Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

“Fine, Let Them Judge Me”: The Peace of Boundaries

Several years ago now, I was in a Bible study which had some very assertive people who were often unwell. And so there were endless rotas: to take meals around, clean their houses, do their ironing, or give them lifts.

Now, I was over-burdened myself, but I didn’t want the leader to judge me as a pretend Christian, or a talking head Christian, a chattering class Christian, a “knows the word but doesn’t do it” Christian, or “a puffed up with knowledge” Christian–oh you know the cruel categories we come up with to judge those whose different gifting threatens us.

And so I signed up for rota upon rota. The leader, who had a lowly job in real life, got a real charge and real energy from dominating this church group, mainly well-paid professionals, as if she were our line manager, and we her unpaid employees; these nagging rotas came around even when the group was not in session.

But for all my signing up, the leader did not really like me and I did not really like her, oh the irony!

* * *

And then—last straw– the leader asked one of the unwell Taker ladies, “What more can we do to help you?” And the lady said, “My children would like fresh-baked caked when they come home from school.” And a fresh baked cake rota was passed around. I jest not!

I thought, “This is ridiculous. I have never baked a cake in my life, and I am not driving across town—past exquisite bakeries– bearing sugar and white flour which anyway I’ve banished from my own life.

That’s it. I am going to do the work God has given me to do.

And if the work God has given me to do is to write, then I am going to write, not wake early to chauffeur the woman with mild ME who drives herself to work 4 days a week but is too tired to drive to Bible study. Perhaps she could host it instead, or call in a taxi. I am not going to take my turn of cleaning the house of the lady, who has been feeling too tired to clean, but eats out all the time; she can get a cleaner. I need to stop visiting that negative lady, who said she was lonely and wanted visitors, but depresses me and tears me down. And I am no longer going to drive across town with meals; the supermarkets deliver better meals than I could cook.”

I thought of Rabbi Friedman’s Parable of the Bridge. Whenever you try to fulfull your destiny, they will be people who will insist they are going to drown unless you hold the rope. You can help them up, but you cannot indefinitely hold the rope.

In this case, none of the people who wanted us to provide cleaning, cooking, ironing, chauffeuring and home-baked cakes would have drowned if I did not provide these services.

All this may be the work God has given the leader to do; it was not the work God has given me to do.

If the leader judges me for not taking my turn on her rotas, she judges me.

Fine. Let her judge me.

So she kept asking me to host fund-raisers, to take my turn providing domestic services (equivalent to a part-time job if I’d agreed to all) and I kept saying No. With a bully as with a toddler and or a puppy, one has to be consistent. No, no, no.

And I was happy with my decision, and I did not sign up to her rotas, and I got even happier.

And I incredibly began to get on far better with the leader, which I did not when I was feeling bullied by her demands, and was simmering with resentment , and she, on her part, felt the uncertainty and restlessness of the bully who scents blood, has been successful in some thrusts, and wonders how far she could go in manipulating people to do things both she and they knew they did not want to do.

I now had boundaries. She knew I wasn’t going to crumble, and that brought some peace to our relationship. Ah, boundaries, they are good for both parties.

If you are doing things which are not the work God has given you to do out of fear of judgement, or to curry favour, just stop. You will not curry favour. You will just place the mark of a easy mark on your forehead. You will just be used and abused. You will just get angrier.

Figure out the work God has given you to do, and do just that and do no more out of fear of judgement.

Fine. Let them judge me.

How liberating that was. The peace of that: To train myself not fear men’s judgements, but only to care for the judgement of the Lord, the righteous judge.

Will We Let Anything Separate God from Our Love?

By Anita Mathias

In Romans, Paul says that nothing neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No matter what we do, no matter what happens to us, he continues loving us. The love of God always shines on us. The pleasure of prayer remains open to us, and the power of prayer to change us (if not our circumstances).

Can we say the same? That nothing He does will stop us loving him?

That no matter what he sends us, no matter what happens, we will still love him, unconditionally?

Lord, I want to be so in you, so engrafted in you, so hidden in you, that not loving you is inconceivable, for, you and I, we’re one. I am in you, inside your heart, part of you, and you are in me, in my heart, part of me.

In Which We Do not Hear the Cheers of our Invisible Audience

By Anita Mathias

Image by Lize Rixt via stock.xchng

When Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was first performed at the Theater am Karntnertor in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven conducting for tempo, had his back turned to the audience.

There was a standing ovation, the audience tossed their hats into the air; the applause was thunderous, and the aging exhausted composer knew nothing of it.

When the contralto, Caroline Unger, gently turned him around, he saw the ecstatic audience, on their feet, applauding.

* * *

Mr Holland’s Opus tells the story of an American aspiring composer, who marries too young (an accidental pregnancy), and then teaches music at high school for 31 years, all the while longing to complete his opus, his Great American Symphony.

At his forced retirement after music department budget cuts, the students play the glorious symphony on which he had laboured for all those decades. And as he stands, entranced at the music he had never yet heard, and overwhelmed with emotion, they tell him that they, in fact, are his Opus. The lives he poured love and music into were his Opus.

* * *

A writer sows into her little patch of earth, and she does not know who, or how many, her words touch, or how.

We sow, we sow, in our little patch of earth, and we hope our words do some good in the world, touch and change other lives, even a little.

We send our words out into the world, to our invisible audience.

And it’s more than an earthly one.

It is, perhaps, at the end of the performance, at the end of our earthly lives, that God will turn us around and show us how the seeds we have planted have bloomed.

* * *

Always the invisible audience.

The other day, a member of our family got upset with another one, who, though upset too, remained silent, until the angst burned out.

And I said gently, “You thought your self-restraint passed unnoticed. But I am sure Someone was very proud of you, and said to the closest bystander, “Do you see my servant? Did you note the overwhelming temptation to yell back and sin? Did you note the self-restraint?”

* * *

While we live our lives, intensely absorbed in the tempo, we sometimes miss the music our work creates, the reverberations through other people’s lives.

However, when we turn around and see with eternal eyes, we will see our invisible audience, Christ Jesus himself; and the angels among whom there is joy when we repent; joy when we win the little victories no one else notices; joy at what Wordsworth called, “the best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless, unremembered deeds of kindness and of love.”

Thank you Kelly Belmonte at , All Nine Muses for hosting me.

When the Bible Makes You Want to Run Away… A Guest Post by Heather Caliri

By Anita Mathias

(credit Chris Zielecki)

This was going to be a pretty post about God singing back to us.

Zephaniah 3:17 says:

The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I love this image of God singing back to us, of the music of the universe originating in the one who is mighty. I love the idea of God standing over us like a mother singing lullabies. I love the closeness, the power and music in this verse.

The only problem is the book that surrounds it.

It’s horrifying.

I don’t like reading about entrails being poured out, or people groping like the blind because they have sinned. I do not like hearing about the Philistines being wiped out completely.

I don’t usually like reading the prophets unedited, because I do not understand them.

I have been afraid of the Bible many times when I read it. Sometimes I read it and its words do not speak to me, or the words they do speak are dark and bloody, like something out of a movie I wouldn’t watch for fear of bad dreams. There is darkness and death in the Bible, and I want to ignore it. There is ugliness and pain and condemnation and I want to run away.

I have been trying, lately, to not run away. I have been trying to take baby steps towards being honest about passages that grieve me. I am trying to trust God with His word.

So, I bring myself back, trembling, to Zephaniah. There the Lord is, singing, and there is the death and destruction alongside him. I wonder: how do these belong together? How are entrails and the quiet love of the Lord not just in the same Bible, but in the same book?

And here’s what I see when I read more carefully, when I look through some commentaries and read a few different translations:

I see the power structures of the ancient Near East exposed and condemned.

The foreign powers: the kings that mock the Israelites and their God, who oppress and exile the people.

But also the powers in Israel: the wealthy, the indifferent, the corrupt.

Zephaniah speaks words of some comfort to the humble in the middle of the book:

Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
you who do what he commands.
Seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you will be sheltered
on the day of the Lord’s anger. (2:3)

It is something, especially given the verses that attracted me to Zephaniah in the first place. No, I don’t like that word “perhaps,” but it is something.

I think about those causing pain in our world and I can understand, with an ounce of me, the desire for compensatory suffering.

I sit with that ounce for a moment. Here’s what comes to me.

Compensatory suffering: I see Jesus on the road to Calvary. I see him stumbling as though blind. I see them piercing his side, and the water from his entrails running out.

Did the conflagration come? No, God took it upon himself. Somehow, he swallowed whole that awful prophecy and bore its destruction for us.

The truth is, these words, the awful darkness in the Bible is too much for me, but it is often because I hear it echoed each day in the destructiveness of this world. I do not want it to exist, but it does. I do not want redemption to be needful, but it is.

I would like the darkness to be less obvious in the Bible, because it makes me deeply uncomfortable. But maybe uncomfortable isn’t a terrible reaction. No, I’m learning to sit in my discomfort and my honesty and wait for the song to come.

* * *

Heather Caliri

Heather Caliri is a writer and mom from San Diego. Two years ago, she started saying little yeses to faith, art, and life. The results shocked her. Get her free e-book, Dancing Back to Jesus: Post-perfectionist faith in five easy verbs, on her blog, A Little Yes.

In Which All Our Faith is Patchy, But Even That is Potent

By Anita Mathias

My eighteen-year old daughter, Zoe, is at the School of Ministry at Catch the Fire, Toronto.

She and the other School of Ministry students ministered at the same Catch the Fire conference as John Arnott and Heidi Baker. They were told to pray boldly, that everyone gets to play, that everyone was equal before God.

However, she said, when John Arnott, a stocky matter-of-fact Canadian, stands before someone, hold out his hand, and declares, “Fire,” they fall down, “slain in the spirit.” However, when the 18-year olds hold out their hands and say “Fire,”—well, it’s not the same!

I laughed.

It is a problem in the spiritual life, isn’t it?

* * *

Why are some people’s prayers answered, and not others? Why are we healed when some pray, but not when others pray? Why do you know the prayer will be answered when you hear by a certain timbre in a woman’s voice that she has entered the throne room –but when another prays, you think, “Aw, sound nice”?

The pray-ers life has something to do with it. “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” 1 Peter 3:12. Wilfully persisting in sin creates a massive barrier between us and God.

But it also comes down to faith. Arnott has no doubt the Holy Spirit will come on request. He is sure the Fire wants to dwell within us, and he prays fervently, and it comes. Bill Johnson has no doubt God will heal, and so he does when Bill prays.

Last year, I heard Isabel Allum riff on all the lost objects which miraculously turned up as she prayed for them—contact lenses, medicine, satnavs, diamond earrings. She has no doubt they will be found, and God arranges this.

I am reading Mark Batterson’s The Circle Maker. Mark believes that God will give him horrendously expensive properties in Washington D.C. (where land goes for $14 million an acre) and God does–through a combination of donations, sheer chutzpah, persistence, and the wild success of Mark’s books, a significant portion of which he donates to the Church.

Heidi Baker tells stories of the dead being raised, of an orphanage gift of used stuffed dogs (feared in Africa) being changed to beads at her prayer, of the dead being raised to life, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing. She knows God, she has no doubt that God will step down to help us on request, and so he does.

* * *

The way to form a new habit is to take a goal (lose a pound a week, wake a hour earlier, read a book a week, write a thousand words a day) and divide it to its smallest measurable increment (250 words a day, wake 5 minutes early, read 5 pages a day, lose half a pound a week) and go from there.

In prayer, however, the opposite is true. Pray as big as you dare believe. Write down your dreams. If you desire to see what you’ve written doubled (and you may not!!), then pray that. Daily or weekly, pray through your lists of prayer-dreams. And take steps of faith in accordance with them.

Praying to lose weight? Eat more veggies. Praying to finish your book? Write first thing in the morning. Praying to become organized? Get rid of one thing a day. Praying to wake early? Well…do so.

* * *

We tend to see God’s hand in the areas in which we have the greatest faith that surely he will act. I have seen his miracles and deliverances in my finances most often, because, most of the time, I have an expectant faith that he will help me.

I have begun to pray with faith in creative areas, for God to give me books and for the first time in my life, am experiencing an anointing in writing. You know, when “the right words in the right order” come quickly and easily, as if from a power beyond myself.

After reading The Circle Maker, I have created prayer lists–a page for each of the 30+ areas or people I am praying for–and am praying through every dream, worry or ambition in my life. I am seeing things shift, expand, change at an accelerated rate. Small changes, but so many changes, coincidences and God-incidences, in so many areas, that I can hardly believe it! My faith is growing.

According to your faith be it done to you. Perhaps that’s why we see answers and miracles in one area in which we can see the kind face of Jesus as we pray, and know he will answer our prayers, and, yet remain stuck in another, in which we have less faith that he will help us.

Prayer is truly the greatest force in the world. I have long believed it intellectually. I am now gradually believing it with all my heart.

From “Ambition OR Christ” to “Ambition AND Christ” to “Ambition IN Christ”

By Anita Mathias

Do nothing out of selfish ambition. (Phil 2:3).

Many achievers have been wired to achieve from their cradles, a mixture of genetically mediated temperament and family culture.

And then we become Christians, and we give up our old identity.

We are now hidden in Christ.

And what becomes of our old ambition?

Well, I can tell you what happened to mine. It has graduated through three phases, the conjunctions changing at each phrase.

* * *

Ambition OR Christ

I committed my life to Christ at 17. I finished school early, having skipped grades, and then worked with Mother Teresa for two years.

When I went to University, to read English at Somerville College, Oxford University, I quickly sensed the contradiction between the openness with one’s time which Christ required (I read “give to everyone who asks of you,” almost literally!) and complete dedication to writing.

Incredibly, I chose writing, and for the next few years—all through a graduate degree in Creative Writing—I focused on reading and writing poetry. To quote Willa Cather, I served “the God of Art who demands human sacrifices.”

It was perceived failure in writing poetry which led me to recommit my life to Christ six years later, and, this time, it stuck.

Ambition AND Christ

In On Writing, Stephen King says he had considered his life a support system for his art. However, when crippled by excruciating pain after a freak road accident, he realized that his art was, in fact, a support system for his life. It made his life bearable, and added comfort and joy to it.

For years, even as a Christian, my heart was really in my writing, sad with unfulfilled ambition for it. I wanted my Christian disciplines to help me get my act together so I could write more. Faith as a support system for art.

Well, God was having none of that.

Francis Thomson writes in “The Hound of Heaven,”

Ah! is Thy love indeed

A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,

Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

Once Christ had his eyes on me, he was not going to share me, so to say. And so, my ambition was blocked, and came to nothing, forcing me to burrow into Christ for answers and comfort and joy.

I am glad. Fulfilled ambition without the comfort of Christ can be hard and barren. The Indian mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, describes it: “Away from the sight of thy face, my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.”

Ambition IN Christ

I am still ambitious; of course, I am. I want to learn to write beautifully, and I want my words to read by many.

But most days, I hold my ambition lightly, in perfect peace.

I am in Christ, hidden in Christ. I am working from “inside” Christ, listening closely to him for ideas, drawing on his strength, eager to write beautiful things which will be a blessing to many.

I am writing in Christ as a branch in the vine, as his ideas, sap and life flow into me, and through me.

I am ambitious to write because I must, as a bird must sing, but it is a surrendered ambition. I am happy if God brings me many readers.

But if he does not, I will still write with joy. As a bird sings its high clear notes, as fish swim through the seas of this world because they must, even so must I write, recreating life’s beauty in words.

This orginally appeared at Penelope Swithinbank’s blog

Writing in the Cold by Ted Solotaroff, a Brilliant Essay on the Psychology of Writing

By Anita Mathias

“Writing in the Cold,” by Ted Solotaroff from The Pushcart Prize is absolutely the very best and most inspiring essay for late bloomer writers. It’s also the most insightful on the emotional and psychological struggles that are part of becoming a writer.

I met Ted at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in 1993, and he read my early work, and was most encouraging—which is another reason I love this essay!

Here’s a link to it.

10 Reflections after Listening to Heidi Baker

By Anita Mathias

Heidi Baker (credit)

Heidi Baker is, I believe, the closest to the heart of Jesus of any living Christian. Christianity Today wrote a rapturous cover story on her.

I heard her in Birmingham, and here are my notes, reflections and resolutions.

1) “Always, always, always, say YES.”

Heidi: “I got so yielded that I didn’t have much more to say than “Yes, yes, yes.

“The world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him.’ Dwight Moody famously said.

How do we get fully surrendered? We just start, one tiny step at a time. And because it is just one step at a time, one minute at a time, it is an easy yoke. The hardest part is setting your feet in the right direction!

2) After reading about “the multiplication anointing” in Mark Batterson’s “Circle Maker,” I have been praying for it on my writing, business, and other endeavours.

Well, Heidi is in the business of multiplication anointings, and has to be, since she’s committed to feed 12,000 orphans.

She explains it: You surrender your lunch, your everything to God, and he uses it feed a great crowd “as much as they wanted.”

In the surrender, in living in the river, comes the power to have your resources of time, talent, energy, and money multiplied.

Heidi says she’s become cleverer. “God took my mind and enlarged it. I can do things now which I could never have imagined. I have the mind of Christ.” SQ, our spiritual intelligence quotient, she said, unlike IQ, grows with time.

3) “It all depends on how you look at things,” a phrase she repeated like a jazz motif. She had many tales of shipwrecks, and beatings and stonings, of when things went disastrously, dangerously, heart-breakingly wrong, but once she decided to praise God, and look at the bright side of things, they worked out. Not as she wanted them to, or prayed they would, but worked out.

She has had numerous opportunities to become a grouchy old missionary, but decided to choose joy, decided to choose to be happy.

4) “It doesn’t matter if people don’t like you, if God likes you!”

I find the thought so liberating. Not everyone will like me, and I am not to bother about that, as long as God likes me!

“Stick to your message. Four years down the line those people who opposed you will hug you!”

Another theme she riffed on, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition.” However, as you behave like children of God without fault,” you will “shine among them like stars in the sky” (Phil 2:8).

5) “When God shows up, people start showing up.”

Heidi: “When God shows up, everything shifts, expands and grows.”

As a blogger, it is my goal to grow my blog primarily by going deeper into Christ, and so it is good to know that “when God shows up, people start showing up.”

6) Growth Happens Outside the Comfort Zone

Heidi: “I don’t mind being stretched. I believe stretching is good.”

(I too am learning to force myself out of the comfort zone, into the growth zone.)

7) Love Looks like Something

Heidi spoke of Helena whose grandmother asked her brothers to stone her to death after her leg was amputated after a house fire; she was now useless. Helena escaped, and selling her body to keep alive, starting at the age of ten.

After Heidi took her in, and kept saying “love looks like something,” Helena decided to go back and tell them about the love of Jesus. Heidi said, “Never! That is the most dysfunctional family I know of.”

Helena said, “But you said, “Love looks like something.”

What a beautifully simple guide to relationships with our family and friends: “Love looks like something.” It is practical; you can see it.

8) Physical Fitness The work she does in Mozambique would be physically impossible if she were not supremely physically fit. She spoke of running; swimming; snorkeling; lifting weights in her bedroom.

I decided to privilege my physical life (strength and fitness) below my spiritual life, but above my intellectual life. I will try to fit in some walking and stretching, even if I write less. But ironically, of course, I will not write less if I make time to exercise; I will write more. As Jonathan Fields says, “if we make the time to exercise, it makes us so much more productive and leads to such improved creativity, cognitive function, and mood that the time we need for doing it will open up and then some–making us so much happier and better at the art of creation, to boot.”

9) She is learning to appreciate the diversity of all the streams in the body of Christ, both the super-campy and the chosen-frozen dying on their feet.

The body of Christ will have the same diversity as creation, and we should learn to enjoy each of its streams.

10) “We can have as much of God as we want to have if we continually say, “Yes, yes, yes”

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