Journey #8

Water flows downwards, just like Grace.

But sometimes, the water curls around and it is forced to stop because it cannot find a downward path to keep going. God, the Source doesn't overpower us. Instead, the water flow begins to slow to a trickle...

And this isn't always out-and-out sin. At times it is a kind of sin of omission. We omit the power of Grace in our lives.


In John 8, the 'right and holy' gang drags a woman caught in sin before Jesus and expects him to condemn her - thus showing that he is somewhat in their camp, at least in such an obvious instance. The story tells us that Jesus astounded them with his very essence: Grace and Truth {John 1v14}. He does not condone sin, but he refuses to let it be the last word where there is a willingness to repent. In fact, the woman was so scared to death, we really don't have any indications of her true spiritual state except to deduce it from Jesus' words to her to "go now and leave your life of sin". He saw in her the possibility of conversion and transformation. The right and holy gang did not receive such words, for they have already skulked away - turning their backs on both truth and grace.

Sometimes, we stay in the dead corner of reviewing our mistakes, going over our mis-steps, flip that dusty file of our misjudgment and mismanagement.... We feel sure our mistakes are staring at us in the eyes of others; and we basically condemn ourselves. We stick our finger in the sand and scribble furiously away even as the Master steps up close to offer us truth, and grace.

This is when the Water cannot reach deep. We have decided we don't deserve more.

Pour out your soul to the LORD. Let your tears drain away all that chokes you up and let Living Water flow right into you again, and again, and again.

Let truth gird you like a belt and Grace garland you and draw attention to your beauty; you made in God's image, called to be His own, chosen before the world began, destined for Kingdom!

Pause / Selah / Drink {click to hear a wonderful song by Sherman Wong}

Bless you dear soul !

Why Home-sickness is a good place to begin your 2014

Happy New Year!

How will you be travelling this year? There are four modes of moving along:

a/ well-planned to the hilt
you already have your goals and plans, a list of things to do by the end of January. Some more seasoned travelers by this mode would even have included safety precautions and back-up plans.

b/ tumbling or drifting
you basically dislike to plan. after all, things don't necessarily go your way (before or ever); so going with the flow is just easier: no fuss, no fight, no fire (to put out).

c/ pushed onward
there are strong forces within you that propel you or there are expectations you know you need to live up to.

d/ hanging on to a string of reactions
you may have goals and aspirations; but in reality, your travel style is to wait-and-see how things turn. You can get red-hot mad or walk away, depending on how you feel you are being treated.

Most of us will be using some combination of these four. But there is a fifth way. It is the way of God's Grace. This way sits at the bottom of all other ways, it also holds and weaves through the other modes of travel. For most of us, most of the time though, we are only vaguely aware of this ever-present Grace.
Why not live aware and upon this Grace so that each time we sing 'Amazing Grace', it is a distinct sense of awe with specific recollections and not vague ideas about how Amazing Grace truly is!

The way of God's Grace is to live tethered to God and His homeward call to us. It is living with a sense of homesickness.

I am rather a person on the move, relishing new experiences and challenges. But whether I am out for the day or away for weeks, a special feeling surges up in my soul as i turn homeward. It feels like a homesickness. I have missed home and hearth. I have missed the safe, familiar, comfortable, 'my place' sense.

It is the well-rooted tree that can spread its branches wide out and continue to bear fruit without over-stretching or toppling over.

Where is home for you? A small spot of ground or a huge house isn't what matters. It is where your heart rests that is home.

God is our home - for those of us who are His children because we believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins and want to live for Him. We go home to God often and dare not run wild and distracted that we cannot find our way home to rest and be restored.

Kingdom is our home - for those of us who are God's new people, called to build a different way of living; we find home when we are among those who share this same dream of a peaceable Kingdom in our broken-up world.

I get homesick a lot like when -
I've been waddling in shallows making waves when I can say 'see ya later' to everything and everyone and go out to the deep and float free.

I am fussing over the stuff that doesn't really count or last and then a ray of Kingdom light and eternity shines across my shoulder and I need to turn my eyes to see.

I am busy counting my small pile of gold coins of 'have', 'need', 'want more of', and forget that's just pavement where I am headed - it's the wrong currency to trade in

I see a picture of grim need, an old wrinkled face, a broken-hearted parent whose child was here a moment before that shrapnel came whizzing past

I need to feel this homesickness. You do too. For in the end, we are pilgrims, travelers, aliens, a-passing-through. And it is this homesickness - our desperate need for God, our deep convictions of a different world, that will help us travel by the mode of Grace.

As we beat our own path to God-home and soak in Grace, our hearts and minds expanding with Him.
As we work out our salvation by living as saved ones, building a different world, and know it will never happen apart from Grace-miracles where our pockets, priorities and perspectives shifting from sand to rock.

So yes, Home-sickness is a good place to begin your 2014.


Happy NEW year friends!

Failure isn't final. Grace is.

Real, exaggerated, painful, fuzzy, cloudy, dragged-out…many circumstances can make us feel like we failed.

Life is too rich and layered for us to plot onto spreadsheets or subject to the see-saw of a cost-benefit analysis. Results and outcomes can be hard to measure; and the enemy loves to sidle up and whisper ‘what a let down’, ‘this is so disappointing’, or more directly, ‘you failed!’.

Whether we made a bad decision, or we feel at the mercy of difficult people and situations; a sense of having failed, being left in the cold by God, losing our way can crowd into our hearts and weigh it with heaviness. It can fog up our minds and even make us throw in the towel. Just give up!

Ask Peter.

Jesus even pre-empted his failure with a warning; but his quick words of denial turned around like a boomerang and knocked him over. The next time we read, he has gone back to fishing.

You and I have read this story countless times. Today though, I hear something more. I connected this failure with other failures. I thought of Moses losing his cool and losing his chance of going into the Promised Land. What a high price! I remember my daughter asking me as she read Genesis, “why did God put that tree there?”.  Yes, sometimes, it can feel like God has set us up to fail. Surely, the Almighty can help Peter bite his tongue and Moses cool over for once?

Why does God let us fail?

More importantly, what does God do when we fail? 

He rushes to us with Tenderness. {which also shows how he feels}

 Adam and Eve receive a garment God personally stitches together.

Moses is laid to rest by God’s own hand.

Peter is fed Jesus-baked fish on a shore.

God becomes personal, and He personally delivers us even as we feel the heaviness of our failure.

He clothes us
"and the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them"

He closes the chapter
"the LORD said to him, 'this is the land...and he buried him  in the valley.."

He commissions us afresh
"..feed my sheep.."

We think our gleaming trophies are what brings God glory. Success is the processed diet we have been fed that has left our immunity weak; making us vulnerable to lies and despair.

We must make changes to our diet, to ‘taste and see that the LORD is good’ – especially where we feel are failures. For our failures are never final. Grace is.

~ Grace flows downwards ~

jenni tweets

An old Word made new - when God's Word seem distant

I am doing a search through my Bible, a quick scan of verses and passages related to a subject I am examining It's a hunt for traces to line up a path of understanding. Along the way I come to an old friend, a verse I had read, re-read, cherished and remembered as a teen:

For the LORD is a sun and shield,

He bestows favor and honor;

No good thing does he withhold

From those whose walk is blameless. (Psalm 84v11)

I recall easily the force of conviction and utter joy at the discovery I'd this promise. How i step abroad with easy confidence that the world and all it holds lie wide open before me; mine to uncover and treasure, enjoy and enrich. How my future beamed bright with good stuff labeled with my name waiting to be dispatched at the right time. I did quiver a little at the blameless walk bit, but I hide behind a mighty Cross and knew I meant business and kept short accounts.

So each time the sun rises and I  felt the warmth or the sting of its tropical rays, I would remind myself God's power stands near and touches me enough without overpowering me. Each time things go awry, I entrust myself to One who will protect me like a shield so I am not completely defeated, but can arise again.

But now i feel the distance of twenty years and many episodes of disappointment, failure and heartache standing between me and these feelings, this word.

It is easy to fill up with questions and cynicism. They fill the air we breathe, and as redeemed fallen beings whose diet is to reach for the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the effortless bent is to seek to calm our fears with what answers we can find. Adult life entrenches this habit: we are proved at work and in our relarelations by the power of what we know-to-work. We are called upon to provide answers, solutions, options.

Yet at the same time, we experience a widening and deepening chasm between what we do know and what we do not. We recognize as problems multiply with complicity at work, children who refuse to conform, weakening bodies, our own unruly souls... that our true knowledge and ability, and - control - is flimsy ay best.

It can be a time of increasing piety.

It can be a season of aching get-by-each-day..

Or

We can turn afresh to those promises and take a deeper look.

In what way is God my sun and shield?

Can we be made to wait because giving us something we want, which we deem to be good can become something bad if it was given too early?

Can the waiting be of value in itself; and indeed be the time-space needed to experience God as sun and shield?

Together with my scouring of verses, I read a Spurgeon piece that bears these lines:

"...we will drive away our griefs, and set up our banners of confidence in the name of God. 

Let others lament over their troubles. 

We who have the sweetening tree to cast into Marah's bitter pool, with joy will magnify the Lord.....

we will not dishonor our Bridegroom by mourning in His Presence.....

Do not men of Grace find their Lord to be campfire and spikenard, calamus and cinnamon...

O sweet Jesus, you are the portion of your people! 

Favor us with such a sense of your preciousness, 

that from its first to its last day we may be glad and rejoice in You!..."

The paradox of being fully immersed in life and yet being lifted beyond it...living a dream, trusting the Great Invitation to live full and free, real and rugged is held by a thick cord that will not snap with our changes. It is called Grace. 

And it is made possible by the Resurrection!

Mad about Grace and Women

Well this must be it: I am a woman, and I really feel like I have rediscovered, no, uncovered Grace. I am mad  excited about the two subjects: women (and marriage or not, children or not etc..) and Grace.

this is a fractal image....something from Higher Math !

I am madder still that I cannot take leave from everything to work it through..and let it weave itself into a tome of sound proportions (aka a book)!

What tension! To know, and want to dig and find and share and not being able to - and yet, understanding too that the subject is not for fancy mindwork but for heartwork and soulwork that happens in the everyday!

I am reminded of what A Testament of Devotion has taught : we live at two levels at the same time.
Just as we live in betwxit...

the now and the coming
the seen and the unseen
the believed in and the perceived
the desired for and the running away

Which end anchors and gives us protection as we move around the space called Betwixt?

Another book* I am reading reminds us that we live at the same time between:

our sin issues
our becoming like Christ

Yes, the truth must anchor us and help us interpret and navigate..and in the quiet of the truth's strength, we make our choices and responses and shape that which we see, feel and fear..and the truth will trump if we but rest in its Grace to work upon our inner landscapes.

The great truth as I learn and think and pray and write is that Truth is seeking me out and wanting a listener, a believer, and then, when deemed trustworthy, a spokesperson. So i will stew on these Womanhood and Grace until I burst and it all leaks over everyone I meet....and write until it all comes together.

Mercy on me.


* The Kingdom Life

free to live

we feel so bound.
it shows up in a thousand ways.
laments, sighs, recriminations, accusations, questions, tears...
what is it we really want?
what is it we cannot reach out to?
what it is we cannot release?

why

set free
no longer in bondage
not bound
but
bounding
abounding
Grace led
Grace filled
Grace carried
Grace joy-ed

just a mind game
or more?

CHORE-deal countdown!

We returned from Batam on Fri evening and leave for KL on Sun noon.
We have now done 3 loads of laundry in my 5kg machine that is missing a button but still works. We coz i set it up, Abi helped me sort the clothes, the machine goes and then Abi and/or Keith helps bring me the hangers, take down the previous lot...fold ...complete with --

"come on, you can do better than that"




"Keith, just think - everything must become a square or a rectangle ok? neatly now..Abi for goodness! show your brother how to do it....."
"Abi. i taught you all these things patiently..do the same for your brother!"


And God is on my side with sunshine each morning!

i just re-folded the lot Dad tried to fold ! Thankfully he didn't go all glum when i hollered

"i think i need to give you a quick tutorial on folding clothes"...He's at the PC - me tuned out?

It is easy to fixate on the back ache and the grumpy attitudes that inevitably surface..esp when the kids go on about 'hey, this is NOT my chore!'...but thank God's Grace..better ideas invaded my mind. So i slowed down, sat down and while foldng clothes, washing dishes or eating dinner, said.

" what do we do as a family?"
Keith: we help each other
"what do we do when we dont know how to help?"
Keith: we learn or ask someone to show us
"Abi?"
Abi: ya..(returns to her book faster than my next breath)
"i want us to be a happy, family where we help and work together. it is up to us to make our home clean, organised and a place of joy. And each of us needs to do our part ok?"


we pray for Grace.

But just as we are learning this...and they say it takes eight weeks to develop fresh habits..we leave for KL and if all goes as plan, we return to a nice clean home coz my helper would have returned!

THINK fast!

An opporturnity for growth and change must never be squandered....we will visit this in KL - how we have grown and how we can cherish and stay in the growth path.

Grace tracks

GRACE, God tracks us who once sought Him.
This past week, what i have believed, written and taught came over me again - - and Grace works like strong relentless waves, crashing up upon the shore until it is clean. Lapping at the edges of faith until fresh sand, sea glass, seaweed contours...

I stood powerless, I who once fought and worked hard for my vision of the glorious...too tired to want to try anymore. If God only showed up when I was depleted, it would seem cruel. But no, i know He has constantly been around. i have a record of the wind blowing...but i really did prefer my way, my time, my outcomes...and so i had to fight till i tire.

And then, Grace still came around.

i want to take some credit: all the hours of trying, praying, buckets of tears...
does it matter? In the mystery of love and time, Grace gathered everything and mixed them into a healing potion. Will i drink this cup?
i sip tentatively... strength, hope, even warmth returns...

now i must note Grace's tracks and keep walking in the path set out..