Tag: different

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different faith

Mustard Seed Part Three

many different leaves.

There are also many different types of mustard seed, as this picture above shows. There are those that are made into mustard, those we put on salads, black mustard seeds, yellow mustard seeds, and there are ones that grow into those big trees. But that is like our faith. We all have many different types of faith. Some are different types of faith in different people and some are different faiths in the same person.

For instance you can have faith for healing, for people to come to know Jesus; faith for a peaceful death, for a word of knowledge for someone; faith in trusting God that they will lead you the way you are meant to go, that you’ll have enough money; etc etc etc.

When I was with YWAM on mission I had faith that it was the right thing for me and my children, that we would always have enough money for what we needed [actually I had that in general every day life which made being a home schooling single mum much more peaceful because of the faith that God would provide – and we never went without]. Now my faith is a different shape and size and I have faith for different things because life is different now I’m married and my children are over 30!

So like the mustard seeds faith comes in different shapes and sizes for different people and for different seasons in life. Someone once said that more people get healed by prayer in developing countries because the people have to have faith in God and prayer because they do not have the medical services we have – which we often come to rely on more than God and prayer.

Sometimes the better off we are the less we rely on God and our faith can be wobbly and falling over because we think we can do it ourselves. But there is so much in our Western world that we need faith for – God to provide the right leadership for a start because it is often the decisions made in the West that affect the developing countries more than it does here.

But each of us must take our faith the size of a mustard seed and, I think, ask God firstly what we need to have faith in and secondly who we need to be leaning against

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denominations styles

Different not wrong

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/types-of-art-styles-list/

As you know I love the monthly Upper Room gatherings we have in our home. We can very easily get drawn down that “good tree/bad tree” – knowledge of good and evil route – trying to decide which denomination is “closest to God’s ideal” and then picking out the bits that aren’t.

One of our number pulled us up short. She said that for her all the different denominations are like the different art styles [she is an artist]. None of them are wrong but some of them we prefer more than others, some suit us more than others.

I also know of people who have to create in a certain way because they need to make money. It is not their chosen style but they go with and hang out with it because, for that moment, it is helpful to them to progress in their field.

I think lots of us have hung out in different denominations that haven’t really suited us but that moved us onwards and closer to who God created us to be.

So we need to always remember that different doesn’t mean wrong. Let’s stop judging and start eating from the Tree of Life.

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Listen to my heart wedding anniversary

17th Wedding Anniversary

Photographed January 2020

This photograph was taken on our 14th wedding anniversary somewhere in Yorkshire [I think]. I’ve picked it because I think it symbolised marriage for me – a simple bridge over uncertain waters.

So we have made it to 17 years!! Neither of us has ever been a relationship this long, apart from with parents or me with my children. I am still amazed – not just that we are together but that we still do enjoy each other’s company on the whole.

We are very much not the people we married 17 years ago. I often thought, when I was younger, that when one reached middle age one’s personality and ways of being would become settled, etched in stone [I was 45 when I married my “toy boy” was only 38] but that’s not true. We have walked through many things since being married – untimely deaths of friends and family, my teenage children growing up and leaving home and all the stuff that went with that. We’ve moved house, got pets, learned things, got healed of things, made new friends and hung on to some older ones. Combined some of those friends so that they are “our friends” and kept some that are just our own. Our energy levels have changed too. We’ve changed inside and out. Sometimes in harmony and sometimes clashing. We’ve had times when I am surprised we are still together and times I couldn’t imagine us apart.

This year’s anniversary is different from the rest. Our plan, when we still had children living at home, was to take off on the nearest weekend to our anniversary and stay in a nice hotel, just the two of us, within a couple of hours to our home. Even when the children left home we kept up this tradition. Although last year we stayed at home. For me I think it was because I had just said goodbye to my dear friend Tessa, who died the day before our 16th anniversary. So the whole idea of going away when I’d just been away visiting her was a bit much for my heart. But we were at least spent it together.

But this year we saw each other briefly on the morning of our anniversary before my husband’s taxi came to take him off to the airport for a business trip and I took the dog out. It is not unusual now lockdown is a thing of the past for my husband to go away but it is the first anniversary we’ve spent apart.

It is strange because I often say that I don’t “do our anniversary” but with him not here I realise that I miss not being able to “not do” this time. It made me think of all those other anniversaries that sometimes our bodies react to but our minds forget. Those times of loss, of celebration, of trauma, of something unexpected. And as one grows older there are more and more of them – both grief and celebration, both sadness and celebration – and too often we try to just push through.

I’ve wondered why I kept yesterday’s Josh Luke Smith email but I think it fits with what I’m saying here. We need to take the time out to listen to our HEART, our BODY and our MIND so that we can “locate where we are, give ourselves all we need to be as truly ourselves as we could be in that moment” –

IN THAT MOMENT – not forever, not for tomorrow, but just for this moment when we feel what we feel, when we aren’t sure what’s going on because we are trying to push through things, push things down, push things away, push onwards and yet feel lost in and of ourselves. It only takes a moment to check in and only then can we know where we are, why we feel as we feel, accept it all and then be our true and authentic selves.

So a dog walking friend saying to me yesterday “you don’t seem yourself” made me check-in with my heart, body and mind and made me realise I miss my husband not being with me for an anniversary I didn’t realise I was that bothered about. But my heart, mind and body did.

After doing all this QEC I’m always amazed that I don’t tune in more often but being the complex creature that I am sometimes I need to hear it from another source. And God in God’s great wisdom knew exactly how to do that 🙂

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different trust

Trust Is The Key

This is a regular beach walk of mine but often, when there have been big storms, of which we had many over the last few months, the stones and gullies have been changed. It can be a very different walk. I need to remember that we are all different as people depending on our personalities and maybe too the storms we have ridden.

Last night was youth group night. It was a new group and I didn’t want to presume that just because they had come to a church youth group that they all believed in God so our first question of the year was “Would you identify as a Christian? If yes why? If no why?”

Only three young people came and all said they would tell their friends they were Christians or that their friends knew this already. It was the “why?” question that challenged me the most.

For myself, I had a very powerful experience which brought me to really want to follow God in the big way. I would say I “became a Christian”. So for myself it is all about the experiential experience. One of the group said that when she prayers she can feel a presence sat beside her. But the other two, and the vicar, all said they just believed and struggled to say why they believed. The answer from all three of them was “I just do”. No wavering. No changing.

When we talked about what things it meant to be a Christian the main one was that God was centre of our lives. We didn’t get into tenants of faith. Nothing about what you had/had not to believe or do to be a Christian but just that God and Jesus were a major presences in our lives who encouraged us to think and behave in a different way.

The first church I attended, and many others I have been to that have shaped my beliefs, have been very much of the ilk that to be a Christian one had to do and say certain things, believe in certain things, accept certain things.

I’ve also studies not just the Reformation but many of the points in history where Christians have persecuted Christians because they have done things in a different way. Things we would now see as trivial. But as the vicar reminded me, even now [and I experienced in other churches] though there may not be actual burnings at the stake, there can often be judgements against those not have “prayed the prayer”, been “properly” baptised, and also the issues of gender and sexuality, care for the planet, who leads the congregations, etc, etc.

What struck me greatly was that we are all different in who we are but that makes us all different in how we approach God, how we behave about God and with God. For me I needed that experiential experience, something tangible to hold on to as I unraveled and rebuilt my life. But for others it is just that believing and that knowing that that is enough.

But what came out of if for me is that however we experience God and however God is out worked in our lives, that important bit is that we keep God and Jesus central and trust them enough to lean on them no matter what is going on around us. Through that can we show God in our lives to others. Then when we take God’s love to others it is something tangible not something we are just saying.

Categories
different remember

Nostalgia

Photo of Porth Padrig graveyard taken by Diane Woodrow of Barefoot At The Kitchen Table
churchyard at Porth Padrig, Anglesey taken by myself Jan 2022

Living in a county crammed with history it is easy to get nostalgic for a past era. In fact my daughter and I were messaging last night and were saying that we missed lockdowns, though at the time when I look at my diary entries no one enjoyed them at all. But we can look back and miss those quiet times with nothing to do – even though we were chomping at the bit to get and do things.

In 2018 I did some work with a local high school based around WWI and was amazed how we sanitised it and looked at it as a time when people banded together to help each, of heroism, of being united. We are distanced from the death and horror by 100 years.

I wonder with all that is going on, and has been going on over the last few years – Brexit, pandemic and now the Russia/Ukrainian war – how history will view it. One cannot even guess because we are living through it.

But even things that we lived through, like lockdowns, we look back on in a different light.

So I think this means we need to be careful as we apply comparisons from history to what is happening across the world – whether Ukraine, pandemics, Yemen, etc. It is said that people don’t learn from history but I think that is because each time something happens the world is different and so history can show something but not enough or too much to help stop wars, stop abuse, stop things from happening, or make things happen.

As Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 B.C., is alleged to have said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” which means that the conflicts, issues, problems, projects, that are going on at the moment are not the “same river” so we must not expect it to be. And also we are looking at things with through a nostalgic lens – whether rose-tinted or not.

So let us be careful as we make comparisons from history – yes history can lead to a conflict but there is much more going on in this present day. Perhaps we need to just focus on the here and now.

Just focus on the moment.