Lent is upon us. It’s a time when we decide to give things up, to stop doing things, make a sacrifice for God. I’m giving up chocolate and chips, and limiting myself to one dvd a week for Lent.

So why do we give things up for Lent?

Do we do it because it’s ‘the thing to do’, or do we have a deeper motivation? This is the question I was confronted with in preparation for Lent. Giving up chocolate and chips is fine, but why am I doing this, what it’s purpose? What positive response does it lead to?

The reason we give up things for Lent is meant to be to deny ourselves, to prepare ourselves for Easter and the death and resurrection of Jesus. To make a small sacrifice in order to remember and connect with the huge sacrifice Jesus made for us.

But there’s more to Lent than simply giving things up. It’s also about taking positive action.

When we choose what we are going to do for Lent, there has to be some kind of purpose to it. We need to be thinking about positive action that we take.

That’s because Lent is not just about giving things up, but taking positive steps in our faith.  Making decisions not just to give things up, but to take positive action that may involve sacrifice and giving something up, but will ultimately help us grow in our relationship with God. (more…)

Romance. We all love it don’t we? This week was Valentine’s Day – which our consumer society has made a day about romance (I don’t say love, deliberately…if only it were a day about real love) – and there’s nothing like a great romantic story.

Many of us daydream about our own (it’s okay, you can admit it) – and when we’re fed such a diet of rom-coms and Hollywood endings, it’s very easy to get sucked into thinking this is normal.

But this romanticism isn’t something we apply simply to relationships.

It can be easy to over-romanticise every area of our lives – work, relationships, creativity, and of course the supernatural  – and these romantic films certainly encourage this view. It’s so easy, that we can do it without even realising.

For example, I could easily romanticise my writing and creativity.

The romantic in me would simply quit my job, finish my book and then sell it to a publisher. Then of course there’d be the happy ending to the story when it sold millions and millions of copies and was a roaring success.  (more…)

Regular readers will have seen part 1 of my interview with writer and blogger Jeff Goins earlier in the week, where we discussed his journey so far, his new book and the difference between writing a book and writing a blog. Today we move on to discuss the creative process overall and how Jeff experiences that. So here goes.

James Prescott:Jeff, what have been your biggest struggles overall when it comes to creativity – not just on your book, but overall, and how have you dealt with them?

Jeff Goins: Yeah, I definitely appreciate what that struggle is. The biggest struggle I feel and experience as a creative person is finding my harmony in the tension of what Seth Godin calls ‘shipping’, getting your art out there to the world, and getting it to good enough.

I tend to have these two opposing extremes when it comes to my emotions. One side is perfectionism, like nothing feels good enough, and that’s what keeps me working on something for months and months and years and never sharing it with a soul, because I’m afraid – of failure and what people would think, and there is something holding me back from sharing this with the world.   (more…)

As a follower of Jesus, it would have been irresponsible to conclude this series on masculinity without discussing how the life of Jesus should influence our attitudes to masculinity, and indeed, femininity as well.

It’s a theme that will continue in some of my posts on a more irregular basis in future – I hope to have another guest poster posting on it soon – as it’s a subject I’m passionate about, that’s very important to our discipleship journey.

I find it very frustrating when some pastors (and I won’t name names, but most of you will know the ones I mean) come out and say Jesus had to be this this tough guy who could beat someone up.

But it’s just as frustrating when he’s portrayed as some wimpy loser, a total walkover, man in a dress. The Jesus-is-my-boyfriend, all-smiles ‘nice guy’. The picture sums this image up perfectly.

Frankly, neither version of Jesus seems manly, neither is the kind of man I want to be and neither is a Jesus I can follow.

Jesus wasn’t simply a ‘tough guy’ who would even consider beating someone up and put violence first, nor was He a total pansy, wimp and a walkover, all smiles all the time – and neither are what, in my eyes, a real man should be.

(more…)

After writing a lot on relationships and the role of women in the last few months, I felt it appropriate to share a little on the issue of masculinity. So in the next few weeks we’re going to be having a series here on this issue – including a guest post next week, with the female perspective on masculinity.

When writing on masculinity there’s always a danger that you can be accused of being under-qualified. In the church even more so – as a single man in his 30’s it can be easy, both culturally and in a church context, to be seen as not a ‘real’ man because I’m not married.

This kind of sums up the point I want to discuss – that a lot of what we have been reliably informed is what makes a man a ‘real man’ is not actually Biblical, but just cultural traditions which have come through misinterpretations and misunderstandings of scripture.

This post covers both singleness and masculinity – partially because so often the subjects are linked, especially in a church context and partially because that’s largely my experience – often I’ve felt that because of my singleness, that somehow I’m not a real man, not as masculine as married men – that is partly my perception, but also partly down to the attitudes and language of some people I have met or heard speak on the subject. (more…)

I have spoken a lot this past 12 months of the process of death and resurrection. Usually, what comes out in my writing is a reflection of my own journey, and this past year, 2011, has been one where this reality of this truth has been manifest in my own life.

Now you may think, entering into a new year, that death isn’t exactly the best place to start, especially after we’ve just celebrated the birth of Jesus. But paradoxically, I believe death is actually the very best place to begin if we’re to experience a year of transformation and growth.

I have experienced death – and of course grief, something I will speak of in a future post – first hand. I lost my mother when I was 23.

It wasn’t actually my first experience of grief, as I’d lost grandparents before. But it was the first time a person in my direct family or network, who I had a very close relationship to, had passed away. It wasn’t even the biggest shock. My mum had suffered from asthma for years and we had all come to accept that the asthma would eventually claim her life – but none of us had really expected it so soon.

But death is something that wakes us up to who we are – and by death I don’t merely mean facing our own, or others, or going through grief. I mean experiencing the emotion, the power and ultimately, the process, of death in our own lives.

You see death is the engine room of life. (more…)

Christmas has now been and gone. It’s less than a week and we’ll be into the new year – which is only two months away from my next birthday.

It’s a time where you naturally come to reflect on what God has been doing in you in the past year, what might lie ahead in the year to come and begin to get some perspective on things. It’s a natural process and one I tend to go through in the last couple of months of every year.

It’s strange, looking back, just what God has been doing. To be honest, it’s nothing like I expected at the beginning of the year. I realise now looking back, that I had all these plans of what God was going to do this year, how I was going to grow, what was going to happen.

It hasn’t happened anything like I planned – and I thank God for that.

One thing that I am feeling overwhelmingly right now though, at the end of the year, is thankfulness.

I have seen people I love pass on to be with Jesus this year. I have seen good friends lose their jobs, homes or in some cases loved ones. All this has happened in my immediate community, and impacted my world. I have been praying this year for people to find jobs, find homes and for God’s comfort in their grief. I have also had the privilege of seeing people I care for make a public commitment to Christ and be baptised, which has been a source of great joy.

At the same time, God has been taking me on a journey inside myself, into my own heart. He’s been exposing truths about me – some I knew existed, some I didn’t, and it hasn’t been pretty.  (more…)

We’re now entering into the final week of Advent, Christmas is almost upon us. In this Advent series so far we’ve looked at the shalom, peace of God, how we can discover God right where we are amongst us, and about grace. Today, as I draw the series to a close, I want to talk about joy.

When my mum died, I felt immense pain, grief and sorrow. I was angry, I was upset, I was hurting deep down. It was one of the worst moments of my life. For a long time I wanted to go back in time and do something to stop it happening.

But as I started to process this grief – through prayer, counselling, talking to friends and hearing memories of her, remember the good things about her,  things began to change.

I reflected too that as a Christian she wasn’t completely gone, and that I would see her again.

This year, eleven years after it happened, I looked back and saw all the good that God brought through that pain, the transformation that took place in me as a result of it, and I began to see that it was part of the plan for her to die when she did, that God knew it would happen then and planned for it, that it was her time to die, I felt something deep inside – something I feel now every time I think of her.

Joy.  (more…)

I’ve been overwhelmed with the response to last weeks first part of this abstinence series. It’s such an important subject and I firmly believe that it’s important we discuss these things. Last week I talked about the concept and importance of abstinence before marriage and it’s Biblical basis.

In part two today I wanted to focus on the reality, rather than simply the ideal. I didn’t and don’t want to present abstinence before marriage as some kind of guarantee of success in marriage.

However much I’d like to, the reality is that it doesn’t always turn out that way. I know Christians who have been abstinent before marriage but the marriage still hasn’t worked out. Others have been abused sexually before marriage.

We live in a less than perfect world and, as all of us know, it often doesn’t work out how we plan. (more…)

Time passes so quickly. It hardly seems to be December, yet we are already two weeks into Advent, coming into our third week. Having spoken of shalom, the peace of God on the blog already this advent, and also about how we need to embrace the God who is all around us right here, right now, it seems right today to speak about grace.

I won’t pretend for one moment I can answer all the questions all of us have around this subject, or cover it wholly and completely in one short blog post. But I want to at least have a worthy examination of the subject.

What do you think of when you think of grace? Personally, I think of undeserved merit. Something given without thought of reward, without condition. We talk of people in some situations showing us grace, or being gracious toward us or when faced with difficult circumstances.

Grace is often talked about as a quality we display in certain situations or circumstances – a quality some people possess, and some don’t.

In other words, a specific type of personality.

The thing is, I don’t believe that grace is simply a quality that some possess and others don’t – not in terms of a personality trait.

No. I believe true grace is very different, much greater than that.

Read the quote below: (more…)