was not something fitted into their schedule it was a real time out.
I wonder why we are so afraid to just take time out and rest under Jesus? I wonder just how much more productive we could be?

Mothering teenagers!!

I am having those dilemmas that I am caring parents have had over the years - how much to get go, how much to trust, how much of one's intuition does one run with and how much does one give to God. And actually the trust thing for me comes down to how much do I trust God with my children, who really are not children any more but becoming young adults who I want to release into the world just right. And also how do I put all my concerns into a positive blog. Not that one should be blindly positive but I do know that God cares for Ben and Tabi even more than I do. And I also know that some of my anxieties are that I am having to let go of them, having to find something that is not them to fill my life. For me being a single parent has brought me to a place with my 2 where I have probably been overly protective and also where we have been very close. I think we are still very close now but at times I feel sad that they have other people they are close to - which I also know is right and proper.
But this on Brian Heasley's (Ibizia) blog has really helped. It from a retreat he was on and the quote is by Henri Nouwen.

"Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one", the "forgotten one", or the "discarded one". Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on."

And I know it means more, much more, than coping with empty nest syndrome and trusting God with our children, but for me it is that whole thing of poking around with negative emotiosn that can be so tempting, to go into a place that is so unhealthy - either from imaging what they could be up to or from letting feelings of life not being as I envisioned, stuff like that. I need to give this all to God and let Him deal with it and not go poking around in it all.
And there will come a moment when they will travel on to wherever life has planned for them and my holding on to them will be no good for them or me.

and also what I like is that God can stick this in to someone else's life and it speaks to me so much, even if in a totally different way to what it was intend to!

Writing in the Sand by Thomas Moore

After a bit of facetious blog about John Eldridge's book yesterday which in places is very good about listening to God in fact, I have started an amazing book - Writing in the Sand by Thomas Moore, which is much more on my wavelength.
I am not sure what translation of the Bible this comes from but for me it sums up how I feel about my walk with Jesus -
From Matthew 10:7-8 "As you walk around let people know that the kingdom of heaven has come. Take care of the sick, waken the lifeless, get to the root of suffering and banish the demonic"
To me that is it in a nutshell and makes me know too that I can do this. Not everyone we pray for gets healed, but everyone we know who is sick needs someone to care for them. My heart really is to encourage and waken people to their dreams and to see them just live life to the full. Everyone I seem to know who is looking at the world keeps wanting to know what the root of suffering is and how we can deal with it - very much this is what I see in my daughter as she works towards her dream of being a human rights lawyer. In fact I can even see it in my son wanting to join the army. I truly can see there a desire to want to do something in his world and for now this is the only way he can see it.
Moore talks about how following Jesus isn't about trying to figure out what is right and wrong, good and evil, but of living life to the full. As Jesus said "I come to give life and life to abundance", and this is not in a hedonistic way. If we are living life to the full then we will be doing all the above and actually not doing things that are evil or bad. Ok so if we go down the hedonistic route then of course there is that danger of doing harmful, evil, wrong things but that is not what Moore means, what Jesus meant.
We have a great poem from Marianne Williamson in our bathroom that says about how if we life to our potential we actually encourage others to too. So if we could life the Jesus life to the full then that would just encourage others to want to follow Him too.
Today I think I understand what Francis of Assisi meant when he said "evangelize at all times and if necessary use words". But now I have to walk this out!

Book Suggestions!!

Oh the perfect morning! Everyone is out and I have had an hour eating breakfast and catching up on reading blogs. Brilliant! I love the tranquility of an empty house and, now with Ian working from home, I don't get it very often. Before he worked from home of course I was home schooling and so didn't get that space either. So this is like a little gift for me.

I also wonder how many people have been in this place? I have started to get to that age when one wakes in the night, some of it is because someone is moving around, or because I am thinking of things, but often it is just because. Anyway over the last few days I have been reading John Eldridge's Walking With God, which I borrowed from a friend who can only get to page 85 every time. Anyway I plugged on with it.
He is very into spiritual warfare and of how we must keep looking to what is going on in our lives and be prepared to take on those evil spirits, and that actually waking in the night is not just one of those things, or part of getting old, but is a demonic attack.
So there am I led away in the night and this thought that this is demonic comes to me. Oh yes he also says that we let these things in (something I do understand from having done spiritual warfare) and so we have to look for the opening in ourselves and also look to see what has been allowed into the house. Well here is me with 2 teenagers who go off out into the world and to be honest at the moment I am not sure how deep their walk with God is and how much "care" they take of what they bring home. And actually a husband who is more into working than looking for demons! So I am led awake trying to work out what has come into the house, and coming up with loads and loads and loads of things, of feeling condemned, of wondering where to start - a bit like when you've let the housework go on too long and it all needs doing at once - and fussing and panicking and trying to remember what was said in the book. Oh a mess!
Eventually I just gave the whole lot to God and let Him deal with it. Not quite what the book said, but very much the only way to get a good night's sleep.

I just wonder though how often the enemy isn't actually attacking us but is using things that say he could be to attack us. Oh my was the thing that I "let into the house" actually John Eldridge's book :)

Blogging and relationships

I have been meaning to write something ever since I got back from retreat over a week ago but relationships keep getting in the way.
Today its Tabi who's up early to chat, yesterday was bumping into a friend and using up the 20 mins I had spare to chat, the day before was talking on MSN to a friend in distress, and leading to that has been helping to sort out the living room as I'd got Ian a bigger desk from Freecycle and I've had to be moving everything else in the whole house, or so it seems, around to get the new desk in just right place and everything else to find homes. Again serving and relationship with my husband.
Oh yes I do have some "deep" things I'd like to put on here but I do think relationship are much more important :)