Sometimes…

… it’s just hard to write. There – that’s about as much of an excuse as I can think of for why these pages have been static for the last month. If it’s any consolation I haven’t been writing nearly as much in my journal as I once did, either. Perhaps it’s simply that being here is my normal now, and who feels motivated to write much about their ordinary day-to-day life?

Anyway, here are some things I’m excited about right now:

1. Worship. Well, worship is always exciting; what I mean is that I’m excited about some differences in the way I’m expressing it this year. Last year I didn’t make it onto the school worship team, to the surprise (apparently) of some of you. To my surprise I loved not doing it and I learned a great deal about what worship really is, and just basically fell in love with Jesus a whole lot more. I started leading in a few small-scale settings towards the end of the year and I got quite a lot of words (as in, prophetic ones) about playing and leading and stuff. Which was nice.

This year I tried out for the worship team again, played about as badly as I did at the first year audition, and made the team. I played for the first time on Tuesday and had a lot of fun. The best thing thing (James Rogers, are you listening?) was that I had control of my own foldback: I had my own mini mixing desk through which I could control both the foldback volume and the balance between the piano and everyone else. OK, that wasn’t actually the best thing about it, but it was pretty cool. I’ve also been taking almost every opportunity going when I’ve been in small groups to bust out the old acoustic and get people worshipping. It’s just a lot of fun.

2. The UK student network. There are nearly 70 Brits in school this year (including Joy, of course, whom I haven’t seen all that much of recently, which is probably a good sign) and I’m excited because we have the opportunity to build something significant as a national group. The thing God has highlighted to those of us leading the network is family… because as you never stop hearing out here, heaven is all about family and relationships. Not everyone is from a church quite like KA and going back after school is over to somewhere where they don’t quite get it (or want it, or both) is pretty tough. In fact, it’s not easy even when they mostly do. You’re going to need to know that you’ve got brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers down the motorway or on the end of the phone who know you and believe in you and have been where you’ve been…

I don’t really know how to create family at the best of times, but I don’t think the Holy Spirit would have brought it up if He didn’t have a plan. We’re having a barbeque in the park on Sunday (yup, it’s still basically summer out here, though not for long, I fear) which seems like a good place to start, and we’ll go from there.

So, there’s a little snippet of my life right now. Check back in another month and I might well have thought of something else to say. But I fear that the real glory days of this blog (if such they were) may be in the past. But who knows? Inspiration may yet visit me again…

The boys are back in town…

(…and so, happily for the boys, are the girls, of course). School may have been out for the summer, but while it still feels a lot like summer – the kind of hot, sunny summer the UK dismally failed to have, I might add – school is very much in again.

Enough tired rock-lyric cliches. The point is that the sun is shining, it’s very, very hot – and second year began yesterday. While Bethel had felt an increasingly distant memory as my summer wore on, walking through the doors yesterday for registration brought everything and (nearly) everyone back. We’re in a different building this year (not enough room for all the second years in the main Bethel building now) and for various reasons more of my friends than I’d like haven’t returned, but otherwise it’s business as usual. Worship was full-on right from the off; Bill and Kris dived straight into their superb teaching; and most of the same fun, passionate, encouraging people are around me.

However, I didn’t find it easy to switch myself back on to this level of intensity. My fragmented and rootless summer was part of the reason I hadn’t maintained the spiritual depths I had begun to live in during first year. I lived during the week in one town where I knew a total of three people, two of whom were my parents, and visited a whole load of others ones at the weekends, barely finding enough time in Bedford (the place I mostly wanted to be) to spend quality time with all the people I wanted to see.

But another part of the reason the summer frequently felt so different from the preceding nine months was that it was too much like real life. First year was a time of laying down burdens and stress, taking time to encounter God in rest and peace, without significant pressure on my time and without major responsibility. It was a time when He opened up to me whole new worlds of who He is, and who He created me to be, but without give me many specifics about how those things would be realised – because it wasn’t a time for working things out so much as for enjoying, discovering and resting.

Second year is not that way – it’s not meant to be, nor do I want it to be. I’m determined that it will be much more focused, and more realistic. I intend to make myself busier, more disciplined, more intentional… I want it to look more like real life looks, where there’s always a tension between what’s desirable and what’s achievable, where we’re always having to say no to things we’d love to say yes to, and where the only way we will get the deep, intimate time with God we need in order to thrive is by fighting to carve out the space in our schedules. Lazy mornings before school at 12.45 are wonderful, but they are not real (quite literally – second year starts at 12.30!). Will I learn to find my strength in God each day if I don’t allow my quiet time to go beyond 8.30? Will I maintain my light-hearted trust in Him when I have the real, pressing demands of increased leadership responsibility? Will I find the courage to push through the excitement of discovering that God has great purposes for my future and try to understand what that actually requires me to do? And will I learn how to do all of that while still living from a heart of rest, where my Papa’s love and acceptance are unconditional and unchanging, and His value for me far outstrips what I could ever imagine earning by my best efforts?

Time – and the grace of God – will tell

Remembering what it’s all about

Over the last few days I’ve been trying to complete a couple of draft posts about what my summer has been like, and how it felt to arrive back in California early last week. But somehow the ideas weren’t flowing and it was obvious that the little I had managed to put into words wasn’t going to amount to anything worth sharing with you.

But I went to church this morning – back at Bethel for the first time in a little over three months – and now I feel like I actually have something worth writing about: not the hectic summer, or the pink sunrise over the dusky hills of southern California, but the One Thing, the thing that David loved more than anything: the presence of God.

He was there in the worship, unquestionably – He always is at Bethel because I don’t think He can resist so many hungry hearts. But it was when Bill spoke about pursuing His glory that we really felt Him come. Bill spoke from the famous story of Mary and Martha ministering to Jesus, about how Martha tried to escape her anxiety and fear by busying herself, while Mary simply pursued the presence of the one she loved. But he also reminded us of the parable Jesus told about how servants come and feed the master before they themselves eat, and how worship isn’t really about us: we come to feed Him – to bring an offering that touches His heart. We discover Him when we lay down everything else to honour and bless Him.

I can’t do the message justice. But it left me yet again convinced that there really is only One Thing in life. Many other things flow from it, but above all the mission of our lives is to be close – in every conceivable sense – to our glorious Jesus. And that means dwelling in the experience of His glory more and more and more. That’s why I’m here, because that’s why I’m alive.

I guess over the summer that had slipped my mind. It’s good to be reminded.

Deja vu

It’s time to begin again. My non-stop summer is accelerating towards its 1st September finishing line and soon I will be feeling that all-to-familiar astonishment at how much I still have to do and how little time there is to do it. This week I turned the final corner that brings the end very much into sight: I went to the embassy for my visa.

The US embassy. If bureaucracy were beauty, Wordsworth would extol that institution to the heavens. If paperwork were passion, Shakespeare’s sonnets would ring with its praise. But it seems neither poet (nor any other that I know about) focused as much on the details of US non-immigrant visa applications as they could have. Not that I was thinking much about literary history as I made my way across Grosvenor Square towards the embassy’s unattractive edifice to join the other blank-faced applicants queuing beltless outside in the drizzle…

I emerged again two and a half hours later feeling, if not enthralled with Shakespearean passion, then certainly relieved. In fact, I was humblingly conscious of the level of favour that seems to rest on my life, because far from having to justify my application to a suspicious and compassionless consular official who considered all applicants bound to be either inveterate economic spongers or merciless terrorists, I had a nice chat with a friendly lady who was curious about exactly what my job was (there are days when I try to explain it and days when I just say the words “computational”, “fluid” and “dynamics” in an arbitrary order and smile benignly) and what “supernatural ministry” meant. That may of course have been her exceedingly subtle way of assessing my terrorist/sponging credentials, but if so, I’d take that over a good old-fashioned grilling any day of the week. The thing that touched me most about the experience was that I had asked God for this lady to interview me after I heard her voice on the tannoy while I was waiting to be called, as she sounded like the antithesis of this stereotype of hard-nosed suspicion I had been entertaining. When I got exactly what I asked for I couldn’t help smiling to myself.

But my inward smile was accompanied by an inward screwing up of my brow in perplexity: why should I live under such favour? Why do so many good things keep happening to me? And the answer isn’t easy if I approach the question entirely in terms of my idea of justice, which is pretty straightforward: that we all get roughly what we deserve. My (I hope) orthodox theology requires me to accept (very gratefully) a great – nay, cataclysmic – aberration in that general scheme of things, as neatly summarised in John 3:16, but, however cataclysmic, it remains, in my instinctive thinking, an aberration, and as a rule any further theologically unnecessary experiences I may have of mercy triumphing over justice are always a surprise to me. You see, experience suggests quite strongly that I’m not, by heavenly standards, a very good person. I could point to more things in my life that obviously disqualify me from receiving such blessing than I have fingers to point with. And if I actually thought about it, I would probably have to borrow the fingers of most of the people I have ever met.

But the fact remains that I receive a lot of blessing. How can I explain that? And more importantly, how do I know it’s not all going to evaporate tomorrow? Well, as any good historian of science will tell you, when one’s paradigm fails to support the observed phenomena, it’s time at least to consider the validity of the paradigm. Which can be a mind-bending exercise. When Einstein chucked out the laughably obvious idea that time and space were independent of how fast something was going or how heavy it was, it took everyone else a while to catch up. Apparently to this day people write to professors of physics trying to disprove Relativity because it makes them so uncomfortable. I may smile a superior “actually I studied General Relativity once although I can’t remember much about now it except that I never really had a clue what I was doing” smile at such intellectual naivete, but I’m guilty of just the same. Jesus chucked out the laughably obvious idea that God’s blessing was basically a function of my goodness a lot of centuries ago at exactly the point He made my goodness more or less irrelevant by giving me His, and I’m still trying to get my head round it. Yes, there’s still sowing and reaping, and yes, we will still have to give an account for everything – I’m not trying to deny the seriousness of sin for a moment – but now there’s grace.

And it’s not just for the past: it’s for now. It’s not just for the excusable things: it’s for everything. It’s not just saving me from hell. It’s not just barely keeping God’s anger in check. It has fundamentally and irrevocably altered everything about my relationship with Him. It has taken my “natural”, “obvious” ideas of what’s reasonable to expect from Him in view of what I’m like, and utterly discredited them. You see, what’s happened is not so much that the legal terms by which we relate have altered to become more favourable to me (although they certainly have) – it is that we no longer relate in legal terms. We’re family now.

So love says what happens, not law. In other words, the relationship isn’t founded on legal questions such as obedience and sin – though they remain eternally significant – it is founded on relational questions such as acceptance, affirmation, identity, kindness…. and (apparently) completely unjustified favour. Of course, relating to an infinite, unknowable person rather than a finite, objective set of principles doesn’t always appeal to my epistemological predilections – which is another way of saying it often seems jolly scary. But to be honest, I’ll take a bit of scary if I get the chance to live in such a love as this…

(Having said all that, if anyone knows a good way I can make myself believe that so deeply that I don’t have to keep reminding myself, you will let me know, won’t you?)

Gut-wrenching goodness

Prophecy is hard work. Having never done it very seriously until this trip I had no idea how draining it is. Since we arrived in Ohio eight days ago we have done twelve services and I’ve had to prophesy over people in nearly all of them, as well as bring words of knowledge and pray for the sick. It has been fairly intense.

Spiritual effort isn’t the same as physical effort, in that it requires a different kind of recuperation. Being so new to it all, I didn’t know the warning signs, and on Friday evening the spiritual fatigue that had been creeping up on me suddenly hit me hard. It was the first service of a busy “Firestorm” weekend, which would involve long meetings each of Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, prophetic ministry to church leadership on Saturday morning and treasure hunting that afternoon, as well as the usual two services on Sunday morning. It wasn’t a time to be running out of gas.

The basic problem was that I had been pushing myself to keep stepping out in spiritual gifts, but nobody had given me any (to my mind) good reason to believe that I was hearing from God. The people I had prayed for for healing had either not been healed or not been able to tell if anything had changed, and the people I had prophesied over hadn’t said anything much about whether the words were accurate or not.

So I was in a pretty vulnerable place that evening. I had been asked to play guitar and sing backing vocals in the worship band, and for no obvious reason, as soon as I stepped up to start practising before the service my confidence simply vanished and I barely had the courage to sing a note. While Brad was speaking, I felt like running out of the building, or hiding in the toilets, or at the very least asking if I could be excused from ministering that evening. But I’ve felt that way enough times to know that it was an attack – that I hadn’t done anything wrong (at least, nothing the Lord wasn’t willing to fix) and that I needed to fight. I went out for a while and tried to tell myself the truth and ask God to help me. It crossed my mind that because of the way I was feeling, this might well be a critical moment both for me and for the person I would prophesy over. That helped me choose to go back into the service and stand up with the rest of the team to prophesy when the time came.

I’ve had confidence through the whole trip that God would give me something every time I was put on the spot, and this time was no exception. Brad got everyone in the congregation to stand who had never received a prophetic word about their destiny, and each of us on the team had to choose one of them and give them one. I focused on a guy standing on his own over to the right-hand side of the congregation, and I saw a picture of a smashed glass vessel “un-smashing”, like a video being played in reverse, which I felt to do with his ministry to rebuild other people’s shattered lives. I was still feeling pretty bad and I gave the word a little reluctantly, especially because he didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who would be into inner healing ministry (though I don’t think I could have said what I thought that kind of person would look like!) I asked him if it made any sense, and he nodded vaguely, which could have meant anything, probably no.

Hanging around after the service I felt very discouraged and wondered how I would be able to bear the last two days of the trip. I told myself how much I hated prophetic ministry, how it felt like I was being sucked dry while having no idea if what I was giving had any value at all. Everyone else on the team seemed confident, and their words were detailed and (mostly) accurate – unlike mine.

Then, out of the blue, the guy I had prophesied to came over and asked me for my address. He explained that he wanted to send me a copy of a picture of a smashed glass vessel that had been reconstructed that his daughter had drawn for him as an illustration of their family’s ministry to rebuild the lives of women saved from the sex trade. My word was a powerful confirmation to him that he really did have what it took to keep going with that ministry.

It took a few moments for it to sink in, but when it did, I went and sat at the back of the church and cried. It’s not often that I have experienced the goodness of God like that in my life. Right at the very moment I needed it, when I had felt barely able to fight back my discouragement enough to step out, He gave me an amazingly clear confirmation that He was speaking through me, I wasn’t missing it, and my words did matter.

By stepping out that night I turned a corner in my spiritual walk. Now nobody can ever tell me that I can’t hear from God, or that He doesn’t really want to use me, or that He doesn’t care when I’m struggling. The words I’ve given since Friday have been noticeably more confident and authoritative (according to my team leaders) and I have felt far more peace and assurance in doing it than ever before. This isn’t the end of the story by a long way, of course – there will be a lot more corners to turn as I continue to grow. But I’m still in a bit of a daze at how amazingly good God is proving Himself along the way.

Harvest Life, Defiance

Defiance, Ohio, nestling somewhere between Bryan and Napoleon – if anything can reasonably be said to “nestle” in land so breathtakingly flat as northwestern Ohio – is a little town of 18,000 or so, spread along the banks of three converging rivers still swollen from melted snow. The roads are straight and occasionally potholed; the houses are all white and wooden, and vaguely Dutch-looking, though none is quite the same as any other. Like Redding, downtown has character but little life, while the mall has life but little character. There is a daily traffic jam at 4.30 or so on the main street; otherwise, everything feels pretty quiet.

Harvest Life, the church we’re visiting, is somewhere on the edge of town sandwiched between dead-looking fields and not very industrious-looking industrial units. It is a fairly small congregation – about 150 – but their passion belies the soporific, small-town atmosphere of the city. They are easy people to like: a couple of days’ ministry and we are all feeling like it will be sad to leave tomorrow. We are doing four services while we’re here and two morning sessions of prophetic ministry to leaders. The services are fun – worship mostly followed by a message from Brad or Sara, the trip leaders, and then ministry – either healing or prophecy or both. We’ve seen lots of people healed, though nothing spectacular. The prophetic ministry has been good too. This morning leaders from various churches around the town gathered, and the words we got seemed to bring a lot of encouragement to them.

I’ve had fun being creative with the Holy Spirit. Each of us in the team has to do prophetic art at the front of a service; my turn was Sunday evening. Prophetic art means painting something, usually within about 30 minutes during worship, interpreting it and giving it to someone as a prophetic word. I had a few ideas of what I could paint but I wasn’t sure which was right. When I got up to the easel the paints happened to be laid out so that the two key colours in one of the ideas were nearest to me so I decided I would go for that one. It all went reasonably well until I got to the hardest part of the picture, when my entire lack of technique began to be exposed (anything other than geometrically simple block colours is pretty much beyond me). But I asked the Holy Spirit to help me and I suddenly realised how to paint it. In the end it looked if not impressive then certainly passable. Last night, too, I was playing piano in the background while the others in the team led a Judy Franklin-style encounter time, and I really felt that the melodic theme I was working around came from Him – it was just somehow more beautiful and satisfying than what I’m used to coming up with on my own. More importantly, some of the congregation had some great encounters with Jesus during that time.

We’re moving on to Grand Rapids tomorrow after one last service this evening. I’m guessing it will be different up there – a bigger city and a bigger church – but whatever happens it will be fun. So far the ministry has been a step up for me, but without feeling too demanding, and the team dynamics have been great, even though none of us really knew each other beforehand. This is turning out to be just the right kind of trip for me and I’m really looking forward to what God’s going to do over the next six days…

The morning of departure

Later on today I’m heading down to San Francisco to catch a flight to Chicago first thing in the morning. It’s MISSIONS TIME! Ten days of who knows what in the climatically and scenically challenged Midwest.

We fly into Chicago (via Minneapolis, so arguably I get to add Minnesota to the list of states I’ve visited without even trying), and then drive four hours to Defiance, Ohio, which appears from Google maps to be as unnotable a place as its slightly ridiculous name suggests. My American friends assure me that Ohio is the very epitome of “not very exotic”, which is mostly fine with me, except that when other people I know are heading (or have been) to the jungles of Central America and to the Middle East I feel a little envious (although the certainty of a hot shower mitigates that considerably).

But of course the adventure doesn’t really lie in the location but in what happens there. We’re not going on holiday (although that would be quite welcome at this point in the year), we’re going to have fun with the Holy Spirit. And He wants to have fun wherever He happens to be… I’m told that things are a little different spiritually in that part of the country – more religious, less open… but there is hunger nonetheless. The pastor of the church we’re going to in Ohio has been desperate to have a Bethel team visit for a long time, and we’re hoping his congregation feels the same. It’s a little daunting realising that “The Bethel Team”, and all that implies, is us, but at the same time, the greater the hunger, the greater things we’ll see. It’s going to be good.

We drive from Ohio up to Grand Rapids, Michigan on Wednesday. Grand Rapids is Evangelical Central, apparently. It’s where lots of good conservative theology gets published, and there are churches on every street corner. We’re going to a Global Legacy church (one in relationship with Bethel) which is well used to the culture we bring, but Brad, one of the team leaders, feels they need to step up in seeing healing miracles… so that’s one big thing we’ll be going for. We’re also going to be doing prophetic art wherever we go, which no longer feels like a ridiculous thing for me to attempt, but still doesn’t strike me as – how shall I put this? – the most natural medium for my expressive abilities. But it’s all part of the deal – stepping out, stepping up, letting everything that has been poured into me pour out again.

I’d be grateful for your prayers over the next week or so. I’m not too anxious about the trip, but then I’ve never done anything quite like this, so I don’t really know what I’m going to encounter. Grace for boldness is probably what I need the most. I want to see God do big things in people’s lives; but I want us to leave a lasting impression not just on individuals but on the entire culture of the churches we’re visiting. Missions trips are inevitably hit-and-run to some extent, but the aim is permanent transformation – a switch getting flipped in enough people’s hearts regarding what God can do in and through them that a momentum is built for the whole church to break out into a more authentic manifestation of the Kingdom of God… That’s my prayer: that the places we go just won’t be the same afterward.

Well, watch this space… I’ll let you know what happens…