Tag: God

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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 🙂

Categories
Love truth

Service

Snowdrops hidden in the woods. Photographed by myself 26th Jan 2024. Spring is coming

What does Service mean? To you? To me?

In Josh Luke Smith’s latest email he says that we all want Meaning. Relationships. Service. I do agree but I think for years I got what service meant wrong. And I think I was encouraged to keep believing in the wrong either because other people had got it wrong or because it supported others.

Before meeting with God thirty+ years ago I pleased myself and I don’t think I really served others. Though I probably did. I worked in hospitality, had friends round for parties, meals, etc. But I thought I was just doing things that everyone did and that was it.

So when I met with God the church talked a lot about service and about serving God. Serving God seemed to mean doing something in church as a volunteer which for me was children or youth stuff. So I was always busy busy in church doing stuff and I would get fed up with it all and that, amongst other things, was what stopped me wanting to attend church. [Yes there are other reasons but I think this whole thing of feeling that to belong I had to be volunteering got me down]

But it wasn’t just church. Lots of places talk about serving which again seems to be doing things for nothing to further that organisation. But now I’m not so sure. And I would say as I read these daily emails I’m not the only one.

I’m not in regular paid work at the moment and will continue like that because I’m 62. That doesn’t mean I’m doing nothing though. But I have realised what I do day in day out is service. From walking my dog, looking after my home and feeding my husband, though to chatting with friends and acquaintances, to running the workshops I do, to reading books, to writing stories people may never read, to writing this blog. All these things are acts of service but, I think, because they are things I enjoy and they are not for some church or other organisation I don’t see them as service.

I am now thinking that service is actually me just being the truest me I am and allowing that to flow into the earth in the only way I can let it. So I clean up my act and get healed so my energy is purer, less polluted, less me expecting something from what I do – which I do wonder if a lot of our “serving” is actually serving our own ego! I listen to my heart, to God, to the Universe, to my gut, and only do what I am at peace with. And through that I am so much more than if I was serving for servings sake.

I believe again it comes back to that whole “Love your neighbour as you love yourself” [or as I like to see it “totally love yourself so you can then love others] and then you are serving in ways that others truly need with no agenda for yourself to be bless. But that does take some work to get to that place, some clearing away of traumas and other crap, and being fully free.

know the truth [about yourself and your motives] and the truth will set you free

John 8:32]
Categories
repent Trust God

Natural Order

I’ve ponder the idea that there is a natural order to things on You Don’t Need To Do It and a bit in Trust Is The Key. And I think this is the same for repentance.

Before I met with God I did many things that were not good – out of survival, though my own wounds, through self-centeredness, fear. Probably fear was a lot of the reason. So when I had this big encounter with God – which really needs to be heard rather than read! – I wanted to dive into this whole repentance thing. I got a friend to show me all the verses in the Bible that mentioned sin so I could make sure I repented of everything. I was amazed at how many I needed to repent of one way or another.

Although this was before I found this lovely prayer in the Anglican service

we have left undone those things which we ought to
have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to
have done

That really does cover most of our lives!

But I thought even then, even in my zeal for meeting with God, there was a natural order of how it worked for me.

Firstly I was accepted by this group of lovely human beings who had got together to evangelise the housing estate I was living on. I was accepted [belonged] to their coffee morning before I went to their Sunday church.

Secondly I had to meet with God and realise how much God loved me unconditionally. And boy was it an amazing encounter. Only then could I start on this journey of repentance. So I had to trust God, believe in and about God and Jesus, and feel I was important to God, special. If I’d been told on that first coffee morning I ever attended that I had to repent and believe I would have high tailed it out of there.

Thirdly though I had to believe and trust that God and Jesus had forgiven me. Actually that was the easiest bit of it. The hardest was going through the journey of forgiving myself because I had done things that had hurt others a lot. But I know I did it because I trusted in Jesus and God to walk with me and leave me high and dry.

Also the whole repentance/forgiveness thing is a totally ongoing thing, which is probably the fourth part. If I believed it was a one off thing and I couldn’t keep coming back to God again and again and again and again and saying sorry and forgiving other people then, I think, I would be a disappointed person.

So daily I ask forgiveness for “those things which I ought to have done, and I have done those things which we ought not to have done” and I am truly sorry. And I forgive those who hurt and upset me whether they did it on purpose or by accident.

But I cannot do those things if God and Jesus are central part of my life, if I don’t trust them moment by moment, don’t rely on them moment by moment.

I do think that repentance and forgiveness should be much a part of our lives that we don’t need to say it but it is in our actions. It is seen when we don’t bitch about people, don’t hold a grudge, don’t worry about things, aren’t fearful, etc. As I explored a while ago, looking at how sinning is really just missing God’s mark, just missing God’s best for us. And anything for holding a grudge and saying bad stuff about people to fit in with others through to worrying and being fearful are the “sins” most of us do. Very few of us murder or steal, but too many of us don’t trust.

I believe we shouldn’t need to tell people but we should be living it day by day – which is what I felt my youth group were trying to tell me and which I shared in Trust Is The Key

Natural order – Trust that God is there for you and loves you unconditionally then repentance and forgiveness will just flow naturally. Or at least I think so.

Categories
being Doing

Being Really Human

Photographed by me on Christmas Day 2023

This is a follow on from yesterday’s post on how Deborah and Jael were most powerful by being in situ and not trying to fill their day with many things. Yet this is so often what we do even as Christians.

We pray as an activity rather than as a just being. But often if we try the just being we then need to tell someone about that. Or to fill in time we read a book. It becomes another activity. We got to church. We join a club. We meet with others. We do things all the time. We rarely just sit about “wasting time”.

Like I said Jael could have been somewhere else being busy but instead I like to think she was at the entrance to her tent maybe watching the battle unfurl in the valley below. She wasn’t waiting for God to use her, which I think we can often be guilty of, but she was just being.

I have been amazed at how many fitness apps and organisational apps and books are being advertised as something to “fit into your busy life” as though being busy is the important bit. And not being busy is wasting time. When we see someone they are “what have you been up to?” and rarely ask “how are you?” And even if they do ask “how are you?” that is quickly followed by “what have you been doing?” And a young friend of mine once showed me how people ask younger people “What have you been up to?” and even “what have you done at school/college/exams are you taking/doing in your future?” and rarely ask them how they are leading to that conviction that doing nothing is not a good thing.

As you know I’ve been challenged on this recently and I decided to do some QEC around it. Turns out that, for me, and I suspect for others, I worry about what other people will think. I feel that to justify my existence I should be doing something., that I should not be wasting my time and that I should be productive. So I get busy busy busy and then don’t have time for what really matters – being me.

I am now in my 6th decade and there are those things that pull to say “time is running out” and that one should “do something with one’s life“. Now Jael was just being by her tent and because of that God could use her. She may have been young. She may have been old. But she was there. And I don’t think she was sitting there going “God use me” or even bargaining with God that if she learned how to be then God could use her.

Also I am learning if I am not busy doing then I have time to think. Not think about what I can do but just ponder life. I probably pray more as a chatting with God thing than an activity. It is a longer process. I also read a lot more which gives me more things to think about.

We live in a world, whether sacred or secular, that tells us we should be doing. And not just doing but being seen to be doing. We need to have something to tell people. But I am finding the more that I am just being the more I can listen to people because I’m not tired, not stressed, not wondering what I should be doing to fill my time. It means I have time to walk the extra round of the park to find out how someone is, time to go for coffee, time to listen to my husband, my children, my friends, to God.

I don’t know if I’ll even be expected to drive a metaphorical tent peg through someone’s head [whatever that means in 21st Century North Wales terms] but I do hope I am sitting by my tent to do whatever God wants of me if God ever does. And I also hope that if I spend the rest of my life hanging out by my tent and am never used I will also known and trust I have been in the right place.

Categories
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
house Inner Healing

I Am Not An Onion

Photo from October 2023. These were the last locally cut flowers of the year

The reason for the photo is because it shows the inside wall of my house which is in need of redecorating. We’ve been in this house for eight years now and the hall is one of the rooms I’ve not yet started on.

I have just booked another session of QEC counseling/healing for next week and was free writing around it. As I did that more and more things came up and I started to feel a bit fed up with it. I have been doing this “inner healing” stuff for soooooo long now. Not just QEC but other forms. And yet still there is more.

Someone once compared inner healing to taking off the layers of an onion; that just because you had taken off one layer there were still more to come. I’ve never settled well with that analogy because if one kept on with the healing and taking off the layers soon there would be nothing left.

I know that can be a Christian way of looking at things – to get rid of “me” and just be Jesus. But don’t think there would be verses in the Bible like

“Come to me, all who labour and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:29-30

if we were meant to be in the picture at all. I think Jesus is saying that the whole healed me is walk in tandem with the whole Jesus and it won’t be a big deal.

So I am not an onion where eventually there will be nothing left of me.

Whilst free writing this morning what came to me when we do QEC or similar types of healing is we are stripping off the wallpaper that we have used to cover up the walls of who we are. Often whether in the Bible, in dreams, etc “house” or “home” represents ourselves. So what we often do, or let others do, is paper over things in our lives to make us seem more acceptable, to fit in better, to keep us safe. But to be wholly me I have to strip those walls right back to the original plaster and see what cracks are there. Then not paper over the cracks but heal those cracks.

Have you ever stripped wallpaper from an old house where previous occupants haven’t done it? That old wallpaper paste was more like superglue than modern wallpaper paste is. That stuff is rock solid. Sometimes too you come across old newspapers which for some reason were used as lining before putting the wallpaper on. That is then like trying to remove papier mache. It was meant to stay.

Sometimes some of the things we’ve put in to keep us safe after childhood traumas, or even grown up traumas, we’ve put on to last. We don’t want to revisit that. But it makes a bulge in the walls.

So I go back again and again for more healing not because the first lot didn’t work, not because I am an onion, but because I am an grand house that is being renovated room by room.

Categories
Lord's Prayer Trust God Uncategorized

Whose Will?

So two posts in quick succession. This is because I’ve been enjoying my daughter’s company and not had time or headspace to blog.

But I have been praying. And again am stuck on working with The Lord’s Prayer. And especially the line “Your Will be done“.

It made me think of how often we mither [check out the link as it is a north of England expression] at God to do what we think is the right thing. With many situations, whether it is Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, getting things done in my home town, illnesses with people I know, there is much more going on under the surface, hidden histories, that we know little or nothing about, hurts and pains we don’t understand, and so often what we are “telling” God to do is ill-informed. I think this is why Jesus’s advise was telling us to say to God “look I see this situation. I’d love you to be involved in it. Your will be done within that.“

Now I had an interesting thing happen after I was praying for God’s will to be done about a certain person. As me and this person were walking and talking they said something that I could almost see God highlighting for me. It was something very deep with them and shared in a way that I felt led me to ask God if that was a way I was to pray about it. I believe now that God has given me their direction in praying for this person and that God and I are yoked together in this.

I also had another time when I did the “ok it’s your will not mine here” as I was finding certain things with another person difficult. I was also trying to avoid that person. But again God had other plans. There I was walking round my park on my own and they were walking the opposite direction. They greeted me warmly and we walked together. Again I could hear that still small voice saying “this is My will that you walk along side them.” And it was like there was nothing else I had to do but to walk with them.

I can be an organised, planning person. It is a family joke that I like my lists. Often of an evening I write a list of what I want to do the following day as part of my unwind before going to sleep routine. But I also find that I can get into doing this with praying for people; the list with an idea of what each person, situation, etc needs. But this takes away the “your will be done” part of the Lord’s Prayer. I wonder too if these things interfere with the “give me each day my daily bread” part.

So this year I am going to just let God’s will be done, not my will, in how I pray and who I pray for, and just trust and see what happens.

Categories
Main Event ordinary

Defining My Year

Colwyn Bay 6th January 2024 photographed by myself

It is that season where we look back and look forward. A time when we talk about our best times over the last year and our worst times. A time when we talk about and make plans for the future.

I’ve been reading Josh Luke Smith’s thoughts which he has been sending out each day since 1st Jan. This verse struck me from the poem he shared

We must not define our lives by our worst days, and neither should we by our best; most of life is in the middle.

Joshua Luke Smith – This is the main event

This photograph I’ve shared is from a walk my husband, daughter, my dog and myself did yesterday. It was an ordinary walk along and ordinary beach. We talked about ordinary things then went to the pub. Ordinary

Neither of my children could make it up for Christmas. 2nd January was the first time my daughter was able to come and has managed to be with us for the whole week. But she’s tired after working all through December, over Christmas and over New Year in hospitality. She’s tired and needs a bit of family downtime. We’ve done a lot of sitting about and chatting. One afternoon her and the dog fell asleep on the couch whilst I was reading. We did one day where we went out to lunch so she could get a new coat. But it was all low key. All ordinary. It was life lived in the middle point between best and worst.

But as Josh says in all his writings for this year – and it is a phrase he uses often – it is the ordinary that is the “main event”. If we spend our time waiting for the amazing or even wallowing in the awful we will miss out on so much. God promises to be with us ALL the time.

Yes God promises to be with us when things get tough and life is awful and when we need to be enfolded in their loving arms. God promises to rejoice with us when things are amazing and shout with us. Though often in the great times, and even in the good times, we forget to acknowledge God. But God is with us ALWAYS.

With this in my head it is helping me realise to just acknowledge God in the washing up, in the deep cleaning the kitchen which I did this morning because husband and daughter have gone for hike in the sunshine that has miraculously appeared over North Wales. I have got good at remembering to praise God for the beauty in my local park but this whole thing of remembering that actually it is the life we live day in day which is our “main event“, which is our lives, is something to be grasped

I suppose it is what mindfulness is deep down, but often that has been turned into a “thing.” – eg “I am being mindful” or whatever. But this is just knowing that all my life, whether good, bad, indifferent, whether mindful or forgetful, all of this is my life. All of this is the main event of my life.

Dog enjoying the beach. For the dog each moment of every day is just what it is!

Categories
enough joy peace

You Don’t Need To Do It

My dog’s biggest decision/resolution for any day of the week is what toy shall he play with from his two new ones. And each decision is “new every morning”

On a Facebook group I’m part of my QEC practitioner suggested instead of feeling like we are being forced into New year resolutions – that most of us feel guilty about breaking by mid-January – why not QEC a vision of Peace, Joy and Plenty for 2024. This is working with that principle that what we believe will come to pass will come to pass. This isn’t a “pollyanna” “pie in the sky” way of thinking. This isn’t saying that we will be protected from bad things happening. But it is saying that we will ride through them with peace, with deep joy [not the silly giggles but something deep and fundamental] and that we will know we will have plenty/enough of whatever we need to see us through.

All this is what God says to us through the Bible – that “the joy of the Lord is our strength” [Nehemiah 8:10], “my peace I give to you” [John 14:27] and Matthew 6:25-34 which tells us not to worry about anything because God has it all for us. God has what we need in abundance. Though too often we do not see Christians living this out so find it hard to believe. But it is there!

But I realised as I was free writing around this that there is an order to have this happens. I felt that one couldn’t just dive into believing there is plenty/enough/an abundance because it is so hard to believe. It is why we have to QEC things and put in new beliefs so we can start on that journey.

  • But that QEC journey starts, I think, with us having peace with our past, with our upbringing, with our mistakes.
  • From this place comes deep joy that we are such amazing people, even if that has been lost in things that have been said to us as children.
  • Then once we are at this place of deep joy and gratitude, then we can believe we have plenty for what lies ahead each and every single day.

To succeed with this we need to be like those who go to Alcoholics Anonymous believe, that what we have this for each day and we rejoice in the dailiness of it and not have to stake it up for longer than today.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
…
Amen.

The Serenity Prayer

Note the “living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at at time” or as Lamentations 3:23 says God’s blessings are “new every morning” because “great is your faithfulness”

By not trying to put it in resolutions – that we aren’t doing at the moment anyway and so won’t stick to because there are reasons why we didn’t start now – but listening to our hearts and going day by day doing our best to live in peace, from which follows joy and gratitude, givings us the hope of living in plenty/enough then we can move in harmony with ourselves, with God, with The Universe, and with each other.

Categories
Cross Lighthouse

To Steer By

Looking towards the end of Ynys Llanddwyn, Newborough, Anglesey. Photographed by myself 26th December 2023

A friend was telling me how when people say to her that it is Jesus is just a crutch she responds with “too right because I can’t do life on my own” [paraphrase]. I found this an interesting response because too often I have heard, and also my response has been, to defend myself, to say that Jesus isn’t a crutch and that we, me and Jesus that is, are walking together equally yoked etc. So her response got lodged in my mind.

Then when we were out on our yearly Boxing day walk, this year accompanied by picnic, to Ynys Llanddwyn with half of the North Wales population, I was struck by the lighthouse and the cross being on the headland of the island. Yes I have seen them before but I don’t think I’ve walked along this path before and got the same view.

How often does that happen that when God wants to highlight something we are lead down a different path way? Often with some phrase or expression or bible verse hovering round our peripheral thought.

I was struck by how no one would mock a sailor who said they were guided by the lighthouse, that they relied on the lighthouse to keep them safe. Yet I wonder how often we are mock for saying we are guided by the cross, that we rely on the cross? Also how often I might keep quiet about being guided by the Cross but openly say how my SATNAV keeps me safe. Or how often we check the weather forecast trusting that but don’t check in with our hearts/the Universe/God to hear where we should be going.

Note to self – be willing to let others know what guides me, but also make sure that guide is the Cross first. Nothing wrong with being guided by lighthouses, SATNAVs or weather forecasts, or all those other things that we use to help us along the way. But make sure that first and foremost it is the Cross the guides and leads us.

And not to be embarrassed by that.