I am Not God

I spent 4 days last week at the Titoki Healing Centre. I highly recommmend it for time out, opportunity to just hang with God and also for the theophostic prayer ministry, which really helped me more forward on some personal stuff I have been dealing with lately. TPM is focused on people's identifying the lies they believe that are causing painful emotions and replacing these lies with the Lord's truth.

One truth that really struck me is that I am not God. Now I know that is obvious, but sometimes we act like we are God, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders.


I really like this quote from NT Wright in Surprised by Hope:

To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.

a world redolent with spirituality

Eugene Petersen, writes of how the Russian novelist, Fydor Dostoevesky challenged him.

He (Dostoevsky) refused to take the evidence that the people presented of themselves as truth; he dove beneath the surface of their lives and discovered in the depths, fire and passion and God. He trained my antennae to pick up the suppressed signals of spirituality in conversations, discovering tragic plots and comic episodes, works in progress all around me. I was living in a world redolent (fragrant) with spirituality. There were no ordinary people!


Eugene Petersen - Underneath the Predictable Planet

What Would Jesus Vote?

Both US and NZ elections are happening very soon. I am very cynical about believers believing that you have to be a Republican to be a true believer (US) or vote National (NZ) because "Labour has brought in anti-christian legislation in the last 3 years." None of the parties in NZ have convinced me yet to vote for them.

The following 2 posts make interesting reading and resonate with me:

Ethics times four by Paul Windsor and
Tapu Misa: Dangers of playing the God card in today's NZ herald which says "...most Americans who responded to a Zogby International poll, saw poverty and greed as the most urgent moral crises in American culture - more than twice as many as chose abortion and same-sex marriage."
Somewhere along the line we have forgotten that Jesus had more to say about money than sex. Perhaps economics is a moral issue after all.

I found the debate last week between Helen Clark & John Key very interesting. Apart from issues of ecological sustainability (that really weren't explained very well and we were left wondering what it all means and where the 2 parties differ), most of the other questions were all about ME ie. who will tax me less, make my life more comfortable and safer. Sure, we are in a global recession, but we are still far better off than most of the world, eg. 18% struggle to live on less than US$1 a day.

I have yet to see a party come out and say how we will be "world leaders" in helping with this imbalance. I would like to know what party will do something about our commitment to the UN millenium development goals. In particular overseas aid. Micah Challenge says: "NZ has promised to give at least 0.7% of our gross national income to fight poverty worldwide. At the moment we’re barely giving half of that and are one of the meanest countries in the OECD."

To me that is more important than which parties have more MPs who voted for the anti-smacking or civil unions legislation.

I have no idea what Jesus would vote and I think it would be arrogance to think that I could work that out, but I do know that issues of justice are important to God. How are you deciding who to vote for?

Secondhand Serenade

I love this band. My son got me into them. Their website here.

Listen to one of my favorite songs:

Lying Fallow

Tomorrow we start a 3 month sabbatical.
Today I met with my mentor who encouraged me to lie fallow for a while ,and to wait for the time when God begins to bring new life before breaking the fallow ground and watering the seed. We need times in our lives when we just rest, and for us after 2 years back in NZ working pretty solidly and a total of 10 years working in missions, now is that time.

He shared with me from Isaiah 7 where "people trembled with fear, like trees shaking in a storm" because of imminent invasion (v2), and Isaiah received a word from the Lord that they should not worry as it won't happen and that "Unless your faith is firm, I cannot make you stand firm." (v9) Then in v13 comes the promise of "Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’)." It is our prayer that we will really experience the presence of the Lord in this time and that our faith will stand firm.

I have also been challenged by words from The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel, p14 to not fall into the trap of seeing sabbath as being "for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labour" but rather as "a day for the sake of life." ie. it is an ends not a means to an end. You work to enjoy the Sabbath, not rest on the sabbath to get back into the work. I hope to view this time in that way - to be enjoyed and experienced as a special season in life.

Being rather than doing is not easy when you have been doing for a long time. I'm looking forward to the challenge and the time and space.