How did God see your 2013?

What is the first emotion that comes as you think of 2013?

If you could draw a picture to represent the year, what would you draw?

Some of us hitch onto some happy moment, grin and tumble into the new year. Some of us wince at certain memories and maybe even fight to fend off the sense that we blew it again. Doubtless for most of us in mostly sunny Singapore, our days were a busy mix of getting around, chasing deals and forging goals. It can be hard to tease our jam-packed days apart to see what they were truly about.

- The unexamined life is not worth living - Socrates

But how do we examine our lives? What do we use to map our days against? What grid, or guide do we have? Our ever-present tendency is to compare ourselves with... some ideal, and often feel like we have been given the short end of the stick again.

Recently, i thought that even being on Facebook can do enormous harm: we may be sick, jobless, lost...and it seems the whole world is having a great time without us - all the pictures of balmy scenes, happy faces, wise words, great times... people are going places and doing stuff. Life is happening without us.

Facebook tries to help with a review of your year by stitching together all your posts and updates that received the highest 'likes'. Ah, all is not lost, i was heard; someone laughed at my joke, someone noticed my melancholy, someone liked my pictures.

As I was preparing to lead my church tomorrow for a time of reflection; I think of Jesus' words that sets up that contrast between life and death. He offers us life abundant - and warns us of the living reality that we have an enemy who wants to steal, kill and destroy.

Perhaps if we recognise that this dynamic presents itself to us each day - that within each day, we are posed a question: would you have life or not? I think of how our feelings, thoughts and circumstances may well be God's invitation and offer to live more fully and free.

I imagine looking at my life from the outside - and seeing it through God's eyes. What then of my 2013? How does God feel about my year nearly gone? What picture would he draw?

Selah.

Psalm 139 & more {enjoy}

Why not have some face-time with God and just remember - He is the God who made you, loves you and constantly, and faithfully invites you to go deeper. To live.

CHRISTmas manifesto

manifesto (n) :  a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer

Yesterday in the enlivening cover of the cool morning air, it dawned on me that Christmas, orchestrated before time, wild beyond our imaginations, had come with some 'instructions'. God has not left it all shadowy and open to speculation. There isn't meant to be twenty versions of how, who, what about Christmas. 

God first unveiled the CHRISTmas manifesto some seven hundred years to an statesman-prophet Isaiah:

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light;

on the inhabitants of a country in shadow dark as death

light has blazed forth

For a son has been born for us,

a son has been given to us..

No more stumbling in the dark. No more trying this way and that.

A blazing light is now available. turn your sights and be dazzled and find it's illuminating rays all about you - a warm, strong cloak that says you are known and you are safe.

All of us share this little child, this boy. Ours. Come close and stroke his soft cheeks. This gift of life -yours and mine together! You did not father him, i did not carry him; yet now, he is ours!

Each of us look at a child and marvel, wonder, wish... But with this child, this CHRIST, we are given understanding about how to see him. He's not here to fulfil our wishes. His character, abilities and impact are described for us:

dominion has been laid on his shoulders

and this is the name he has been given,

Wonder-Counsellor

Ask of the CHRIST what you need to have a heart full of wonder and worship. We live too often at the level of mere function. It's a tic-toc world and we are satisfied with clockwork. God did not create us - setting us in a lush garden filled with creation that continues to baffle and dazzle us, just so we can get on with it. No, we're meant to marvel, wonder, gasp in awe and let is all come out in praise and adoration of the Creator. The very lives we have, each sometimes so filled with mundane minutiae are no less works of Grace and tender love. We need this season to see our lives with fresh eyes - to ask the wonder-counsellor for eyes to see, heart to feel and minds to think brave.

Mighty-God

Yes, it's but a helpless babe. But he has come to destroy the works of the devil and rescue the world from darkness' clutches. Might is all His. Might is defined by him. Where do you feel weak, unable and afraid, overwhelmed and intimidated this season? Go to the God of might. Sit with Him for He is a giving presence. Go often and come away stronger.

Eternal-Father

Your father and mine - busy, absent, careless, no longer around... The strength, direction, example we long for is available. Christ shows u God is our eternal father. Our failures, crazed ideas and inconsistency won't turn him away. He will always be.

Prince-of-Peace

O to come to Christ and just feel the peace. No words needed.

I'm guessing one of these means more to you now. Go ahead, write it down, draw it, dream it, memorize it, sing it, dance it! 

The gift has been delivered. Go ahead, unwrap it and enjoy it. You need Him.

{the New Jerusalem Bible NJB is used here}

Let these WOW snowflakes' message melt into you...

God certainly delights in what He does...  {click}

This Christmas season, allow Him to do his wonders in your life.

How?
Stop demanding,
questioning
looking back
whining

but -
pray for eyes to see
heart to feel
mind that will think clear

look again at the snowflakes and let its beauty melt into your being and water the dry, thirsty land within.

Discovering God

Last night as I led a few leaders in a time of sharing about the past year in our lives; a brother talked about how his recent experiences helped him see that there are moments in life when it all boils down to you-and-God. No one else can quite enter your experience, bear the pain or help with understanding. Only One remains present, attending, and able to help. 

Yet, it will take us all a while to learn this deep truth that we indeed have a Heavenly Father, a God who offers help, a God who does carry us, a God who will grant wisdom, provide rest and bring healing.

When King Saul's jealousy and possible psychosis got the better of him, he hunted for David like a crazed predator for four years. Naturally, David feared for his life - and fear can make us do many things.
David went to the high priest for help. Later he went to enemy territory to hide. Everywhere David turned, people became implicated and sometimes suffered from the fallout of the conflict between Saul and David.

It looked like the sheer fear for his life was going to layer on with more: grief for what Saul would do to others who are innocent.

In our desperate moments, we will often turn for help - and sometimes, like a drowning man, we cling so tight to anyone or anything that can help; and drown that too.

There is instruction in this.

Equally, the four years David spent running for his life did something for him as all of these things happened. He crafted the Psalms that today reveal what depths a man and his God can get to.

In God alone there is rest for my soul

nowhere else
nothing else
no one else

In God is my safety

Not here
There
in him/her
in this/that

In God is my refuge

no need to flee
panic
fret
for God, ever-Present is.

David of course, eventually becomes the King God has anointed him to be. The dream God inked on his heart will come to pass even if it has to nearly die first. The king God saw fit to stand through a nation's history as king par excellence and as a pre-figure for Christ - that king who will build God's kingdom ways in a people, must know his God to the depths a mortal may be granted to. Yes, much of it came through a cauldron of human suffering we all seek to avoid: fear, threat of death, loneliness, emptiness, defeat, humiliation... But perhaps as John the Baptist would put it a thousand years later, "He must increase, I must decrease". More of God, less of me.

Christ on the Cross with John the Baptist and King David by
Schaufelein, Hans Leonard c1480-1539

note: These experiences and insights about God are reocrded in Psalm 62 - lyrics and music for a head Levite named Jeduthun* -one of three chief Levites; whom some deduce may be David's music teacher! 

Bereft. The feeling of losing something precious permanently.

Most hearts eventually have to reckon with this overpowering sensation.
This week someone got drunk. Another drags on more cigarettes than she intended to. Another walks, life around but not within her.

It's a dark night where the sun doesn't seem to rise. Negative emotions overrun while positive ones seem to have gone into hiding. Tears make their way to the surface without the least effort. There is little fire left in desires as everything feels blah.


It could be an unexpected, bad shattering news or a slow dawning sense that things are not as they seem; until a point of clarity reveals the truth of the situation.  Either way, nothing will be the same again.

It's hard to know what to say - to self, and others.  After all, it is like being forcibly sucked into a blackhole.

Young shepherd David lived and acted based on his faith in, and fervor for God. He served the King, he defeated the enemy. Despite his noble choices and right moves and the well-known praise and accolades he was receiving; the truth of the situation began to emerge: he had aroused the jealousy of King Saul. The tension turned into threat to his life, and as with all situations, things compound. When we reach Psalm 52, David was reeling from the devastating news that eighty-give priests were killed on account of him. The Psalm is a poetic way to teach truth; in this case, David asserts that through the reversals and losses, he will refuse to play the cynic. Instead, he senses God's hand on him and wrote ~

I, like a flourishing olive tree 
in the house of God,
put my trust in God's faithful love,
for ever and ever

There is much that didn't make sense. God's king has an inverted sense of what is right. David is targetted for treason. Others are implicated and killed. Everything is a mess; God it seems, has left the building. It would be easy to feel sorry, to rile, to strike back, to curl up into a ball and cry softly to death.

Goliath's sword that priest Ahimelech gave to David {1 Sam 21}  

Meanwhile, history tells us that some four hundred ragamuffins - "in distress, in debt, had a grievance" looked to David as their leader. {1 Samuel 22} Most leaders today will run a mile wide from such candidates for discipleship or leadership. But by chapter 23, the number had swollen to six hundred. A leader on the run for his life; battling darkness of guilt for causing the death of others, the pain of false accusation, the demands of broken people. He says he is a flourishing tree!

There is a core to our being that can be unshaken - for it is held, defined and kept by One who alone gives, sustains and protects life:

God did not deliver him into Saul's power {1 Sam 23v14}





Things will happen to us.
But God decides what to deliver us to. With the Cross, there is only one option for God: God will safeguard us for himself. He will deliver us up to Grace, restoration, healing, peace, truth, and power.

We may feel like we are in a blackhole, spinning helplessly. We don't know what to say or how to respond. But like David, we can resist the blackhole's power to snuff us out because Life is in us and nothing can extinguish that.
Indeed, we can afford to lose anything and everything because we will never lose what is essential: our loved selves. We are all olive trees that flourish because in the worst of days and nights, there is still God's faithful love and His goodness toward us.