How do you decorate a rowing boat for Christmas?

… With oar-naments!

One of the staples of Christmas dinner growing up was pulling a cracker, putting on the paper crown and telling the joke. As a child, at first hearing and with the naivety of youth, they made me chuckle. Now a grown up, and having heard most of them before, they make me groan! I wonder what effect they have on you?

I’m sure we can all agree that cracker jokes are rarely clever. You don’t need much intellect to either chuckle or groan at them. I once heard that that was the point. They weren’t meant to take brain power to work out. They weren’t designed to go over some people’s heads. They were designed to make everyone groan (and a couple laugh). They were meant as an equaliser so everyone was on the same page. They were never meant to be good jokes – they are bad jokes on purpose.

I don’t know whether that is the truth – I like to think it is because the alternative is someone somewhere thought they’d written a bunch of fantastic jokes and would be very disappointed by they’re reception!

I also like it because it means everyone is included. A bad joke can make the rounds in the office or on the bus. People can understand the punchline and no-one feels left behind (at least in principle). And part of the reason I like that idea is because that is what church should be, what following Jesus should be like. Jesus called fishermen and tax collectors, zealots and Pharisees, thieves and rich men, officials and prostitutes – he called everyone with no regard to any societal hierarchy. Everyone was welcome, everyone was equal. Was, and is.

The message of Jesus shouldn’t make you groan or chuckle, but it should be for everyone. It’s a message of unconditional love, of undeserved grace, of the impossible made possible. It might make you gasp or sing or even cry – that’s up to the listener. (OK, maybe a bit of groaning or chuckling might happen, but not because it’s bad!)

As we journey to Christmas we hear of a virgin, pregnant and unmarried, travelling to a backwater village with her carpenter fiance, visited by shepherd’s and wise men. There is space for everyone. It’s not a joke (good or bad) but something real, a promise kept, a hope for the future. Whoever you are reading this: there is room for you too. God’s message and kingdom is for everyone – the greatest equaliser of all.

What do you use to drain your vegetables at Christmas?

An advent colander!

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

The bedsheets

A few years ago I went to an evening exploration group with some other people from church where we talked about all sorts. One thing that stuck in my mind came when we were talking about the purpose of Sunday church. One of the group who is a few years older than me compared it to bed sheets, the non-fitted kind. When they were washed they got a bit misshapen so her mother and her would take diagonally opposite corners and pull it back into shape. Church was a bit like that for her – the necessities of the week could pull her out of shape, but Sundays got her realigned.

If a week could get someone out of shape, imagine what month or even a year could do! The world around is just goes on and we get tossed about with normal day to day things, plus those extras that come up suddenly. The daily grind of working with other people, maybe driving on roads full of other drivers, dealing with family and people we live with can all get us out of shape in our hearts and our minds. And then you get the unexpected bereavance, bad news about health or job, things that come out of nowhere and knock us sideways. I’m sure by the end of it, if we had started as a rectangular bedsheet, we’d look unrecognisable by the end and would need a good strong pull to get us back in shape.

A bedsheet can’t realign itself, but maybe we can. At the beginning of this advent series I quoted from the book of Isaiah some names for Jesus. Maybe, as we get ever nearer to Christmas, we can realign our hearts and minds to God by remembering who he is, by reading Isaiah 9, and some of the Psalms, and by reading through the first chapter of Matthew, Luke and John (Mark skips straight to adult Jesus, but you could read that too if you wanted!) Maybe we can talk to friends and get help with realigning, or maybe God is trying to do just that and we’re being stubborn bedsheets and pulling back. Whichever it may be, now is a good time to get back in God shape. Whether you’re only a little misshapen or you’re stretched beyond recognition, set some time aside to remember who God is in time for us celebrating Jesus’ arrival at Christmas

Walk a mile in their shoes…

It’s an oldie but a goodie: before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them you are a mile away and you have their shoes…

How quickly do we jump in and criticise? Whether it’s friend or stranger, at home or at work, we can find ourselves putting our opinion in about the way others do things and it’s not always complimentary or encouraging. Or maybe you’ve been at the receiving end of criticism which you think is undeserved or a bit harsh, because you know what led you to making that decision or doing things that way.

Because we don’t know what journey other people are on. We don’t know what unseen scars are hidden under the surface, or what other plates are being spun by that particular person. Unless we have lived that persons life and shared all of their experiences, we shouldn’t judge or criticise.

You know you’re own journey. You know where you’ve been, how you now make better decisions than you used to. You know how you were taught to do things, even if that’s different from how others might do them. And everybody has their own version of that.

Jesus teaches that we shouldn’t judge others. He says the measure we use to judge others will be uses to judge us. This links with forgive and you will be forgiven. So maybe instead of judging and criticising at work or in the coffee shop, or even driving, you could instead have a little more patience, maybe pray a blessing instead of shouting. Maybe you could listen to the why, offer advice or just give a gentle encouragement. You could change someone’s day around, you can start a change in the whole atmosphere of you choose to be different. Let’s face it, you don’t particularly like to be criticised or judged, so be the person who chooses not to do it. You may find the people around you start to copy you.

That’s the way Jesus lived, so that’s the way we can live too. This advent, when the shoppers are getting impatient, when work deadlines are looming and stress is building, try and put yourself in their shoes and build up the people around you instead of tearing them down. Be like Jesus. (But don’t steal someone’s shoes!)

Mistletoe and Wine

Is there a song that really puts you in the festive mood, and Christmas isn’t really on the way until you’ve hears it? I love Christmas music, a mixture of carols and crooners, throw in some Slade and some Wham and you’ve almost got my Christmas playlist.

But for me, no Christmas playlist is complete without a but of Cliff Richard. I’ve got a bit of a reputation for being a Cliff fan which I try to debunk, but if I’m being honest, I do enjoy listening to his songs. And at Christmas, it’s his songs that set the mood for me. I remember childhood car rides with him on the CD player, or his CD in the kitchen while Christmas baking was being done. I even tried to get my choir to add one of his songs into their Christmas repertoire! (They were as excited as me…)

So, in this run up to advent, I had to visit Cliff. His music is part of my preparation fir Christmas. And as you may have guessed from the title, I wanted use Mistletoe and Wine. It sets the scene for advent and Christmas from the very beginning and what follows are some amazing lyrics:

It’s a time for giving, a time for getting
A time for forgiving, and for forgetting
Christmas is love, Christmas is peace
A time for hating and fighting to cease

Mistletoe and Wine, Keith Strachan / Jeremy Paul / Leslie George Stewart

And the reason I wanted to look at this song today is that it picks up the theme of forgiveness. Yesterday I wrote about forgiving yourself. Today, I wanted to encourage you to look at others you may need to forgive. Forgiveness is hard. It’s hard to forgive someone who has hurt you even when they apologise, it’s harder still when they don’t realise or won’t acknowledge they’ve done anything wrong. But the bible is very clear about forgiveness. It is a choice we make with no conditions.

And it’s right here in the song: a time for forgiving and for forgetting. When you hold onto a grudge against someone, you are poisoning yourself. They will be merrily living their life while you are looking back at what they’ve done. Maybe forgetting is not the correct word (but it rhymes, so works for the song) – forgiving someone doesn’t mean letting them do the same thing again, but letting go of needing to get even, moving on and leaving the situation behind is the best gift you can give yourself. You take the knife out of the wound and let it heal.

It is something Jesus models and something that the bible teaches: forgiving others is not negotiable. You must forgive ‘not 7 times, but 77 times’ – or more times than you can keep track of. And now, as we are getting ready for Christmas and getting our hearts ready for Jesus, now is the time to make that choice to let go of a grudge and to move on, to be open to love and joy and everything laid out before you instead of being anchored to the past. And if can’t persuade you, listen to Cliff tell you:

Forgive, release and be free

Today’s title is taken from a book by Joff Day about forgiving others. The premise behind the book is that in forgiving others and releasing them of any debt they owe you, you are then free to be yourself without any ties to the past. It is a book that I have found helpful in the past.

But today, I want to turn it around a little. Yes, forgiving people is a key part of being a Christian and being in a right relationship with God, but possibly more key is forgiving yourself. Yesterday I posted about believing in your identity as a child of God and not in anything else. Today, I wanted to briefly write about something that can get in the way.

Yesterday I wrote about the difference about making a mistake and being a mistake, about failing at something and about being a failure (basically, what you do is not who you are). But sometimes when we fail or when we make a mistake, it can leave an impression on us even if that’s not where our identity is. We can be disappointed in ourselves, or we can kick ourselves and tell ourselves to do better. We can be our own worst critic. The thing is, God has already forgiven us for mistakes and failures where we did wrong, and he sees the bigger picture and knows that sometimes it wasn’t our fault (although we may still blame ourselves). This blame, whether we deserve it or not, is not helpful. It can hang around and draw us backwards, make us look the the past and predict a negative future. It isn’t healthy for our own self worth or for our relationship with God.

God has already forgiven you. Jesus has already paid the price. To not forgive yourself is to not accept God’s forgiveness. It is easy to say, harder to live out. But you must try. And just as it is a process and a choice to forgive others, so it is with ourselves. We are forgiven. We are loved. We just need to realise it and believe it. And when we can get to a point of forgiving ourselves, and releasing ourselves from some impossible debt or expectation, we can be free to live our lives, loving ourselves and receiving God’s love as we should.

This advent, if you can, set aside some time to reflect on where you are being hard on yourself, on where you need to give yourself a break, and just be kind and forgive yourself. God already has.

Who are you again?

I’ve written before about identity. It’s a big topic for me, something I’ve had to change my thinking on, so it’s something I like to remind others about incase, like me, they can do with an occasional reminder.

If I were to ask you who you were, you’d probably tell me your name. On a game show, when introducing themselves, people also include their age, their job and where they are from. Sometimes people will include they married status and whether they are a parent. All of these things are true.

Internally, we can also judge ourselves on other things. We can put a lot of emphasis on possessions such as a car or a house. We can look at skills we feel we should have. These all become part of how we see ourselves, our identity. The problem with this is that if we don’t have or can’t do something we feel we should, we start to have negative thoughts about ourselves, something like feeling like a failure or a mess or like there’s something wrong with who we are.

Maybe you’ve recently lost a house, moved out of independent living into a lodging or houseshare situation. Maybe a job has gone wrong. Maybe you’ve had an accident and now can’t do something you could before. Or maybe you’ve had a relationship break, or a falling out with someone close to you.

If these are things important to your identity, these can trip a negative pattern of thinking. I know, I’ve tripped over that one many times myself. But these things are not where our identity should lie.

For example, I am not a baker. I can bake, but if you took away my ability to do that, that doesn’t take away a piece of me. I am not a musician. I can do music, but it is not who I am. Don’t get me wrong, these are both important parts of my life, things I love to do and share with others, and I would be incredibly sad if I lost the ability to do either of them. But I need to keep reminding myself that they are just parts of what I can do and not central to who I am.

That is the important bit to remember. Who you are is not wrapped up in job/tasks/relationships/possessions etc. If you make them where you find who you are, it takes much longer to recover should they go wrong. Instead, they are things that do have an impact, but there is a stronger foundation.

Maybe things have get a little messy, but you are not a mess. Maybe you make a mistake, but you are not a mistake. Maybe things go wrong, but you are not a failure. Because here is a promise from God:

But now, this is what the Lord says—
    he who created you, Jacob,
    he who formed you, Israel:
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have summoned you by name; you are mine.

Isaiah 43: 1

And again, later:

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! 

1 John 3: 1

You have been claimed by God. Nothing can take that away. In success and failure, in joy and despair, when it’s smooth sailing and when it’s rough seas, you are God’s beloved child. With that truth as your foundation, although the hurts still hurt, and although things will still go wrong sometimes, you won’t lose sight of who you are. You are so much more than a job or a skill.

You are a child of God.

Are you sitting comfortably?

It’s a phrase that predates me. When I was very young we would visit grandparents in the North and my Grandma would sometimes read me a bedtime story, and this is how she would begin: Are you sitting comfortably?

When it was used on the radio, and when my Grandma asked the question, the desired answer was ‘yes’ because the phrase would be followed by, “then I dhall begin.” A story of some description would follow to be listened to in comfort and security.

So, I ask you, “are you sitting comfortably?” But I am not looking for the answer ‘yes’. I am looking to provoke thoughts. Because ‘sitting comfortably’ can lead to being complacent, and complacency can lead to laziness and carelessness. Not all the time, not everyone, but sometimes we can get so comfortable in our everyday habits that we miss the nudge that we need to make a change, or we become blind to parts of the world around us where we could help.

I am not writing here telling you that you need to change everything. In fact, I am not telling you that you need to change anything. But in this period of advent when the focus is on getting hearts ready for Christmas, I guess I’m encouraging you to just take stock for a moment, to stop and listen to the small voice of God speaking in your spirit, to see if there’s is something you do (or don’t do) that gets in the way of a good relationship with God.

In some church circles, the second Sunday of advent is used to look at John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin who wore camel hair and ate locusts and honey. He baptised people in the river Jordan, something strange for the culture of the time when baptism was reserved for purification of Jews or for conversion to Judaism. Unlike in the Christian faith, baptism wasn’t for everyone.

So John was shaking things up. And when the Pharisees and Saducees (religious leaders who were supposed to set an example) came for a baptism, John had some strong words for them. He called them a ‘brood of vipers’ and warned them to make a real change. He said, ‘bear fruit worthy of repentance.” In other words, don’t just go through the motions, take a look and see where you need to change to actually set a good example.

Please understand, I am not comparing any reader to those religious leaders. And I am certainly no John the Baptist with harsh words of warning. (For one thing, I’m not a huge fan of honey…) But John 3:16 says, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Jesus had mercy and compassion on those who listened and were open. He didn’t turn a blind eye, but gently pointed out where people needed to change. He wasn’t one to let people ‘sit comfortably’ either. More than once he spoke out and said things that led to others feeling uncomfortable, but only because he pointed out where they were living and behaving wrongly, in a way that wasn’t in line with God’s word.

So in this advent season, maybe even this week, see if you can find time time to ask yourself, “Am I sitting comfortably?” And maybe spend a bit of time being still and letting Jesus tell you if you should be.

What music does…

Music has a strange quality. Well, it has a few, but I am thinking specifically of how it can bring people together. I have just come from a local concert where my choir and some other performers came together to provide an evening of music in a small venue. The first half was general tunes, the second half Christmas songs.

It has struck me before how the choir I lead brings people from different walks of life together. But I was struck again this evening by the power music has on the listener as well as the producer. An audience can sit and listen and somehow connect with the music. It becomes a talking point between strangers in the queue for refreshments. They can join in or just sit and let the sound wash over them – and somehow there is a connection between the listener and the performer. The performer is giving something which lasts only a moment, and yet can leave a lasting impression, and the listener is receiving something that they cannot grasp or even share with others – as they hear it, it creates a personal internal response that will differ from person to person and is often hard to explain.

Some songs make us smile, while others may draw a tear. Some will help us get festive, others will get our toes tapping, while others will have us reaching for the off switch (or the ear plugs). But it will create some sort of reaction. And if human-created music can elicit such a response, I wonder what it sounds like to hear divine music?

At the birth of Jesus, angels appear in the sky singing their joyful song, at key moments people are overcome with emotion and have no choice but to sing (Miriam and Moses when they are rescued from Egypt, Mary when she finds out she will have Jesus, Simeon when he sees baby Jesus at the temple, David in the Psalms…)

But more importantly, God sings. Zephaniah 3: 17 says, ‘The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.’

I wonder what it would be like to stop and hear God’s song. Maybe it’s in the birds and the breeze, or maybe it’s something more gently in our hearts. A shared experience with other Christians, and yet also deeply personal between us and God. Music has the power to reach us on an emotional level and bring us closer to our neighbour. Maybe try and listen to God the Musician and the song he is singing over you tonight.

The mental shelf

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find that life can be a little overwhelming. Sometimes I can find myself juggling so much that I don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to deal with it. Or something so huge comes in that I have no idea how to deal with it (more so when I was a child). What used to happen to those things, the things that were just to much, was they would get ‘shelved’. Like some people do with things in their houses they don’t want to deal with right now -it gets put in a drawer or on a shelf for later. Except it was a metaphorical shelf in my head, and I was never very good at coming back to sort it…

The problem with this approach is that even a metaphorical shelf can end up holding too much and collapse. Suddenly, you don’t have the choice of ‘dealing with it later’ (or ignoring it…) In fact, you have to deal with quite a lot all at once! I once told someone about this shelf, and their response was, “let the Carpenter take care of the shelf.”

That was some very wise advice. Jesus, a carpenter before he started his travelling ministry, would of course be able to handle anything and everything I would and had put on the shelf. And the bible doesn’t say, “pile all your cares on oneside because God isn’t interested.” No, it specifically says the opposite.

Psalm 52: 22 says, “Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.” 1 Peter 5: 7 says, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares.”

Speaking from experience, it can be easier said than done. Partly, it may be a journey to believe that God actually does care about your cares and worries, big and small, because God does actually care about you. He doesn’t role his eyes and give an exasperated sigh when you start to pray. He genuinely cares for you and listens when you give him the things that are on your mind.

Another part that might make it hard is the stubborn voice inside telling you that you don’t need any help. Thanks very much God, but you can take a day off, I’ve got this. Sort of. Kind of. And in part you might – but it is much better to share it with God in case it gets bigger and out of hand, or in case something unexpected comes along. And God just wants to do life with you. Good and bad, big and small. Let Jesus help.

Maybe it’s hard because you are doing what you’ve always done. That’s ok, write one of the bible verses mentioned above somewhere to remind yourself that just because you’ve always done it alone previously, you don’t have to do it that way going forwards.

So if you have a mental shelf (or an equivalent), don’t wait for it to collapse – let the Carpenter who Cares help take care of it now.

Still, small voice

I’ve been reading a good book recently. There’s lots of good bits in it, I’m sure I’ll reference it again. But the bit that’s important for today comes in the chapter called ‘Uniquely You’. The gist of the chapter is to be you, exactly as you were created to be, unique and wonderful. To do that, you need to let God guide you. You shouldn’t compare to others, just trust God.

It then goes on to say that in order to let God guide you, you need to recognise his voice. I wonder how many times you have heard a Christian say, “God has been speaking to me about…” or something similar. Have you ever wondered what that might sound like?

I know Christians who say things like that on a regular basis, as well as Christians who couldn’t be sure of God speaking to them because they’ve never been told how to recognise it. The difficulty is that it is hard to put into words what it sounds like to have God speaking to you. I have previously mentioned about God using friends around me to talk to me (which I sometimes think is because I don’t trust myself to hear God correctly directly and need to external confirmation…). Sometimes people will have dreams or visions from God.

But mostly, it’s like a picture or a phrase rather appears in your mind. And in the book, it described it rather well:

How do we hear God’s voice? It is not usually an audible voice, but a still, small voice in our spirit that causes us to know what to do.

Authentically, Uniquely You by Joyce Meyer

Which triggered a memory of an exercise I once did with a church. I got one person to read a phrase from the bible (not sure which one, probably something about God’s love), then about 5 other people to loudly shout things that might be on a daily to do list like ‘Do the washing up’ or ‘meet that deadline’. I asked people what God was saying but through the din, they couldn’t hear. Life can be like that for us. It was for Elijah.

Elijah had many successes and a good relationship with God, but when his life was threatened and he was afraid and in despair, that went out the window. He ran away and gave up. He literally told the angel of the Lord that he wanted to die. So the angel of the Lord fed him, made him take a nap and took him away from all the distractions. And it was there that Elijah heard the still small voice of God telling him the next step, reawakening hope, proving that Elijah hadn’t been abandoned.

It can be hard to know the right way to turn at times. Maybe there’s a big decision you need to make, and one logical answer but somehow the internal conflict doesn’t make it an easy decision. (OK, that’s a personal recent experience, but maybe you have something in your life that relates?) I recently had the opportunity to go away for a few days to somewhere with no mobile reception and very dodgy Internet. In the run up, I’d had been wrestling over a decision and just couldn’t work out what to do. I could argue it with myself each way, and the ‘right’ decision seemed to change every hour (and that’s not much of an exaggeration…)

So while I was away with little contact with the outside world, everything went quiet. And there was that ‘still small voice’ helping me to make the right decision, a pull in my spirit to know what decision was best for me. Was it the logical option? Not to anyone else, no (and I had heard plenty of advice about what I should do). And yet, I came away at peace, knowing that it was the right decision for me and God agreed – because that still small voice had led me to that decision.

So if you are at a crossroads and don’t know which way to go, if you are conflicted over a decision, if you are feeling lost and need a bit of guidance, move away from the distractions and loud voices and be still and quiet. Because God will guide you – trust him and your self. He is the still small voice.