God said something to me today, and it really stuck with me. I was being prayed for, and I really felt Him say simply this

“I like you”

Have you ever felt like you know God loves you, you might even believe he loves you completely and unconditionally, and have accepted it. But there is something nagging at you, that He loves everyone, and He only loves you because He loves everyone so he kind of ‘has to’.

Almost like you feel God is stuck with you. He is love, He loves us all, so of course He loves you. Now the reality is that God chooses to love us as well – but because we have grown up with the idea that God loves us, because it’s so ingrained in our thinking – even culturally, a lot of people think that God, if there is one, loves all of us. But it’s can easily become something that we just accept, God loves everyone, but He only loves everyone because He has to. If it wasn’t who He was to love us, He’d never choose us.

Maybe what you really want to hear, is that He likes you. Not just loves you, but likes you. That He chooses you. That if He didn’t ‘have’ to love you because of His nature He’d still choose to hang out with you and have relationship with you. Continue Reading…

One thing I like to do on the blog is to find and share resources that have helped and challenged me, and which will provoke questions in our minds and get us thinking. There’s a video which is a constant challenge to me, it’s been around for a while now and is constantly updated, called ‘Shift Happens’. You may have seen it before, but nevertheless I would recommend it, its probably one of the most challenging short films out there right now, and leaves us with lots of questions.

I’m going to leave you all to watch it, but as it goes on just ask yourself the following…

- What can it teach us?

- What questions does it raise?

- How can we answer those questions?

- What does it mean for our way of life?

- Is there another way for us to live – a different rhythm, a different story to tell?

Today I returned to work proper after the Christmas/New Year holidays (two days last week don’t really count…) and I have to admit, it was difficult to suddenly get back into the whole rhythm of things again. But one thing I found myself thinking, and even saying, was about it ‘taking a while to get back into the old rhythm again’.

Then I suddenly realised something. That the rhythm of my life as I had been living it at work wasn’t normal. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t necessary. I didn’t have to live that way. Continue Reading…

Epiphany is one of those Christian festivals that often gets ignored, forgotten or just swept under the carpet. It comes just after Christmas, which we all know has a tendency to take up not just Christmas day itself, but an entire month. Most of us are still recovering from the Christmas/New Year period and suddenly epiphany is upon us, almost before we’ve realised it.

Epiphany began as a celebration of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, what is sometimes called the theophany of Jesus Christ. Theophany is a term used in several different religions but it essentially means the appearance of a divine being to man, or a representation of God through man. So in the Christian context we see this when Jesus is born as the divine Son of God, essentially God and man in the same person, 100% human and 100% God, fully God and fully human.

Alongside Jesus’ suffering on Good Friday, this understanding of epiphany highlights more clearly that Jesus isn’t a distant figure, who floats five inches above the ground and doesn’t relate to us, but that He is a real human being, with the same experiences and temptations we have.

If God is fully man, then by definition He has to experience all the temptations, feelings emotions, dilemmas, frustrations and basic human experiences that we go through at one point or another, and therefore knows from first hand experience what it really means to be human.

As we reflect on this, it allows us to connect with Jesus in a much deeper way, as when things are difficult, when there are problems, when we just want to give up, we have a God who can come to us and say with total honesty, ‘I know how you feel’.

This is a God who isn’t distant, but who is right there with us in those moments, in the times he feels most distant, and has been there before HImself. A God who wants interaction with us, who wants relationship, and who even in our darkest moments can relate to how we’re feeling and thinking and is right beside us.

Another historic understanding of epiphany was the remembrance of the visit of the wise men – three wise men from the east, not kings as they are often mistakenly called. The important thing to reflect on here is that these men were not Jews, they were what were known as ‘Gentiles’. Many thought the Messiah had come only for the Jews, but in including this story the writers of the Bible are sending out a message, that right from the beginning, the message of Jesus wasn’t just for Jews, but for all people everywhere.

What they are really saying though is that it’s not about meeting a set of criteria, obeying a set of rules, or being a special kind of person. It states quite clear that the invitation of God through Jesus is available to all.

Epiphany says that the message of Jesus is for all of us, that no matter who we are, whatever our background, no matter what we do or say, that we are unconditionally loved, welcomed and accepted into God’s kingdom.

This epiphany, let us celebrate the God who became incarnate, who became one with us and shared fully in our human experience. And let us remember that no matter who we are, what we’ve done or whatever our background, that the message and love of Jesus is for all people and for all time.

We often live in a fantasy world. The world of advertising and media all around us feed us this idea of what life could and should be life, if only we had this product or that amount of money, or if we held a certain status – especially at this time of year. We all know of course that this is never going to happen to us, that we’ll never be rich, famous, or even have the real happiness that we always see in the movies.

Well we do don’t we?

Maybe it’s just me, but often I can get caught up in these ideals of what life is about. As a writer it’s easy to daydream – in some ways, it’s part of the job. But it’s so easy to get caught up inside your own fantasies of what you’d like your life to be, and I don’t think it’s just writers who do this. Continue Reading…

It’s Christmas. Time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the birth of hope. In a consumer society, it’s time for us all to go out shopping for presents for friends and relatives. But I’ve been thinking recently about the whole concept of what happens when we buy something, because I think it can speak volumes to us about the culture we live in, and the contrast it presents with Jesus economy, Jesus’ vision of how we should live.

It all begins with the transaction. In the process of purchasing a product, we are buying control of that product or service. We can do what we want with it, when we want it, how we want it, within certain external boundaries. But often when we buy something we don’t use it for what we bought it for straightaway. Sometimes we get home and forget why we even bought it or why we needed it.

Have you ever bought a DVD or CD, for example, but don’t watch or listen to it straightaway? But you still feel good inside don’t you? You feel satisfied and content.

Why? Continue Reading…

Last Advent you may remember I was asked to write a blog post for Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates, a Christian community in Seattle, USA, which was published on her blog Godspace. This year I was asked to do the same, and today my blog post ‘Know the reality’, about the reality of the Advent/Christmas story, is published on her site and you can find it here.

It’s part of a series being published on the site throughout lent about how Jesus can become real to us in this advent season, and there will be new blog posts published on the site every day of lent by various authors with their own take on this topic – obviously this started nearly a fortnight ago now, and all the other reflections can be found merely by looking at the ‘recent posts’ section of the site . Continue Reading…

I had a health check at work yesterday. They checked my blood pressure, my cholesterol levels, my weight, height and BMI (body-mass index). Now anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always had this problem. I love food, and hate exercise. I am not a natural sportsman, which doesn’t help, and I’m not a naturally confident person – certainly not in this area anyhow. I was the guy who was rubbish at sports and never got the girl at school, and I say that not to get any sympathy or pity, but as a statement of fact.

Bottom line is, this all affected how I saw myself.

All the things that happened to me in my teenage years, my relationship with my family, how I was treated at school, the messages I got fed (and the irony in that comment doesn’t escape me) created deep psychological scars which are still there to some degree.

I was really skinny as a teenager, but because I was bad at sports I thought I was fat and was told nothing about healthy living. So in the end this is what ended up happening, I became overweight, especially in my early-mid twenties, largely down to comfort eating, and it’s always been a mission to lose any weight. In the last 18 months or so I have lost a fair amount of weight – but the health check showed me I still needed to lose a couple more stone to really be healthy.

Reflecting on this a bit in the last day or so I began to see things a bit differently. I realised that one of the reasons I often eat is because my concept of love, my concept of how I receive people’s love is conditional – and this has deep implications for us all spiritually. Continue Reading…

Change.

It happens all the time, it’s inevitable. No matter what you do, your body is going to age and eventually it’s going to die. Your body is never the same, it’s always creating new cells to replace old ones. You get a new skin every 30 days (which also happens to be the moon cycle for months, and the length of the female menstrual cycle – strange coincidence, it’s almost like it’s all designed…). Things have to change. If they don’t then they become dated, they stand still and get left behind. Our character and personality changes all the time too. Every day we gradually become different as we experience different things. We are never static, we never stay the same. Many changes we don’t notice are happening until a period of time has passed, because many are small or internal changes where the fruit only comes out later.

I’ve said many times we are all on our own individual journeys with God – whether we know we are or not – and a lot of what appears on this blog is about my journey. God has really been putting me through some big changes in the last four years, and this site and my own writing has developed along with it. Continue Reading…

As you can see, I’ve changed the look of the site. Don’t worry though, you’re still in the right place. At least I hope you are. I felt it was time, given all God has been doing recently, that I freshened things up a bit round here, hope you like it.

But I have to confess, I’m giving some serious thought to taking a sabbatical from the blog, possibly for a month until the end of the year. I’ve not made up my mind yet, and want to discuss it with a few people. I’m trying to write and developing my creative gifts, especially writing. I know that I am a creative person, I love to make new things. I like writing & talking about Jesus, church and discipleship. I love creating things which help people connect with God in a deeper way.

I’ve progressed in developing this gift and started to take it more seriously, but I realised that as was doing this I was trying to take control of this gift. I was trying to come up with ideas myself. I forgot briefly that all the times I’d written before, all the times I created the my best stuff, was when I was open to God inspiring me, and I wasn’t worried about being in control of it, because it didn’t matter so much. Continue Reading…