
Follow on from “Gifts”
I was walking the dog yesterday and thinking over the post I’d just written and my gifts – and how content I was with my gifts now. Note “now”. I had many years when I wasn’t content with them and wanted something “better”. Like many of us I’d worked out a hierarchy of gifts and giftings, of things I should be doing, things that were godly and things that weren’t, things that were worthy and things that were a bit trivial.
I wonder how many of us, or is it just me, have amazing gifts and talents but are not using them because we are struggling to manifest some gift that just isn’t in us whether to please parents, or to be thought highly of, or because we think “just” smiling at someone isn’t really using our gifts.
Having done work in schools and with young people I see how they rate and value so much. I’ve done amazing writing projects with teens who were in lower sets and who saw themselves as “thick” to quote one teen. Ok so they weren’t grade A students but they had so many other gifts and talents.
Too often, I think, we rate gifts on how much we earn using them, how much other people give us credit for them, how much praise we get for them from those who are significant to us. When actually we should be looking at ourselves, be honest with what we love – because that is generally where our gifts lie and where they will blossom best. I don’t think a gift will flourish is we are trying to do it within something we don’t love.
I think, again, it comes back to that whole freedom thing. We can be fully free if we are using the gifts we were given, not the gifts we think we should have and that we know we are loved just as we are and don’t need to change to please others.
This I think is true freedom, where true peace and joy come from, and where we are without fear to fully walk the gifts we have and not try to be someone else. If we look back at The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe each of the children had different gifts and each had to use them to the full for the White Witch to be defeated.




And this is why I think this passage, esp the first line is so amazing and I think will be my word for the year. Along with a few others I’m gathering but … what a great start to the year, to sit in church and hear that it is time to Arise and shine. Wow! Especially on this dreary day when the town is shrouded in mist here is God saying “Arise and shine” Wow!
strength, hope, reassurance. Almost anything. I really don’t think that one can let the Lord rise upon and around you unless you have confidence in yourself. I know of a friend who went through an awful tragedy but I can hear her sobbing “Just one touch of the King changes everything” but she had to let herself be touched for Him to be able to change everything.
It always takes me a while to get into the fact that its a new year. Others around me come with resolutions that they can present at midnight on 2016/17 but I need a run up to it and some thinking time. So for me though I will put aside worry and also put aside false hope and I will arise. I will shine. I will let my light shine in my spheres of influence. This is my resolution for 2017.



we die to ourselves, to our own wants, needs, expectations, even wanting to see others come to know Jesus, then we can truly shine. We can stop doing things because we want some form of recognition or someone to fulfil our needs.
Jesus did as individual salvation and much more about corporate salvation but actually I can only change me and how I look at the world, how I react to the world. So if I die to self and then love others unconditionally there is much more of a chance of me being able to look at things corporately because I will no longer worry about whether someone in my “pack” does something I will be embarrassed about.
et the Light of God shine in and through me. It will mean I will care for others as God cares for them which i
I’ve been chewing over this post for a while. It’s really about living in the liminal place, which sounds so cool when you talk of it as that spiritual place between earth and heaven but the word means inbetween place. And this is where we are, living in that place between places. Our possessions are packed in boxes. We have done our round of goodbyes. We’ve finished our jobs. But we cannot take up new jobs, sort our new house out ready for the whole hospitality thing, can’t get to know our new neighbourhood. It is an odd place to be.
bit of know the vision and the why were sort of easy. Ok not overly but they were things God had been brewing in me, and in my husband, over a number of years, both together and individually. The thing is though they involved moving and place. These questions from
I think often what is seen by those who don’t go to church is a load of people going to church services, pretending everything is ok, and yet hiding something. I do think in our modern church services we’ve tried too often to show God as the answer to everything when in fact He is the supreme being to hold on to, to shout at, to be hugged by, to be vulnerable with. God is about relationship in life not about answers to stuff we don’t even know the questions for.
want to hang on to the excitement of what will come; the walks on the beach, having a room of my own for writing, the guests we will be having, the new stuff, the spa I want to join.