Category: unconditional love

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climate change unconditional love

Storms, Storms and More Storms

This is what has been going on in my house over this weekend as Wales get battered by Storm Darragh.

Compared to many places across the globe the UK gets off lightly with extremes of weather. Oh we get weather and don’t we Brits like to talk about it. Even if you have nothing to say to anyone as you pass in the street you can always say things like “nice day” “bit cloudy/windy/rainy/sunny” “bit cold/hot/wet/dry” “its come early for winter/spring/summer/autumn” Always a something and generally a disgruntled something.

Well for the first time I think we’ve had a red weather warning. Our local Victorian pier is breaking up with the battering it is getting. Trees are coming down. Roads are blocked. Electricity is down. Christmas markets are cancelled and we’ll all be late doing our Christmas shopping!!!

But it isn’t like some places even in America where twisters and floodings and fires are becoming a thing. I was amazed at the lack of news about the fire in Ventura, California, which happened during the US elections. I only knew about it because one of the houses destroyed belonged to friends. I wonder how many other environmental disasters there are that we never hear about?

Yes environmental disasters! Because that is what this extreme weather is – an environmental disaster brought on by climate change.

I would say this isn’t normal but I think it is going to become the new normal. But also it is to be expected.

6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains.

9 “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. 12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, 13 but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

Matthew 26:6-13

Ok so it doesn’t mention floods and uncontrolled fires and extremes of weather, etc, but that sort of thing does appear in poetic form in the Book of Revelations later in the Bible. Worth a read as you look at these global weather phenomenons.

I’ve been doing some pondering around being a Christian, Jesus, and the whole suffering thing – encouraged by a friend last night as we were driving home. She was saying about trusting God in the storm [we were driving back from a concert as Storm Darragh was approaching North Wales] but I was then saying how many Christian friends or friends of friends I’d known who’d died in car accidents, etc. They died. We suffered grief. God didn’t stop it from happening.

Interestingly in the above verses it doesn’t say God will stop it from happening. In fact it says these things MUST happen. Too often, especially the evangelical charismatic branch of Christianity, has said God will stop us suffering. But this isn’t what Jesus says to his followers just before he dies and before the authorities turn against his followers. He says that it is only the one who stands firm who will survive.

Now I don’t think that means that we won’t get hurt, battered, lose things and people important to us. I think it means that we must stand strong in the faith that the Creator of the Universe and the one who is allowing all this chaos because they knew why loves us all unconditionally and will give us the peace and joy that transcends all understanding.

So I am grateful that I have a lovely warm solid house to be sheltered in, that we have lots of food, that we live in a town and so don’t have to get the car out, but above and beyond all that I am grateful that The Creator of The Universe loves not just me but all my family, friends, acquaintances, and even people I don’t like and don’t know, unconditionally.

[Though of course my very human side also wishes that we could have a weekend where we didn’t have to worry about the weather and could just go for a nice long walk and lunch out!!! 🙂 ]

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Psalm 23 – part 7

You anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.

Psalm 23:5b

I went for a long walk on a very windy beach to ponder this one.

I get the first bit – that God anoints me as his special person, his ruler, his one who can rule in his place. I am anointed and special to God even when I have to make peace with the enemies without and within, even when I’ve walked through horrid, depressing, dark, death-like things, even when I’ve been made to lie down in a calm place and do nothing. In all those things God says “you are anointed. You are important and special to me”.

It’s not what I do or don’t do but it is all about God’s unconditional love for me. See I’m back to that again. This does seem to be the crux of everything – God’s unconditional love for me in whatever situation – good, bad, busy, still, being important or not being noticed – in all of those things I am God’s special anointed person that they love for who I am. Amazing.

And I think it is once we realise that then are “cup”, our lives, our way of thinking, will overflow with blessings and gratitude. But, I think, we need to be willing to let God lead us wherever they want always knowing we are loved unconditionally, that God sees as us awesome, and that God has our backs and we can trust them with our lives – however good, bad or indifferent our lives are at the moment.

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Films unconditional love

Back To Black

Post image of film from IMB site https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21261712/

We went to our local independent cinema to watch this amazing film. I say amazing because as well as been well performed it was totally non-judgemental. Those of us who were Amy Winehouse fans had read a lot in the papers about her addictions and her relationship with both her father and with Blake, her husband. But this film took all that media judegmental attitude out. It told a story where we were left to not even make judgements on anyone in the story but to just watch, to feel and to get some sort of understanding. Not an understanding of why but just of what was, I think.

I’m looking at Show Not Tell with my writing group and we were saying that often films are more tell because all the showing comes in what we are seeing. But what we saw here were people living their lives with all their issues, hopes, expectations and humanness.

What struck me about this was how all her family and friends knew she had a problem with alcohol and yet often fudged around the subject. I wondered how often we do that with people we love. We know there is an issue but we don’t want to say much because we don’t want to hurt them, are fearful of sounding like we are judging, and also don’t want to lose our relationship with them.

This made me think of this quote

Sometimes discernment causes you to see things that are not nice and as Christians, we can dismiss it as we think “that’s not how a Christian should think!”

https://www.cwmprayer.com/

I often feel that we are not “taught” or even expected to learn how to say things in love. Yes we hear the “I speak my mind” but often that is followed by “and I don’t care what they think”. As children, whether Christian or not, we are often told that “if you can’t say nothing nice don’t say nothing at all” [quote from Thumper in Disney’s 1942 version of Bambi]

But how do we truly live so we are supporting each other? How do we live as today’s meditation from Henri Nouwen says?

The discipline of community makes us persons; that is, people who are sounding through to each other (the Latin personare means “sounding through”) a truth, a beauty, and a love that is greater, fuller, and richer than we ourselves can grasp. In true community we are windows constantly offering each other new views on the mystery of God’s presence in our lives. Thus the discipline of community is a true discipline of prayer. It makes us alert to the presence of the Spirit who cries out “Abba,” Father, among us and thus prays from the center of our common life. Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply “Where does God lead me as an individual person who tried to do his will?” More basic and more significant is the question “Where does God lead us as a people?”

Meditation Landing

Note Nouwen says it is a “discipline of community“. It isn’t something that just happens. We need to see it as something we have to make time for, make space for, really fix ourselves into. I think too often we don’t commit to community – whether this is our families or our friendship groups – but sort of expect it to happen. Yet we don’t deal with our issues, our needs, our reasons why we get hurt when someone says a certain phrase which triggers something but we don’t know what.

I think because we are full of our own issues/traumas and are holding on to them we often use those groups we are in to meet our needs. So we don’t call someone out because we want to still be with them, or we call them out in a mean way because we want a fight. We don’t know how to speak out in love because we don’t believe we are loved.

I think, to live in this “discipline of community” and to know how to speak into each other’s lives fully we need to know we are loved unconditionally just as we are, need to know those other people are loved unconditionally just as they are, need to know how to say thing without us having an agenda, and then whether the other person does as we’ve suggested or doesn’t change at all that we carry on loving them and accepting them unconditionally. We need to not be “supporting” them to get our own needs met.

But I believe is can only come fully when we know that someone bigger than ourselves, which for me is the Creator of the Universe, sees me as amazing with all my faults and issues. As Jesus said “love your neighbour as you love yourself” but you do have to love yourself first.

[I’ve covered the Love yourself so you can love others in many posts so please feel free put one of those phrases into the search bar and reread old posts]

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respect unconditional love

What Does It Look Like To You?

Newborough Beach Boxing Day 2022 taken by myself

Who has not looked at clouds and seen shapes, dragons, spaceships, incoming rain, promises of sunshine? The worst thing is when someone says “no that’s not right”. It is your imagination seeing the things. You know they are just clouds but are enjoying what you are picture.

I was thinking about both Respect and Unconditional Love and thinking they can look different to each one of us. I don’t think there is a one size fits all of respect or unconditional love.

I was walking with someone this morning who is struggling with something and I felt I had got the handle on it, but just as I was going to say my bit she said how hurt she’d been about people telling her why they thought she was dealing with this. I closed my mouth and listened to her. I did not say these friends of hers were wrong. I did not say they were right. I did listen and say that her feelings were her feelings. I gave her the respect she needed at that moment in time. Perhaps I could say I did not feel respected because I didn’t have my rant but actually that would not have been kind and helpful to her.

Perhaps Respect and Unconditional Love come when we lay aside our needs and wants and listen to the other person. Perhaps if we believed we were loved unconditionally by God, by the Universe, by something more than us, then we could let go of our needs and allow others to feel respect, to feel really loved.

How will this work with those who are striking? Who are asking for more money but who say they feel their jobs are not being respected, are not the caring jobs they signed up for? Money is not the answer if they are still expected to work in the conditions they are working in. Those in government, those in management, those with power, need to bend a bit, show these people they are important to the workings of this land.

I wonder if those in power, in government, in management, also do not feel respects, do not feel unconditionally love. How often does the media run down the government? With the latest words for the Prime Minister all that followed was complaints and criticisms. How would we all have felt if we put forward an idea and got it slated? But then those lower down do not feel respected.

So how do we change? One of the things that strikes me with the Lord’s Prayer – which I don’t think was meant to be read parrot fashion but was a serious of ideas we should be looking at – in “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” that this means us. You and me. For that to happen we need to be giving respect, giving unconditional love, listening and respecting the person we are with at the time, caring for our planet, our world. Caring firstly for those nearest to us.

If each of us showed respect to the person we met and then they showed respect to the next person they met and so and so forth, but the end of the day so many people would feel better about themselves, and I think towards each other. I don’t think it is about “making people Christians” but is about showing unconditional love, showing respect.

You know Jesus never told anyone to convert. He did tell them to change their lifestyles but he also showed them respect, unconditional love, and told them that the Kingdom of God, that true place of peace and deep joy, was nearer than they thought, was actually deep inside of them, but sometimes they just needed to let it out. And letting it out comes, I think, knowing our self-worth comes from within not without, that we are loved by something so much bigger than ourselves and that we have nothing to lose by being nice to others.

So today I will try to believe I am loved and respect and pass that on to others. That I really do not have anything to lose by being kind.

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2020 2020sForesight God hope psalm unconditional love

Where is your hope?

My hope comes from the hills – Psalm 121 (image taken by myself at Gwytherin April 2019)

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope and what it means, especially after sending a text to a friend talking of hope.

She had said that two unexpected things had happened – one that their neighbour had, out of the blue, decided to cut back his trees which would mean they could regain their lovely view, and then that someone had managed, what had seemed the impossible, and had found somewhere to rent. I had responded with Psalm 121 and that the trees being cut back were so that they could see their hope again. She messaged back to say she had shared this with someone else who had responded back to her that they has lost all hope because of not receiving an answer to prayer. I’ve also heard from an older person I know how she has lost hope and wants to die because of all this lockdown stuff. So what is that hope that the Bible talks about?

When my father-in-law died my husband read Habakkuk 3:17-18 at his funeral. His death had come during a long period that my husband and I had endure of unanswered prayer and of searching for God in the midst of it.

Though the fig tree does not bud

    and there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop fails

    and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen

    and no cattle in the stalls,

18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

It made me wonder how often we are taught in churches, or take on board ourselves, that belief that God answers prayer the way we want it. And that we hitch our hope to getting what we want. We are taught, and teach ourselves, that God is the truly loving father, full of unconditional love. Does unconditional mean that we always get what we want or even need? Is this why we lose faith when things don’t happen as we would like?

One of the big moans of the older generation towards “children of today” is that they are unruly and rude and have no respect for their elders. Some of that reason is that they get everything they want – the best trainers, phones, trips to exciting places on holidays etc. And because of that many of them come with a sense of entitlement – which I think is a lot of what we are seeing with all generations during this season, with not being able to do as they want when they want. We think we’re entitle to things, but are we?

Can we really be joyful in God if we don’t get what we want; our world is gripped by a pandemic, by weak leadership, by selfish world leaders in many fields, by global warming? Can we really rejoice when those we love don’t get healed, don’t get what they want, aren’t fulfilled? (and by rejoice I don’t mean Pollyanna attitude of pretending nothing is wrong, of smiling in adversity but I mean that deep rejoicing in God) How do we do that?

I think we can and I think we should and I think this is what is being asked of us during this period.

Sometimes we can’t see that hope, like my friend with the trees blocking her view of the hills, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Tom Sine talks in 2020 Foresight about how we need to be praying in Psalm 121 as we look towards the changes we need to make in our churches for the future. So let us lift our eyes and remember where our help and hope and support really does come from. As Oscar Wilde said “We’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars“. So let’s look up, remember, take hold and have hope even if nothing turns out as we would like it.

Psalm 121

A song of ascents.

1 I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
    where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
    the Maker of heaven and earth.

3 He will not let your foot slip—
    he who watches over you will not slumber;
4 indeed, he who watches over Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

5 The Lord watches over you—
    the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
6 the sun will not harm you by day,
    nor the moon by night.

7 The Lord will keep you from all harm—
    he will watch over your life;
8 the Lord will watch over your coming and going
    both now and forevermore.

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It is Unconditional

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Pexels.com

Yesterday I finished “Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas” by Maya Angelou. I’d also just done another QEC session which involved forgiving myself for misinterpreting church teachings and working too hard to earn God’s love and acceptance, whilst at the same time teaching and sharing about that self-same unconditional love and acceptance!!! Goes to show how often we can teach and share on things that we know to be truth but haven’t accepted into our hearts!

In the last few pages of the book, Maya goes to see her vocal coach to unload about how awful she feels she has been to her son, and lots of other issues, and he says “God forgives you, that’s a given. But you now need to forgive yourself”. Wow! How often do we browbeat ourselves about not being forgiven when in fact God who’s totally forgiven us but we are not forgiving ourselves? If God really loves us unconditionally, which I do truly believe God does, then like Maya’s vocal coach we need to believe that it is a given that God has forgiven us. As my OEC coach told me, and she isn’t a Christian in the ‘purest sense’, “From what I gather God loves everyone unconditionally, even the murder and rapists, and wants to heal them too, and so will forgive them so they can be healed.” We need to forgive ourselves so we can be healed.

Maya ends with this book with a story about her and her son in Hawaii. He was only about 9 years old and had gone off on his own, leaving her asleep, for a swim. She was really worried about where he was because he hadn’t eaten breakfast in the hotel. When the police finally find him he says he ate breakfast in place down the street. He had told the proprietor of the place where he ate “See that name?” pointing to the sign above the hotel with Maya Angelou’s name in lights, “She’s my mother and she’s a great singer.” It made me think that I don’t often enough say “There’s my God and it will be cover by our relationship”.

I should be able to know that I can go wherever I want and do things knowing that the “payment” is covered by God because I am God’s child and am totally loved and looked after and will always be fed. Surely this is the message of the Cross – Jesus made the payment for us and we don’t need to have too any more! Now that is exciting! But to believe that I needed to forgive myself for all the times I’d not quite got it.

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Why I’m still a Christian

I’ve written around this theme before but can’t find the posts to tag them. I am writing this now because I have been given an journaling exercise that is post-heroic. And I’m doing it without pictures for a change

I “became a Christian”, as the phrase was then, because I met something that amazed and astonished me. Yes I was lonely. I had just had my son and was living with someone who wasn’t his father in a house with other people. It was not a safe time. But something inside me was urging me to change. Some well-meaning Christians came along and knocked on my door. I went to their coffee morning and then I went to their church. I experienced an amazing spiritual encounter where I know that I met with the God who made the universe who told me He loved me and felt like I was being covered in a viscose glittery substance. I have since been told that was a Holy Spirit encounter. To me, at that time, it was like meeting the entity that made me, made my world, looked deep into who I was and how I was living and said “you may not being doing it all right but I like you. Come on let’s walk together.”
Since that time I read the Bible loads, studied Christian doctrine, theology, right ways to be a Christian, been on mission, led prayer journeys and set up prayer groups, done all that stuff and in doing it totally agreed with the U2 song “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” I’ve blogged on this and pondered this. I’ve tried to tame the mystery even though I know in my head “he is not a tame lion.”
I have reached a point in my Christian life where I am no longer wanting to be heroic, no longer wanting to tame the lion, understand the mystery. I have seen God let me down by letting people I know and love die with horrendous timing so that anniversaries of untimely deaths come at a time when we are trying to celebrate birthdays. I have seen God not come through on some dream that I believed He had promised me we would fulfil together. I have been angry and hurt and let down when it felt as if the mystery of God had turned out to be hollow.
Today I turn a corner. No that’s way too dramatic. Today I have decided to let the mystery out of the box and fly. I may never experience the viscous covering again, may never have a request answered as I like, but I know I have reached a point where I want to just hang out with the mystery, where I just want to be with whatever it is that I have tried to box as God.
So I’m still a Christian because I have decided that just as I don’t need all the answers neither does God need to tell them all to me; just as I don’t need to get it right all the time neither does God have to do what I think is right. I might even stop doing but learn to start practising and start just being. Not in that cheesy “oh I’m a human being not a human doing” but in that way that says it’s ok to just be me and for God to just be God, and for other people to just be who they are.
So I am still a Christian because there are no answers, no right ways, no clear paths but I do know that even through those dark paths the mystery that I call God is more than happy to walk with me and all my whinging and moaning and He still says “you may not being doing it all right but I like you. Come on let’s walk together.”

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On THIS Rock I Will Build My Church

deganwy-north-beach-2I was walking the dog on Conwy Beach this morning looking toward Deganwy and felt God speak to me as I was looking at the basalt column that rises above the down. He felt Him say “on this rock I will build my church” so I asked for a bit of explanation as it’s a verse we all know well and have often been told it means the confession of Peter that Jesus was the Messiah.

As I was walking I kept thinking and chewing this over. Basalt columns pushed themselves up during a time of great volcanic upheaval, not a peaceful time. The rise above the surrounding area because erosion has stripped away all that may have surrounded them. This is how my faith feels. My faith came up during a time of upheaval

snaefellsnes_hiticeland_1140
I love this one standing alone

for me – single mum leading a lifestyle that focused around drinking, drugs and random people staying at my house. When it started it was surrounded by loads of supports, theologies, rules, etc but all those have been eroded away.

I went to the funeral of a dear friend last week who’d died at 43. A lovely, crazy, opinionated friend who sometimes drove me to distraction who had argued through her Christian faith. Gone way too soon. At her funeral the vicar read I Corinthians 13, the love chapter as it is often known. Whilst listening to it I could feel something stirring in me but wasn’t sure what. The walk today revealed what it was. Everything has been stripped away. I no longer care about whether it makes you a “proper” Christian if you speak in tongues or prophecy or say the right prayers at the right time or whatever silly ideas I had. I’ve been watching Gunpowder [and have studies this period too] and it amazes me how people were willing to die or to take the life of another for a believe which I’m not sure God even cares about. I may not have been that bad when I first came to faith but I know I lost friends because of my dogmatism. That has all been stripped away. Now very little remains but I stand – not so much tall but I stand like the basalt column.

tumblr_mhhsu9ys701qawir9o1_500What is left? Faith – A faith that God is bigger than anything I ever hoped or believed and that He is always there for me whatever I walk through and that I will stay with Him forever. Hope – that God is bigger and that those who’ve died before me will be with Him, that those who don’t profess to knowing Him on this earth will be with Him at the end [see I can’t believe that if we are all made in the image of God – and that we don’t just become made in that image when we “pray the prayer” – that God will take what He has made to be with Him . But that’s another thought entirely ] Love – that God loves me, loves those I love, loves those I don’t love too, and that I must learn to love too.

Faith and Hope and Love that is all that remains but I feel that God said to me today that this is what He’s building His Church on and I need to stand on that no matter what more the storms have to throw at me.

faith-hope-love
This says it all so well

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What we going to do to wake up?

(Apologises if I’ve miss quoted lyrics or missed the point. These are my thoughts and how I heard this)

Last night I watch Kate Tempest at Glastonbury. In fact I watched her the night before p056s313too. I don’t do the “watching music” normally – in fact I don’t often listen to music. In the car maybe but not just to sit down and listen to. I have to be doing something else. But someone from one of the writing groups that I run suggested we watch her. I have not been able to get her out of my head since. Then, as things generally do, I met with a friend for coffee and she was talking about similar things to the things Kate was singing about. Last night when I watched I also took notes of the things that had stood out to me the night before. The title of this blog is one of the lines and it is the line that fits in most with what my friend and I were talking about – “what we going to do to wake up?”

She starts with a knock out song about the present government and really does take down Theresa May using actual words that May has said. And this is where the media stops in their reporting but Kate Tempest does not stop there. She takes things onward. I think that is what made me listen twice. Yes it is great to hear someone speaking out against the mess our world is in but it is even more awesome to hear someone talk about what “WE” can do. Not them but us. I did a lot of journalling around that afterwards.

Her main song tells the story of 7 very different people being awake at 4.18 and I challenge anyone to listen to it and not see bits of themselves and bits of those they love in it but she challenges each of us to look for the “gods” out there; that each person is born to greatness – “Gods rise in the most unassuming and human way“. Each of us has the power to act. What I felt Kate was challenging each one of us to live out was; justice, kate_tempest_-_let_them_eat_chaosrecompense, humility and most importantly to realise that we are connected and to live with unconditional love for each other.

One bit that has stayed with me is when she says to realise that the oppressed and the oppressor are connected. I felt, and feel too that it is reflected in the medias response to her set, that we blame the government, blame “them” when in fact each of us holds others back, holds ourselves back, turns a blind eye to things, when in fact we need to realise that we do get what we either vote for or can’t be bothered to vote for.

I loved how she finished – that there is nothing new, nothing set in stone, we have it all in us and there is peace in face of people, but that things will not change until we all realise that they have to and are all willing to rise up and change things. We need to stop consuming and start looking to each other, encouraging each other, releasing each other, helping each other to dream our dreams.

“What are we going to do wake up?” Before the US elections I read of a prophet (I’ve lost the piece so can’t quote fully) that I remember saying that Trump was in the running because we all needed a “trumpet call to wake up“, and that things were going to come into the light. I believe instead of reacting and fearing we need to ask what caused that boy to want to blow himself and lots of young girls as well after a concert in Manchester, aaeaaqaaaaaaaaesaaaajdc5yty5ytlmltfkyjmtngfjoc1imze4lwq4y2vlzjuyyzhmzgwhat caused those young men to drive a van into people they didn’t know and then go on a killing rampage, what causes the person in the town next to me to want to stab his wife, what causes builders to put cheap inflammable materials into a building and authority figures to turn a blind eye, what causes suicides, murders, the need to buy sweatshop made clothes, to drink, etc etc.

We all need to have that wake up call to find out what makes us happy to moan but do nothing. How much more needs to go on before we all take responsibility?

One of the things I journalled last night was “have I ever spoken to a potential terrorist, rapist, murderer? I don’t know. But maybe I have. Maybe something I have said has awoken a dream in them for something more than destruction. Or maybe because of things I do and say then those thoughts never cross their minds. It is time we all got out forgivenessfearlessness-unconditional-love-tmu702there, stopped blaming them and started seeing how we can LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY. Perhaps we can only do that when we realise we are all connected, all loved and all have something to contribute?