I was driving home today in the drizzle and I saw a rainbow in the sky. From where I was I could see the end if the rainbow landing among some trees not far from me. (Yes, I know it was an optical illusion). I’ve never seen that before, I’ve always seen the colours in the sky landing somewhere in the distance behind houses or hills. But this one was close. And I thought, “What a beautiful rainbow!”
Is a rainbow ever anything but beautiful? Have you ever heard of an ugly rainbow? I haven’t. A rainbow is intrinsically beautiful.
In the bible, the rainbow is a reminder to God of his promise never to destroy humankind with a flood that covers the earth again. (That seems very specific to me, but maybe it means never cause such worldwide devastation and destruction?). It is a symbol of hope for us, to see it and remember the covenant God made with us, a covenant for a fresh start. It’s a sign of grace and mercy on all people, that never again will God wipe out the sinful from the earth. Instead, we get Jesus come to save the sinners.
A rainbow needs two things: rain and sunlight. It’s a symbol of hope because after the rain comes something that can’t be anything but beautiful. A symbol of hope and love, a rainbow if encouragement to keep going, a promise that something better is yet to come. A rainbow is a reminder that God hasn’t given up and reassurance that we shouldn’t either.
And maybe it represents life for us. Our life has good and bad in it, it has both rain and sun. Which means, our lives become rainbows – something so beautiful that nothing can take away from it.
Keep going, remember God’s promise and love, and keep your eyes peeled for rainbows
The gardener and the carpenter is the title of a book on parenting. I haven’t read the book (I’m not a parent) but the premise behind it caught my imagination so I read a quick synopsis. The essence is that when parenting, it is not the job of a parent to dictate and therefore carefully shape the mind of the child, but to create an environment where the child can explore and discover. A carpenter thinks they can transform the wood into a chair. A gardener knows they don’t actually have control over their plants but aims to create the best conditions for the plants to flourish.
How is this relevant? Over time I have heard Christians take a different view on how God works with us. Some say God preordained our lives and things are fixed. Others say God gave us free will and we choose our path. Those are the two extremes, neither of which sit well with me. I’ve also heard God compared to a master chess player, but in my mind we are either the opponent (we’re not) or we’re mindless pawns (we’re not that either!)
The bible talks about God’s plan. Psalm 139 talks about all out days being written before we were born and Jeremiah is often quoted – “I know the plans I have for you”. However, there is also writing about choices. John’s Gospel has Jesus saying, “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God”, and back in Genesis Adam ans Eve make a choice to eat the fruit which is clearly not God’s specific plan. The bible doesn’t give a definite answer.
So when I came across this analogy something clicked for me. God could have been a carpenter. Indeed, looking at the creation story God played the roll of the carpenter, transforming matter into a world with seas and land, plants and animals and, eventually, humans. But then he changed. He became a gardener, giving mankind the best possible circumstances to grow and flourish. OK, it didn’t turn out quite right, but in a garden, the gardener knows that their plans may be thwarted by pests or weather.
So this is where the analogy fails a little. God could do something where a gardener couldn’t. But that’s where rhe element of love comes in. God could be a carpenter, dictating how everything should happen and we would all become examples of perfect ‘chairs’. But that wasn’t what God originally designed. He designed us to be thinking, growing beings. He created us all unique and part of life is to discover who we are. God has created the circumstances for us to discover that. Sometimes external factors knock us, sometimes the pests and the weather mean its a battle to grow. Sometimes, our choices are the things that marr the garden. But through it all, the loving gardener is there to tend and to feed. He doesn’t give up thinking the garden is hopeless and not worth the hard work. He knows that as we grow and bloom we will discover and adventure and love.
Sunday has come around again already, so another comic from ‘Joyful Toons’ – this one for anyone who is struggling. Its easy to loom at the things that are going wrong and focus on them, but if you want, look around at the good stuff as well. Try and remember that God has a bigger plan and may that help you to find peace in your heart and the flicker of hope to keep going.
A friend and I went out to a local garden, the sort you pay to enter with multiple cafes and plants of all kinds from around the world. There were so many colours, even on a gray cloudy day in a cold snap. There were plants of every colour, some big and some small, some standing proud and some hidden among leaves. You could walk around a smell their fragrance, and feel the humidity and see how each plant had adapted to its environment.
As I walked I was again struck by how varied the world is. I was seeing a small selection of plants in one small snippet of the year and there were more varieties than I could count. God’s creation is so much wider than I can possibly grasp, so much variety that we could never see it all. It makes me stop and wonder again at the God who made me, who continued to create until he had made mankind. All of these wonderful, colourful, beautiful elements were a small segment of the world. The same care taken in making the delicate petals with appealing scents and the towering trunks that offer shade also went in to making you and me.
Take a moment. You don’t have to go to a special gardens, although there is a lot of variety. You could just look out the window. Stop and take it in. Look around at the creation. And remember you are a part of it.
At the place where I work there is a chair. It’s not an outstanding chair, in fact it’s pretty basic. It’s made from wood, has 4 legs and a back. In fact, this chair started in one office where it wasn’t really wanted and just got in the way. So it got moved, dumped really in a other office. It was adopted by my colleague who worked in that office. She loves the chair. In fact, we had a big office clear out to get rid of the bits and bobs that build up over time as staff come and go. The colleague wasn’t in that day and sent a special message asking us to make sure we kept that chair.
A few weeks ago, we talked about the chair. I mentioned how it had been shoved about because it was no use and in the way in another (smaller) room. My colleague (someone who sees the positive everywhere) looked at the chair and then at me and said, “it’s not just a chair. Here it is a chair, an extension of my desk, something nice to look at, somewhere visitors can sit and an extra table that can be moved to where its needed.” (OK, I may have remember the details wrong, but she did reel off a list of 4 or five things it was other than ‘just a chair’!)
I wonder if you can relate to that chair? Have you ever been somewhere that you just don’t fit, where you feel like you’re in the way and not really wanted? Maybe some have looked at you and thought (or maybe even told you) that you’re a waste of space or just neglected you through no fault of your own.
There’s a lesson here from this simple tale about a chair. When we moved the chair, we found somewhere it did belong and someone who valued it.
No matter what some situations or circumstances tell us, we are not unwanted or a waste of space. We are children of God, loved and valued and very much wanted. We have a place in God’s kingdom. And until that time, maybe we need to try a different ‘room’ where we will find a person or people who will see all of our potential. Maybe we need to find people who look at us and see that we’re not just one thing, but have so much more to offer when we are embraced and given a chance.
If a chair is not just a chair, neither are we just one thing. Go out as children of God and show the world all you can be.
The story of Joseph and his coat of many colours is probably one of the best known in the bible. It was made into a musical with classic songs like Any dream will do and close every door to me, and an Elvis-like Pharaoh. The story starts with a family of 12 brothers from 2 mothers, a father who plays favourites, and a special son who rubs it in the faces of his brothers either intentionally arrogant or woefully naive. The special son, Joseph, goes to give his brothers a message and they take the opportunity to get rid of him. They throw him in a hole in the ground and then sell him as a slave in Egypt.
The brothers then take Joseph’s special coat, tear it and cover it in goat’s blood. They present it to their father, telling a tale of how they found it in the desert, that Joseph must have been attacked a killed by a wild animal. Their father is heartbroken, his favourite son is dead. The brothers secretly rejoice, although life doesn’t exactly become smooth sailing. Read Genesis to find out what they get up to.
Joseph gets bought by Potiphar and serves him well. But Potiphars wife tries to seduce him and when that doesn’t work gets Joseph thrown in jail. He stays there for years, interpreting a couple of dreams along the way and eventually gets dragged before Pharoah to interpret his dream. Off the back of that he winds up overseeing the food for Egypt during a famine.
Back home, his father and brothers are starving. The brothers go to Egypt to beg for food. Joseph recognises them, they don’t recognise him. A little bit of back a forth they Joseph reveals himself. There is no resentment, just compassion for his brothers. He sends them to get their father so they can live in Egypt without worry for food.
This is the bit that interests me. The brothers go back and tell their father that Joseph is alive. Its not clear how much of the story they tell him. Did they come clean and spill the beans on what had really happened to Joseph all those years ago? It’s never mentioned. The passage doesn’t say that the brothers come clean, but neither does it say that Joseph drops them in it. There’s a lesson there on true forgiveness – when we have truly forgiven, we don’t tell others about what has happened. (But that’s a post for another day…)
I wonder how the brothers felt. Coming clean could have led to their father disowning them, but keeping quiet meant their father could find out another way. The guilt and uncertainty would certainly have made for a difficult time.
It’s next mentioned (sort of) after their father’s death. The brothers make up a message for Joseph from the father. They want to Joseph to know their father wanted Joseph to forgive the sins of his brothers (which Joseph had already done, but maybe the brothers hadn’t forgiven themselves). Does that mean they told their father and he chose to forgive them too? Or does it mean the guilt was still eating them up and they feared the consequences that their actions deserved but which they hadn’t yet received?
I guess that’s not something we’ll ever know. But it does raise an interesting point. Joseph’s brothers feared consequences and couldn’t accept forgiveness. What if they had come clean and brought it all out into the open? What if they didn’t have any secrets to hide? They wouldn’t have had as much to fear, and maybe they would have found it easier to forgive themselves and accept the grace Joseph had given them.
And for us, replace Joseph with Jesus. Are there things we hide, actions which we are still waiting for the consequences of, but which Jesus has forgiven and instead offered grace? Are there things we still keep in the dark, holding them over ourselves so we live in fear?
There is a solution: come clean. Bring it to God, honestly, and see what he says. Offer the guilt and the shame to God, repent and say sorry, and accept the gift of grace Jesus offers in return.
We weren’t meant to live in fear, so don’t trap yourself by holding onto something that allows fear to grow. Jesus wanted more for you than that, that’s why he died on a cross.
Sometimes in life we have amazing experiences. We conduct a choir on a cruise ship, we cater for an amazing dinner party, we right an article that gets published… OK, those are all me, but I’m sure you have some stand out amazing memories too. And they are most definitely part of our stories.
But actually, those big things actually make up a very small part of our stories. I was talking earlier to someone with kids who was saying it’s not the big things that shape them, but the everyday little things that happen all the time. And when we interact with the people around us, the big things do matter, but the little things matter too, maybe even more! And if we look at our lives, the things that can change the day around can actually be really small things – a smile, a cuppa, a hug.
Jesus did a huge thing – he died on a cross and rose again. And before that he did some other rather large things – raising the dead, feeding thousands, turning water into wine… the list goes on. But he also did little things. He listened to people. He welcomed little children. He walked and talked and lived everyday – he wasn’t that different from us (without the internet or cars). Of course the big things are important, but Jesus influenced people by doing lots of little things in between those big things, things so insignificant that they aren’t written down but which must have happened for him to have such a following.
We can do big things for ourselves and for other people. Grand gestures are amazing. However, they take planning and energy and we can’t sustainably do them every day. What we can do is make sure we give ourselves credit for the little things. All those little things build up and create ripples just like the big things. And it’s the little things that build relationships.
Someone once said to me, “Do the little things like they are big and God will do the big things like they are little.”
The little things we do are important – don’t underestimate them.
As we go through each day, things we see, do or say leave an impact. Sometimes that impact lasts seconds, sometimes it lasts years. Sometimes, memories come back time and again, some with good feelings and some with bad.
Internally, it’s almost like we have another voice commentating as we go. It’s the sort of voice that could be God speaking to us through words, emotions or pictures. But how often is that voice not encouraging?
I don’t know about you, but sometimes that voice can be a voice of shame or blame, a voice of anger or disappointment. And it’s persistent. It can come back when you least expect it, when you are at a low point, or when something triggers a memory and the voice niggles for weeks after. Maybe that’s just my experience, but after some conversations, I suspect not.
The thing is, that voice of blame or shame, of anger or disappointment or any other berating voice that drags you down is not God. While God doesn’t always approve of choices or actions, he does not belittle us or tear us down. It’s clear in the bible God isn’t always gentle, but God is always motivated by love. Someone who loves you doesn’t constantly point out your mistakes or wounds, at least not in a way that is designed to tear you down and keep you down, not in a way that can lead to self-hatred or giving up.
While we are not perfect and do make mistakes, God sees them all and never gives up on us. God sees who we are, who we can be and encourages/nudges/pushes/drags us to be better, to heal, to move forward and to grow.
So the next time there is an internal commentary, pause for a second and think. Is it trying to build you up or tear you down? If it’s the latter, try and ignore it. Instead, ask God what he thinks. God will always speak from a place of love, His is the voice you should listen to.
It’s been a long day. A long, cold day. The place I work is windy at the best of times. At the moment, that wind has a cold bite to it. And today, my work included sitting outside for an hour talking to visitors. OK, I was sitting in a tent, but it still wasn’t exactly warm.
Now, I’m not a big fan of being cold. I’d rather be too hot than too cold. But it was worth it today to talk to the visitors who had come up. We had a bit of a joke about how cold it was and one told me I should have brought a hot water bottle. ‘Tis a good idea I shall remember for the next time my work day includes sitting in the cold!
It triggered a memory for me, something I may have written about before. Back when I was a wavering Christian, someone who had grown up going to church but didn’t necessarily have a faith, I was going through a tough time with my job and my living situation. It wasn’t great, and I used to escape to my church. I’d get the key and spend some time in the building with the door locked just as a safe place to sit. One evening it was quite cold and quite late. As I said, I didn’t have much of a faith at the point, but there I was sitting in a church. I’d heard about God all my life, I knew what others said he was. But that wasn’t enough for me.
So in this cold church in the dark, I prayed. I said, “God, if you are real, if you are who they say you are, I need you now. I could really use some help.” I rambled on for a bit longer and then I realised I wasn’t cold anymore. No, I hadn’t got hypothermia. I felt warm from the inside out, a heat that spread from my heart. I guess, not unlike a water bottle on the inside!
It was that moment that I started to believe. The warmth was comforting. It was a feeling of love and belonging and reassurance. I don’t know what I expected when I prayed that prayer, I think part of me didn’t expect anything. But God showed up for me. I’ve done my best to describe it, but words don’t really do it justice. It’s a feeling I can still remember nearly 10 years later.
Sometimes we need to stop. We need to remember. God has revealed himself to us at some point, probably multiple times. Go back to that point and remember who God is, how he showed up for you. When Christians first come to faith, especially if they are an adult, they are full of energy and determination. As time goes by, they can become complacent or just worn down. Remember who God is to renew you passion and restore your soul. What story would you tell to share God with someone? What story do you tell yourself when the voice of doubt comes calling? What memory do you draw on when the going gets tough?
Go back to basics when faith was simpler. Go back to God himself.
The Reason for my Hope Blog 