Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

When your Blog is not on a Blogroll

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The Lamb’s Book of Life (Image credit)

You know that awkward moment, when you check a blogroll, kind of hoping you’ll be on it, and well…you’re not?

And your heart sinks.

And you say….

* * *

Well, 30 years ago–forget that, 3 years ago, if I were blogging then–I would have heard the word of torment, the word of the accuser of the brethren, the word of demand: MORE.

Blog more, comment more, network more. Get your name out there more.

Demon whispers.

I hear them, I hear them, and as Odysseus poured wax into the ears of his sailors so they’d be proof against the song of the sirens

I pour honey into my ears,

The honey of truth.

* * *

For this is what the Lover of Anita says.

“Who gave human beings their mouths? Is it not I, the LORD? 12 Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” Exodus 4:11-12

And I still say More, but it is no longer a fist-clenched anxious more.

It’s a hands-open, humble one.

* * *

Help me to follow you more closely, Lord. May my blog develop in tandem with my spiritual life.

More of your spirit, Lord, more of you. Help me believe more deeply for you said:

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”(John 7:38).

Ah, give me that, Lord. Streams of living water flowing through my blog, flowing to find readers to bless. And if my blog blesses people, well, I guess I don’t deeply care about blog-rolls.

Ah, let me swim, oh Lord, in the waters from your sanctuary. For it is written of the river which flows from your sanctuary: Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” (Ezekiel 47: 12).

To grow in the waters of Spirit which flow from your sanctuary, and to bear fruit each month, fruit for food and leaves for healing—fruit from the Spirit!! And when you are swimming in the waters which flow from the sanctuary, when the tree of your life grows in it, and bears fruit every month—well then, blogrolls are secondary.

* * *

And I bring you again the two loaves and five fish of my talent. And I see you bless it. And, ouch, I see you break it.

And it doesn’t resemble the way I hoped to write, the way I planned to write, the way I was taught to write, the way I used to write.

And you—YOU distribute the loaves of words which have come from brokenness and quietness, words you have whispered to me in my distress—and seeing them read, I am satisfied.

I smile if I am on a blogroll,

And am content if I am not,

Because hearing, overhearing and recording your whispers, Lord,

That is the greatest work you have ever given me!!

 

 

 

 

Forgiveness and Forgetfulness, a guest post by Tanya Marlow

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Forget-me-not
by bill_canada
Last night I told my husband (slightly sheepishly) that I had bought some MORE children’s books.  
I like to buy children’s books and my boy likes to read them. It is not just a purchase, it is an Investment. So I am reasonably sure that although we didn’t discuss this purchase together beforehand (as we are accustomed to doing) that Jon won’t mind. 
“Do you mind?” I asked.
“Well, no – except that – do you remember the discussion we had where I asked you to stop buying books and you agreed?”
My face fell. I had forgotten that conversation.

He was right. We had agreed not to buy any more books just at the moment. After the last belletristic bundle (Dr Seuss! How can you say no to Dr Seuss?) I had promised to restrain my trigger-happy internet-purchasing finger. I had promised – and then I had forgotten. 

He smiled. (I think, deep down, he agrees that they are an Investment).

We are a forgetful people.

*********


The Israelites hated their slavery in Egypt, but they had forgotten that by the time they reached the desert. “At least in Egypt we had meat!” they complained.  Already they had devalued their freedom.

Peter denied Jesus three times, and then wept when the cockerel crowed. He had forgotten the loyalty he had sworn just hours before.

In the time of the Judges they forgot about the Lord, and served other Gods.  God executed judgement; they remembered. Then they forgot that they had forgotten, and did it all again.

We are a forgetful people. 


******** 

Every time I write in my spiritual journal I find I am writing the same things again and again. Why have I not learnt this lesson?  Why do I always fall into the same sin, the same patterns? 
I wonder if I am the only one who always seems to return to the same place with God, repenting of  those same sins I was battling a year before.

We are a forgetful people.

 ******** 
I watch my boy playing in the kitchen.  He opens the cupboard, and I am poised, rebuke at the ready.  He looks at the cupboard, looks at me; his eyes glinting with defiance and hope.  I return his gaze with steadfastness and warning. Then he reaches a hand in –
“No, darling. You’re not allowed to touch.”

He closes the door and plays elsewhere.  Two minutes later he returns; opens the cupboard, reaches inside.
“No darling – what did Mummy say?”

I don’t get too cross. We are a forgetful people.  

******** 
So much of my sin is tied up in forgetting; forgetting who God is, what He has done for me, who I am before Him. I forget His nature, His goodness, His commands. I forget my vows, my resolutions, my debt of gratitude.  I forget the break-through revelation I had last month, the one that would make all the difference to my spiritual discipline and restore my enthusiasm and fervour. I forget the sermon that I heard this morning. 
I am grateful for the repetition of the Bible.  I need to hear the consistent cadence of fall, grace, atonement, redemption that recurs throughout the symphony of His revelation, reiterating time and again the promises of a generous God.   
I am glad that I have a God who remembers.  I am glad that I have a God who reminds me. 
But I am also glad, that for some things, I have a God who forgets:

“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more” (Jer 31:34)

For those days when I am more aware than usual of my wickedness, my fallenness, my foolishness, it is a relief to know that God is not sitting keeping score of my failures.  He has promised to forgive them and wipe them out.  He has forgotten them.

We are a forgetful people. We need a forgetful God. 

Over to you: 
 – What are the ways that you see sin and forgetfulness intertwined in your life? 
 – What things help you to remember God’s character?
*******


Tanya Marlow

Tanya Marlow is passionate about teaching the Bible, answering tricky questions of faith and training others to do this.  In the past she has done this in student and church ministry and as Associate Director of the Peninsula Gospel Partnership (PGP) Bible training course. Right now she does it by reading Bible stories to her toddler, as she learns what it means to be a stay-at-home mum who is also housebound with severe M.E. Her blog is called Thorns and Gold: on the Bible, illness, emotions, life. 

From Fatness to Fitness: Doug Black shares his inspiring story (Guest Post)

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It finally hit me one night after the youth ministry we were in charge of. I was about to put my fist through the wall.
You see, we were having a couple major changes in our lives. My beautiful wife and I were expecting our first child. The company we worked at was about to be sold to the biggest hospital in the area, bringing us from a small company of 100 to 7000. We were struggling with figuring out if we could go to one income and make life work. The church we were leading at was struggling, and I had just heard about a student who was leaving home to move in with her boyfriend who she was newly impregnated by.
It was either me or the wall. Gladly, I decided on me.
You see, I have been avoiding getting fit for a long time. I had tried running in college a little bit, but was bored to death. Rather than work out when I got married, I decided to eat emotionally. It was my one of my only outlets in full-time ministry, as well as when I went bivocational (working full-time and doing ministry “part-time”). I have given up exercise in favor of video games and work.
In fact, I had never been health conscious. My family never worked out, or pushed me toward sports. I did ten push-ups as a punishment in 5th grade, but couldn’t do one today. I became a “Fast Food-ie”, and could tell anyone the location of the nearest fast food chain of their choice (on multiple occasions, we drove 2 hours to a White Castle).
But it was time for me to die. At least, a big, tubby part of me.
I had to change. For my own mental health. For my family. For my soon-to-be-born baby. For my ministry. To glorify God with my body. And this Wednesday night was the straw that broke the camels back.
I got up the next morning, weighed in at 255 lbs, and ran two miles. Did I say ran? What I meant was crawled, huffing and puffing, and dying.
Then, my affluent landlord put out two weight benches for the trash. I said, “Thanks for the heads-up God”. I quickly snatched them off the street, and guessed at how to rebuild them from scratch. I then researched like crazy on every muscle group and lifting exercise to work them.
Slowly but surely, the muscle started showing, the fat started going. Three years down. 75 pounds gone. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m honoring God with my body. I decided to eat more vegetables, yogurt, healthy food options.Rather than taking anger out on others, I take it out on my heavy bag. I could do a push-up, and even more than one! I started pull-ups, and sit-ups, and strange combinations of them all. I can enjoy running with my daughter (though, for a 3 year old, she’s surprisingly faster than me).
I feel like I took my life back.
So, there have been some crazy lessons I had to learn on the way:
1) Exercise Is Terrible (At First): The first couple weeks of exercise was awful. My running was belabored at best. My push-ups were on my knees. My weightlifting was light. BUT, it gets better…if you keep going. You may even *gasp* enjoy it someday.
2) Find Something You Like To Do: Part of the reason I never wanted to exercise was that I hated everything I did. I have a pretty bad case of ADD on top of it, so I get bored very easily. So, whenever I get bored, I change up the routine. I learned quick that the more fun you are having, the further you go. So find a partner. Take up a sport. Do Zumba. MMA.
3) Set Fun Goals: Do an adventure race. Set a rep-number goal. Win a championship. Aim for the most fun thing imaginable, and enjoy as many steps as you can along the way. My current goal is to enter the 2013 Crossfit games; let the training begin!

 Doug Black is a Christ follower, family man, simple church planter, mental health case management supervisor, and CrossFit enthusiast. Follow him on Twitter @dougblackjr

Turning a grey plot into wild spirals of colour

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When the stream of our lives
Seems to vanish into desert sands,
and we wonder if we’ve lost our way,

When between our talent and output,
Between our aspiration and achievement.
Falls the shadow

When we have planted much and finished little
And we wonder if we’ve bequeathed our children
A durable compass for this whirling world.

There is still hope. A lever
Which can reverse things
And revise the plot:

Prayer which can take the story of a life
Which seems hopelessly entangled, contorted
Unpromising and bleak

Oh, and just reverse the whole thing!!
Making it burst into colour,
Twists and turns, whirls and spirals

When we call out to the Lord in our despair
He comes,
Helping us see ourselves

Scouring our spirits with repentance
Filling them with his Spirit
And newness.

New ideas, new vision, new courage,
New hope. Fresh grace, fresh strength,
Fresh fire.
* * *

And again and again, when my life
Seemed stymied, and my dreams
Had crashed, and sadness surrounded me,

When I seemed unable to do the simplest things,
Run an orderly house,
Balance my budget

Or—as now–figure out how to shed weight
And be fitter and stronger
And I cried out to you in my despair,

You came, you came,
Rocking me with tenderness
Bestowing new ideas, new grace!
                          * * *

Oh Lord, we see so little of reality:
We see the caterpillar,
Not the dazzling peacock butterfly,

The acorn, not the oak.
But the puny, drab apple seed
Is never the end of the story.

Help me remember, Lord,
That you take seeds, or 5 loaves and 2 fish
And transform, multiply.

So I give you my puzzlement,
My lack of discipline,
My sadness and frustration with it

Take it, Lord, breathe on it,
Transform it, bring fruitfulness
And beauty from this little seed!!





The Lowest Bar there ever was

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Image Credit

“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God’s friend” James 2.23. 

Cool!

Isn’t that the lowest bar there ever was?

All one needs to do to be the friend

of Him who dwells in high places

is believe what He says–

really believe so that trusting him

frees us from all fear.

 

And it is one of life’s cooler experiences

when your thoughts naturally turn towards Him,

through the day, and in wakeful nights,

until you realize that, incredibly, mysteriously,

God is your friend.

 

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot

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 Listen to Eliot read, or rather chant or intone Ash Wednesday here.

I append a few passages from the long (still copyrighted) poem.

The new years walk restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem

Because I do not hope
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
 
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

O my people.

VI

 Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
 


Memories of Half-term: Waterfowl and beaches near the New Forest

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 Well, we’re well and truly back from a restful, creative, contemplative break by the sea. I love the sea, and try to get there as often as I can. It renews me, and fills me with creative thoughts, and perspective. And here are a few more photographs from the break (the last, I assure you:-)

Swans on Sturt pond.

Swan using its wings as a sail. 
A cygnet

Swans feeding?

Sandpiper

I’m guessing this is a little egret.  (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)

It was a truly gorgeous day on the beach, which was almost deserted.

This looks like a young family trying to escape over the desert.    But in fact, they are just returning from Hurst castle on the track along the top of the spit.

The view out to sea

Can 140 characters make anything happen?

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 Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote despairingly. And can tweets, 140 curt characters, make anything happen?

Yes, they can.
* * *
The precious jewels I hold in my heart, which change the way I see and think and live, are all tweetable.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Thoreau, Walden (134 characters).
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (135 characters).
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. Blaise Pascal sums up his deepest spiritual experience (31 characters).
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Gandhi, (55 characters).
Or Ann Voskamp writing of Hagar, dying of thirst within a bowshot of a well, “There is always a well. All is well.” (38 characters).
Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. C.S. Lewis (66 characters)
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” C. S. Lewis. 132 characters
 * * *
And the ideas of the said King which mean the most to me, and are most life-changing are eminently tweetable.
Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 63 characters.
He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will find it. 114 characters.
Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be measured to you. Edited, 125 characters.
Yet to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. 96 characters.
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 125 characters.
Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Trust in the Father, trust also in me. 101 characters.
 * * *
Once we have done the hard work of thinking, our brain instinctively sums it up in a tweet, I believe. Mottoes, goals, eureka moments, epiphanies: we unconsciously summarize these in epigrams. Short and sweet. Less is more. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Good politicians instinctively realize that “tweets,” aphorisms are the most effective and best-remembered part of speeches.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Churchill, 61 characters. (I guess that’s what George Osborne’s offering us!)
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. (140 characters) Churchill, 3rd June, 1940.
And across the pond:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 110 characters Abraham Lincoln, Gettyburg Address
Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. JF Kennedy, Inaugural Addess, 82 characters
Read my lips: no new taxes.  George Bush, 24 characters
Yes, we did. Preisdent Obama, 10 characters
·       * *
·        
Well, do tweets make a difference? It depends on who you follow. But, I am guessing that a steady drip of tweets of wisdom, encouragement, and a Godward gaze from @nickygumbel, @johnpiper, @annvoskamp, @rickwarren, @maxlucado (to name some prominent tweeters) surely makes a difference to their readers. Or those of @richardrohrofm, whose most recent tweet is
When younger, I praised God as a worthy exercise and song. Now there is a kind of praising that instead–sings me and sings through me.
All these are largely positive tweeters. I wouldn’t follow a largely negative tweeter for long: I can generate quite enough negativity for myself, thank you, and scan tweets for the thought-provoking, true, optimistic, God-saturated, blood-rosy vision, which is just as true as the half-empty glass.
                                                                                                          * * *
Our words count. Thinking hard to condense complex thoughts in a couple of sentences is work–and work worthwhile. Tweeting is good practice for writers. It’s training in Orwell’s maxims for good writing
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use a long word where a short one will do. (104 characters) and in Virginia Woolf’s
Write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one means (83 characters).
So be encouraged, tweeters: we can express substantive thoughts, capable of changing the way we (and perhaps our regular readers) see and live and rejoice and trust and love in two or three brief sentences of 140 characters!