Small is beautiful too

One of the lies I've realised I've been 'living under' is that if you are 'getting it right' as a Christian that God will somehow make you 'big' or 'successful' (in a Christian sort of way of course - you know, like writing a bestseller, starting a world-changing non-profit, rescuing 4000 orphans, having a trending blog or being an international speaker).

So then, when your life is 'little' and doesn't seem to have a big impact you think "What am I doing wrong?"

I felt God whisper to my heart that He is way more creative than that.

When I look around at the world God has made, He has done lots of 'big' - mountains, oceans, stars and galaxies.

But He's also done a huge amount of incredible small - caterpillars turning into butterflies, cells containing enough DNA to create a whole person, atoms we can't split into tiny enough pieces to get to the bottom of.

God is a God of incredible variety and creativity. He loves big and He loves small and everything in between.  Just because my life isn't 'big' doesn't mean it isn't the way He wanted it to be. He delights in billions of 'little' stories happening all over the world simultaneously at every moment. He is big enough to be involved in every single story as if it was the only one.

He delights in the hidden stories just like we might delight in discovering a hidden little beach that is beautiful and peaceful. If you blogged, facebooked and tweeted about it, it would be destroyed from being what it is by the deluge of people who would come and crowd out the tranquillity and unspoilt calm.  God doesn't make everyone's story 'big' in terms of lots of people knowing about it or even being affected by it.  I believe for Him, that some of the beauty is in the hidden-ness of it all. He loves to see the life quietly laid down and poured out for Him. He waits to reveal it all in Heaven and reward in full.

This reminds me that the primary audience for my life is God. My purpose is more about my relationship with Him than in the impact I have on the world for Him. I can't do anything about that anyway and He chooses each of us to have different roles.

So when I look at Ann Voskamp or Heidi Baker or anyone else and think I should be like them. God says, "I've already got an Ann Voskamp. I don't want another one. I want a Claire. She's unlike anyone else who has ever lived and I have a journey for her that is unique too"  Yes we can learn from, be encouraged by and inspired by others, but don't feel you have to be them.

So God, thank you for loving me and making me the way I am. You made me on purpose to have a unique place in this world. Thank you for reminding me not to measure my importance by the size of my life. Thank you that my worth comes from You.  Amen.

God's faithfulness - my rampart

Psalm 91:4

"He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart."

The word rampart gave me in my mind the picture of a grassy embankment that you could hide behind.  The connotations are of hiding from an enemy who is attacking - maybe firing arrows as is the picture in Ephesians 6:16 which refers to the 'flaming arrows of the evil one'.

Some of the 'flaming arrows' that get me most  frequently are ones of doubting that God could still love me and be patient with me when I fall back into the same sins so often and am so weak in my faith and love for Him.

How can I defend against these attacks?  What is the rampart I can hide behind?  The answer: his faithfulness.  This reminded me of another verse:

"If we are faithless, he remains faithful,  he cannot deny himself."  2 Timothy 2:13

If God, who is all-knowing and outside of time, has decided to set His love and affection on me and to send His Son Jesus to die for my salvation, then nothing I do or say, or don't do or don't say can ever make Him change His mind about that love.  He already knows the whole story anyway. He already paid the price to redeem me anyway.  His character is one of faithfulness. He cannot change because it's part of who He is.

So I can say with confidence: He loves me.

And when I disappoint myself by the feebleness of my love for Him and the sinful thoughts and actions resulting from my cold heart, the enemy will tell me: He can't possibly love you. You are too pathetic and useless. You are swayed by every single thing you read and see and hear.

I can reply: Yes I am not steady in my love for God as I would wish. Yes my thought life and my actions are not fully pleasing to Him. But He is faithful.  No matter how rubbish I am. He does not and cannot change.  I can go to the Bible and read the promises there and stake my life on them because of His faithfulness.

God, you know the very worst of me. You know how inconstant my love for You is. You know all the sins and failures that the rest of today holds, let alone the rest of my life. And yet Your word tells me that You chose to love me. I rest on that promise because it depends on Your faithfulness. Thank you that it doesn't depend upon me at all. Amen

Mixed motives - what's stopping you?

I write every day. Lots.  I write to process my thoughts. I write to remember things the children have said or done. I write to remind myself of the things God's teaching me and showing me. I write to help 'tame' my thoughts while I pray.

Mostly I write in my journal. Privately. For no one else to see.

But some of the things are good things that would encourage others if only I would share them.

I know that God wants me to share and pass on the encouragements I receive and that one way I can do this is by writing this blog.

So many different things stop me from doing this such as perfectionism and feelings of unworthiness.  But another barrier I have is that I have a secret desire to be a successful writer and blogger and would love to have a great following of people who read what I write. But that is really a motivation of pride and a desire for myself to be great rather than for God to be exalted.  And so I don't write in order to prevent myself chasing a self-glorifying goal.

However, this morning something jumped out at me from Philippians 1.  Paul is writing from jail about how his imprisonment has caused other people to start preaching the gospel.

He says, "It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of good will . . . The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition . . . but what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true.  Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice' (Phil 1:15, 17, 18).

 I saw from this that God in His great power and wisdom can use people who are preaching about Him even from mixed motives. Even when they really want to be great themselves, He can use them telling others about how great God is.

So even though I may still wrestle with my own desire to be great, I can still keep pointing to God and telling others how great He is and God can still use that while He's still working on my motives.

Thank you God that You can use us even when our motives are mixed up. Help me keep telling others about how great You are even while You are still working on many things in me. Amen.

What size are your margins?

When I read blogs I want to re-read and think more about, I often copy and paste them into a word document and print them out. I want to use as little paper as possible, so I delete all pictures, I set the line spacing to single and I set the margins to 'narrow'. I try to fit it all onto one sheet of paper.

I'm realising that's what I've done with my life too. I've crammed as much as I can in. The margins are narrow. There is no extra spacing between lines or paragraphs. No room to breathe between school and after school clubs, homework, piano practice etc etc.

How much can you get onto one page - one day?

Then when the 'extras' come along, they have to be crammed in too - shoe horned into the narrow margins.

Then all of a sudden, an email telling you someone's moved your crayons, and you flip. It's the last straw.

They're just crayons for goodness sake.

They can be moved back.

But not if there are no margins.

Or your child has fallen over and scraped their knee. But there are no margins for long cuddles to soothe the tears. So they just have to be got into the car as quickly as possible so that you're not late for the next thing.

Since when did getting to the next thing become so toweringly important?

My inbox gets crammed with more email than I can read or process.  I have 170 'starred' emails that I'm supposedly going to go back to when I have time.

Mail through my door goes straight to recycling (unless it's a lovely handwritten letter from a friend of course😀).  I skim read blogs and think 'I must take time to reflect on that' but of course that time never comes.

And so now my body is telling me: slow down.

My heart rate, timed by God to have margins to speed up when the pressure is on, has got stuck in 5th gear. I've spent so much time stressed. So much time always trying to do ten more things in my day, that top speed has become normal and then there's nothing left to give.

One of my husband's missions has been to impress upon me that rest is not only good but also important and necessary.  He points out that it actually makes it into the ten commandments. God doesn't just think it's a good idea. It's so important He COMMANDS us to rest one day in seven.

But, in Christian-ese that has translated into - get to church early on Sunday so you can set up for Sunday school,  take the Sunday school class, speak to 7 other people about various church-related activities you are planning, serve the tea and coffee and make sure you've said encouraging and supportive things to everyone you know is going through a hard time.  It's exhausting all this 'rest'!

So, what do good margins look like?  I don't know yet but I want to discover and I'm on a journey, a mission to find out. I want to go back to discovering that being a Christian is good news, not exhausting, demanding news.

I think it's going to involve not letting myself be intimidated by all the things everyone else has posted on Facebook. It'll mean being content with having less and doing less than others. And, Heaven - forbid, it may involve even saying 'no' when I'm not actually stressed to the max but because I don't want to get to 'stressed to the max'.

I've read Psalm 23 in a new light lately:

'He makes me lie down in green pastures'

Sometimes, when He's watched us strive and rush about for long enough, He lets us get to a point where we have to rest.

Thank You Good Shepherd for making me lie down and rest. Thank you that You are doing a good work of restoring my soul. I praise You. I pray for my brothers and sisters reading this post that they too would be set free to simply lie down and enjoy the blessings of the green pastures You bring in our lives.  It doesn't all have to be striving. Amen.

Too many processes

The other day I wanted to turn the laptop on quickly and to quickly show my son some things online. However, the laptop, having sat in its bag for maybe a month or so, took a bit of 'waking up'.  Eventually, it showed the desk top as normal but when I double clicked on the web browser icon, it took a while to come up.  Once on the internet, for every click the laptop was laboriously slow to respond.

The computer was trying to look like everything was fine on the surface but there was clearly something going on in the background - probably downloading or installing some update or other.

The computer was trying to show me a web browser and let me look around on the internet but everything was hampered by the fact that it was also trying to do a load of other things behind the scenes.

It struck me that this is a picture of where I'm at just now.  Everything seems hard work and slow. I find it hard to think and process stuff. It's hard to be as productive as I normally am.

There are too many processes going on!

God is showing me that right now is a time for slowing down and stopping lots of things I've been doing.  Not because I can't do them but because I have too many processes going on.

I've been trying to figure out  who I am, what I believe, how I came to be who I am and where I am, and what things should look like going forward, how to parent well, how to know God and love God well etc etc.

This is taking a lot of processing power.

I'm beginning to realise I can't process all that while also running full tilt at life. The result is that I'm not doing well at either.

So I've taken a step back from lots of the things I was doing. I've taken the pressure off myself to achieve so much. I'm letting my days be less crammed. I'm giving myself space and time to take longer over things and to have some time to rest.

On the surface it may not look like much is happening.  It just looks like I became a sluggish web browser.

But God is doing something. Something very important is going on under the surface, in my hardware. But it's going to take some time.

So I'm learning to patient. Mostly with myself. Which I don't find easy.

But I think that the fundamental downloads of knowing God, knowing who I am and what His desire and plans are for my life, are worth shutting down the frantic rush of running groups and keeping on top of every resolution I ever made.

Sometimes when the computer gets 'stuck' you have to go into Task Manager and force a few applications or processes to shut down in order to free the computer up to do something else.

That's what I'm doing just now.

I encourage you to consider what 'processes' need a bit of time and space to complete and whether there are any processes that just need to be 'shut down' for now.

Thank you God that You are our good IT Administrator. We trust You to download what is good, helpful and important for our lives.  Help us see what is cluttering up our minds and processing power and to be prepared to clear the space for what You have for us.  Amen.