I’ve just read a post asking “Seven/Seven: Where were you?” and also today was talking with mother of the girl I tutor about remembering where we were when … and listed various events that we remembered and talked of what we remember about where we were.
I commented on the “Seven/Seven: Where are you?” post and said:
I will always remember where I was on 7/7/2015. I was at home in Frome, home educating my daughter. My son had gone to college that day in Radstock. We were really engrossed in something when suddenly we both said “let’s put the radio on”. Neither of us will ever know why but we listened with shock as the reports unfolded. We are Christians and we just prayed and cried.
But also I remember clearly where I was when the Twin Towers were hit –
We were in our first week of our Family DTS in Paisley Scotland. I think it was the first time I’d left my kids for with someone to teach them since I’d taken Ben out of school. Us adults were in a church hall about 2 miles from the main house. Our base leader came in (the days before everyone had mobile phones) and said there was dreadful news. It unfurled slowly. We were on our faces in prayer. It was not just an awful time nationally but for me it was an awesome time realising the things I could pray and the strength I could pray with.
The death of Princess Diana is neither so deep or so inspiring.
We were living in Belfast. We had been there for about 10 months. I was helping out in the Sunday school at the church we had been attending for maybe 8 months. Someone came in and said “Diana’s been killed in a car accident.” Everyone looked sad. I didn’t say anything. I presumed this was someone they knew, someone who attended the church. I remember racking my brains to think of any Diana’s I’d known. Thankfully I kept quiet and didn’t embarrass myself.
But it also brings back memories of where I was when I hear of things closer to home –
when I heard my Dad’s voice on my answer phone and I knew something serious had happened – my sister had drowned.
when my husband phoned from our friend’s house to say that friend had succeeded in hanging himself.
my Dad bursting into tears in the first ever house I owned to say my Mum had left him for the second time.
the colour of the train we were on when we picked up the message from my husband to say his dad was dead
These are a list of events where I can see and smell how things were, that have stayed seared in my brain, where everything is still so vibrant, where something has been capture. A moment in time. And yet there was a prompt on a
Did my childhood kitchen look like this?
Linkedin group I’m part of which this morning said “write imagine your 5-6 year old self and write about the kitchen in your family home.” I couldn’t remember. I know I’ve moved a lot as an adult but as a child we only lived in four different homes and I can only really recall the third house, where I lived from 10-16. I only remember the fourth house because I visited it twenty years after I’d moved out because new friends were living in it. How can I see snapshots for vividly and yet not remember even something vague from a place I must have gone in to over a thousand times?
It is said that memory is an odd thing and that we shouldn’t trust it that much. What is truth may not be fact. Yet those things etched in my brain that I have mentioned above I am sure that they are really true, that they really were like that. In fact there are certain
In all I do I want to glorifying God. What on earth does that mean? And I do mean “on earth” because I think in heaven glorifying God will be easy – because He’ll be there.
I am a writer. I am away on a writing weekend with some lovely people. How do I glorifying God whilst I’m here? How do I glorifying God in my writing? I can only write what comes into my head and I do not write a very openly “Christian” story. Yes I have written poems and short stories where, for me, God is very much the centre, but that may not be open to those who don’t follow God. In fact I can see God in almost everything whether openly Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, new age or supposedly nothing spiritual at all. But how do I glorifying God in that?
I was walking this morning as the place where we are is beautiful with wonderful grounds. I had just
The Lighthouse, Tytherington, where I walked this morning with the sky a similar colour to this.
read some very tough stuff in John Piper’s “ThePresence of God” book and was chatting to God about it and weeping. I was thinking of my son, who’s just been so a trauma for him of seeing a dream he had planned for about ten years fall apart and the people he expected to stand by him making accusations about him. Now I, not being God and able to see all things, don’t know how true these accusations are but you know what I love my son even if they are true. And that’s the thing, these other people don’t love him with that unconditional way I do because they don’t know him. He has had to learn to trust that I love him unconditionally. He has to learn that his stepfather loves him unconditionally. But this has taken time, has taken heartbreak for him and has taken a time of others letting him down. I know this is how God is for me. With the things that have gone on in my life, not just the last three years of dealing with too much grief, but in all the other shattered dreams in my life before and after making that choice to try to put God in the centre of my life, I have had to learn to trust that God is trustable, not just when things go how I want but when they don’t. I have learned God loves me unconditionally and delights in me even when the world falls apart around me, even when I screw up, even when I make mistakes, even when others hurt me. Its not that things happen as a lesson for us to learn form but that life is about growing to know that God is trustable even when He doesn’t do as we want. My son is learning to trust us when we give to him unconditionally. It is like he is a child again, which is what we are when we first start following God. But there comes a time with God, and will come a time with my son, when He backs off, when we back off, when the trust is built and stuff can happen that we don’t want.
This isn’t me but it is how I like to write; laptop, coffee, journals, and then the dog at by feet and the cat on the back of the couch, or visa versa 🙂
The question isn’t how can I glorifying God in the bad times but how can I glorifying God when life is just normal? It is easy to reach out when the waves crash around us and just let God hold us. It is also easy to praise God when things are going so well. Like it was easy this morning to praise God when the sun was shining, when everything was as it should be; peace, calm, sunshine, bird song, toad croaking, someone else sorting out my meals and doing my washing up. But I want to work out how to glorifying God, not praise Him but really glorifying Him in the mundane of my life, in what I write, in what I say. Not in a cheesy openly evangelistic way but in a way that is me, in a way that is natural.
But maybe, just maybe – and this is how so many of my posts are, full of questions and no conclusions – I just need to keep being me and keep just letting God be God?
The Rules of Francis of Assisi sums it up really:
Simplicity: “There is no pretense in the Franciscan Spirituality. We who live by the Rule of St. Francis strive to be the genuine article, that is, people who do not care much for fame or wealth–people who live in simplicity.”
Poverty: “Love of Gospel poverty develops confidence in the Father and creates internal freedom.”
Humility: “The truth of what and who we really are in the eyes of God; freedom from pride and arrogance.”
A genuine sense of minority: “The recognition that we are servants, not superior to anyone.”
A complete and active abandonment to God: “Trusting in God’s unconditional love.”
Conversion: “Daily we begin again the process of changing to be more like Jesus.”
Transformation: “What God does for us, when we are open and willing.”
Peacemaking: “We are messengers of peace as Francis was.”
I will always remember where I was on 7/7/2015. I was at home in Frome, home educating my daughter. My son had gone to college that day in Radstock. We were really engrossed in something when suddenly we both said “let’s put the radio on”. Neither of us will ever know why but we listened with shock as the reports unfolded. We are Christians and we just prayed and cried.
We were in our first week of our Family DTS in Paisley Scotland. I think it was the first time I’d left my kids for with someone to teach them since I’d taken Ben out of school. Us adults were in a church hall about 2 miles from the main house. Our base leader came in (the days before everyone had mobile phones) and said there was dreadful news. It unfurled slowly. We were on our faces in prayer. It was not just an awful time nationally but for me it was an awesome time realising the things I could pray and the strength I could pray with.
We were living in Belfast. We had been there for about 10 months. I was helping out in the Sunday school at the church we had been attending for maybe 8 months. Someone came in and said “Diana’s been killed in a car accident.” Everyone looked sad. I didn’t say anything. I presumed this was someone they knew, someone who attended the church. I remember racking my brains to think of any Diana’s I’d known. Thankfully I kept quiet and didn’t embarrass myself.
Aspirational Adventures 