So there I am this morning at 6am on a windy hilltop in Ireland with a bunch of other 
Christians waiting for the sun to come up, praying and declaring stuff over the whole of Ireland and a question someone asked me a while ago, connected to some of the atrocities in the world that are committed in Jesus’ name came to me: “How can you believe in God?” and was then followed by a “Don’t even try to tell me” comment. I deleted the email and then tried to forget about it. And was doing good till feeling slightly sleep deprived, hungry and a bit cold it came back into my head.
So I believe in God because I’ve encountered Him. Our first proper meeting was amazing. There was me, a single mum in my early 30’s, still doing a bit of drug, still sleeping around a bit, still drinking enough, smoking, and just a bit unsure of my life, and I turn up at this small house church that was meeting on the council estate (social housing project to my American friends) where I lived and God just met me there. All I can say was that something was said during the talking/sermon bit about God’s love and suddenly I could feel myself being covered in what seemed like a thick oil with glitter in it and knowing that
God loved me totally unconditionally and totally as I was there and then. It wasn’t a text book conversion. It took a long time, a lot of talking with God and Christians, a lot of reading both the Bible and study books, and even now it is still a journey which just involves me going deeper and deeper with God.
I’ve seen money and houses and furniture and stuff just provided where no coincidence can explain it. I’ve seen people healed and lives changed. I have also seen people not healed and die, had my eye sight totally healed but by a surgeon not by some miraculous encounter. Yes I have seen my friends die from cancers, from suicides, from unhealthy lifestyles they cannot leave. Yes I have seen prayers not get answered as I would like. Yet still I pop up to gatherings at the moment and pray.Why?
I’m not sure I know. I know I’m here with this group this week because I believe it’s where God wants me to be. I’m not one of those who brings along things to pray with or even
mighty words but I’m here. In fact just recently a new acquaintance, who I hope will become a friend, asked me what my role was in this group. I said “I just come to make up the numbers” which actually isn’t belittling but sometimes I think that is what we are meant to do. It is about being faithful in the small things.
So how do I know this is where God wants me? Well I suppose it comes full circle – I believe He talks to me. I believe He has said for me to come. I believe He hears are crazy early morning prayers on the side of a mountain and it does change things. This faith. I cannot tell this person why. I just do. I cannot tell her why God allows these things to happen that do, horrendous awful things, or why members of my family and friendship groups had to die. I don’t know. But I do know God is real because I’ve met Him. And really until she is willing to meet Him she won’t be able to believe.
Actually I think that is why I go off to these places to pray – because until people are 
willing to turn and actually meet with God they will not know He exists. Once they have met with Him then they can ask Him all those questions; all the why questions. I believe that when I gather with my friends and pray across the hills as the sun comes up recreating something that happened hundreds of years ago things do get opened in the heavenlies, blind eyes get a chance to see, deaf ears a chance to hear, lives can be changed. S
o I will turn up as often as I believe He is asking me to. Does it strengthen my faith? Sometimes. Sometimes it makes me doubt even more. But you know even when I doubt God exists
then it’s Him I go to to find out.
Ok so yes we are in a new place with a new house and new things all around us. I still don’t know where to find half the stuff I want to buy, get excited when I find the butcher and get me meats I want, etc. So yes to a point it is a fresh start. But will that make things better? And what do we mean by better? Will we have the perfect marriage because we now live in North Wales? Will I get around to doing all those things I’ve always wanted to do? Yes maybe! But there are some truths we have to admit beforehand!
up. I’d get into relationships in the hope that they would take over and help me to be ok. But again I kept turning up in them and doing the same crazy things I always did. Eventually I met with God and realised that He loved me for who I was – crazy, scared, insecure, looking everywhere and blaming every thing else rather than at me. And you know once I got to accept that unconditional love I could then start looking at me and who I really am. I like me now. I’ve stopped running away from me now. I do like the fact that I can move 250+ miles and I come too. Ok there are bits of me I would like to change that do keep coming along. I have to decide whether to accept or change those bits. I think that I have to accept before I change.
armour and change it all, keep people alive. Somehow God works things differently. So I’ve had to take my scars and wounds with me. They didn’t stay behind in the old house, they couldn’t be stripped off and thrown away like the new owners did with all the decorating we had in that old house of ours. The scars are a part of me too. They come along. A change of venue doesn’t make them vanish. That isn’t to say I dwell on them and tell people. It doesn’t mean I look at them and pick at them every day. These are scars that God has been healing but they remain as who I am. Without sounding blasphemous, but like Jesus scars from the cross. They didn’t vanish because we all have to see and remember what He went through but that doesn’t mean He dwells on them. Without my stuff I wouldn’t be me!
am it helps me to be able to weep when others weep and also rejoice when other rejoice. If we are to give a safe, hospitable space to others we do have to remember who we are and where we’ve come from, to accept ourselves and our circumstances, good and bad, and let our lives and what we have to give flow from there. I think too that if we can accept that change of location doesn’t change us then we have so much more to give.
Why do I write? This was a question I was asking myself in the early hours of this morning after sending a text to a friend. Before sending it I did ask myself ‘would I have said this to her face?’ and answered ‘yes’. Then I got to thinking about why I had not said these things to her before and why I had written. After much pondering it came back that I am more confident writing. I know people say that and there have been the hurriedly sent emails full of anger and hate, and I have been guilty of that too, but this, and others that I have sent in similar vein, are because I haven’t had the space within the conversation to say these things.
conversation. Like this morning (this was written Thurs 25th initially – posted later) I met this woman dog walking who stuck up the conversation, not just about the dog but about me and invited me to a dog show. Now I know her name and she knows mine. I liked a couple of the groups we’ve been to since moving here, Bible study groups, because there is a fixed idea on what is going on, and also a common place for people to start.
friendship is strong enough to go through this? To be honest I’m not sure I mind. What I really hope is that when I see her face to face I am able to be as honest with her as I was in what I wrote. Often when I do write emails, texts, letters or cards to people it is to open the conversation so that when I see them face to face we can go from there. Although again I wait for them to initiate. I wonder if there is a personality type for those who need others to initiate? 🙂
Well after the great one line help from Martin Scott – which actually was very appropriate for the actual journey because the main motorway we had to go up was blocked and we had to do a pretty major detour through the middle of Wales, adding 2 hours to our journey, and then also made an error of judgement on a junction adding more to the journey. As always it was a struggle to enjoy the detours 🙂
what if we’d got it all wrong. And that we shouldn’t be moving now, that we should stay put and wait. Oh and even moved on to worrying that I was abandoning my children. Ok they are 22 and 24 but it was 3am!
Anyway I expressed by doubts and fears to Ian as we journeyed up. He was great and said about how it felt right to be doing this but actually even if we are doing totally the wrong thing in the wrong timing that’s ok. We have to work from where we are. And then he teased me to remind me that these were my words that I had said to him before 🙂
We are finding this part of the house move journey trying. Not difficult but trying. We are stuck in this limbo land of not knowing when things will happen and not having any control of how or when things will complete.
the journey?
a ship or pillion on a motorbike, we just go with the way it is going and don’t try to force it any other way. With riding pillion, it works best when we just put our faith and trust in the driver and let him be the one who steers.
of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility.” (
The challenge is “In this in-between place of stillness, can you consciously and with intention, release what came before and prepare to enter fully into what comes next?” So can we? Are we willing and able to release what came before and prepare for what comes next? And what does that mean in practise?
of saying that we wouldn’t be doing this walk for much longer I said goodbye to things; to the sparrows, the sheep, the trees, the styles, etc. I will do that again tomorrow and the next day – consciously say goodbye to things that are very much part of my dog walking landscape. As I drive through our town I will start to say goodbye to things too, things that I’ve been use to, even things that annoy me. The town I live in is a beautiful town but I don’t think we will come back and visit it much after we’ve gone, and if we do it will be as visitors not as residents anyway.
And I will start to prepare for what comes next. I’m already on 2 agencies for working in schools with either learning support or teaching assistant jobs. I have things that I have acquired to go in my new “room-of-my-own”. But also I am going to pray and release the things to come that I do not know of. A friend prayed for us last Sunday and asked of Diane and Ian shaped spaces where we are going and for good neighbours and friends. I am a people person, as recognised with the importance of relationships earlier on in this, and for me people are part of the tapestry of what is to come. Also if we are offering hospitality then we do need people in that equation 🙂
married to each other. This week has not been easy with the uncertainty that has gone on and I can do my bit to support, even if it is just being there a week on Monday to welcome Ian home with a cooked meal and a listening ear.
alcoholic who needs to take one day at a time and say, ‘Today I am not going to have a drink’ similarly trust in God, surrendering to Him, is not worrying about tomorrow or the next day or next week but deciding to say each day, ‘Today I am going to fully trust God in all things’. This state allows us to live in and out of His will for us and therefore instills His Peace in our lives.”
of areas but at times I slip, at times its hard, but actually I can pick myself up and start again each day. I think there can be times when I am especially hard on myself and think that I haven’t been honest or trusting God and really that is just me being accused by the Devil/enemy/inner self. I have had some amazing times when I’ve been trusting God for so much and then there have been times when I have crashed. If I can see myself as continually being resurrected and it not being a once and once only event then I can happily sing “one day at at time sweet Jesus” rather than “let me know the plans in detail”. And there will be days when I crash, like I did on the weekend, and lose sight of if all but then there will be other times when I know where to go.
The last post wasn’t the first time I’ve been honest about where I am with God in my struggles and I don’t expect it will be the last. I am a work in progress and my testimony is built not in how I fall but in how I get up; not in the fact that I can keep going but in who I turn to when I’m crashed in the dirt.
of the replies that came back were empathetic, some encouraging but some just wound me up. I started journalling about it this morning and then took the dog for a long walk. It is beautiful and frosty this morning and the sun had just come up and was making things glisten. A great day for a long walk.
covered empty fields this morning I was able to tell God that I didn’t trust Him and listed the ways that I felt He had let me down. The list was long. It included healings that never happened and the people died, marriages that failed, dreams that never happened and were squashed, people I’ve prayed for who still are happy not in relationship with God and more. But it was not just that I didn’t trust God but also that I didn’t trust people and there are a lot of people involved in a house move that need to be trusted; buyers, sellers, estate agents and solicitors, removal companies, and friends and family. I told God all the people who I felt had let me down; friendships that were no longer close as they were, hurts and times of not being able to be open, church leaders who I felt weren’t there for me, and also the suicides and drownings we experienced. There were 4 people who let me down majorly, I felt.
How do I feel now? I’m still struggling with the waiting and the not having a date but I feel much more peaceful with the struggle. Sometimes, I believe, we need to wrestle with God and with our thoughts and emotions. We need to be honest and open. I now understand why I’m struggling and through that reflection I now have peace with my feelings. This is very much what Mindfulness teaches. It isn’t about pretending that I’m ok, that I trust God, but accepting that I’m struggling. I think that this is what God really wants from all of us, not that we are sorted but that we accept how we are doing at this moment in time.
A friend of mine writes extensively about honouring and I have tried for years to put it into practise. This morning though I was praying and meditating over some questions from Abbey of the Arts around starting the new year’s journey and what giftings one would bring, etc. I was happily listing mine and what I would share with others and how much I encourage and support people when I felt a gentle God nudge. I really felt I had to email my solicitor and say sorry for being rude. And once I got that nudge it wouldn’t let up and I couldn’t get any peace. So at 7.30am I was emailing the solicitor to say sorry for being rude but also felt able not to justify why I was rude but to explain why I was struggling with things.
aggressive! It really was a case of looking at her as also a person in my world that I need to be kind to, to encouraging and remember that she is also made in the image of God, as are we all, or so I believe. Made in the image of God doesn’t mean that all people have to believe in God, Jesus, etc, but if I am to believe God made people I have to believe that He made all people, even my solicitor.
It made me think of another exercise I am working through with 
of themselves, but who also trust me and see me as tender and accepting, as vulnerable yet wanting to share. And I suppose this is a bit of what I did with the solicitor; not just saying sorry and leaving it at that but saying sorry and explaining why I was uptight.
So one could say that I did have a good reason to be snappy with my solicitor but it was not honouring, but in saying sorry and explaining my side I have given space for her to explain and honour me too!
Aspirational Adventures 