Sting - Fragile

Sometimes life can feel fragile......love this song by Sting, beautiful.

Sentimental

I have just discovered U2’s latest offering Invisible via you tube which then took me to a cover they did of song by Aslan called This Is…..straight away I was took back to the mid to late  80’s when I was in a band called Tekoa with Kelvin Strode, John McMahon, Nick Turrell and later joined by Mark Willis.

Sometimes you don’t recognise or acknowledge the times you are living in and how good they are, maybe you only see later with age and hindsight but anyway we had some great times, great fun and dare I say times when we felt we touched a bit of heaven.

I have just reconnected with another long standing friend;  Ravi (Sahota) and we have been talking about the past days of our previous church we were in together in Birmingham, and what sometimes happened in our times of worship and dare I say what happened at times when we were playing in Tekoa…..’portals’ were opened to heaven… the divine entered the room and maybe in only a small way we were changed, marked branded forever with something.

You see when you touch the divine nothing else will do……I have spent over time, through the years between then and now,  in the wilderness, wondering where is the God of those divine times….. The God of the miraculous.

Let me put it another way. I now run addiction clinics and have a good working knowledge on the power of addiction. Crack cocaine is the worst addiction. You are always chasing the first hit…a hit that lasts at best 3 minutes, and after 10 minutes you will want another. The horrible reality with Crack is that you can never get that first high again….you are seeking, chasing the impossible.

It feels like that for me at the moment……I look back and want to experience the divine like I did years ago. I don’t want counterfeit, or staged, I want the divine, the immortal, the eternal, and the divine…the touch of heaven.

The Celtics had a word for this…’Thin Place’. They believed there were certain ‘Thin Places’ where heaven touched earth.

Tommy Tenney put’s it brilliant in his book ‘God Chasers’…”When God shows up what is the problem”!

It’s not about experience for the sake of experience…...maybe that was the mistake of the past……it’s about receiving and being so full of God, the divine, that when we disperse we naturally carry away that which we’ve been filled with. We can’t help but affect those we simply encounter. Acts 2 anybody!

Our evangelistic models have become too forced and powerless. If I spray myself with aftershave people will smell me regardless! I can’t force the smell of the aftershave on anyone….it ‘s a law of chemistry. It’s the same for us and God’s presence! There is a law!

The problem for many of us is that we haven’t bothered to get into the presence of the Father, His fragrance….we go wearing nothing but ourselves…no aroma or worse still the aroma of self, me, the world…who knows!

So what is this…I don’t know…..maybe it’s only for me…but I just want to say if you’re having a wilderness time it won’t last forever.  God is graceful, forgiving, faithful, loving and merciful. Believe me I have experienced this more than ever over the last 4 years, but I also realise it’s a journey and no one else can walk that journey for you.

So in closing let me be really spiritual with a line from Shawshank Redemption; Andy in his letter to Red says…”Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Love Andy X

Grandad 2

Every now and then this happens....in fact I believe this is the second time I have blogged about my granddad but I either can't get to sleep or wake up early and then can't get back to sleep....the latter was one of those mornings....waking at about
3.45am...trying to sleep and failing miserably.
And so as I awoke i remembered my, dream we were on a camping trip and with us was my granddad, as I remembered him from my days as a child. Larger than life, full of smiles, humour and fun. That was who he was...certainly to me anyway. But then as I dwelt on the dream for a moment I realised how much I miss him...he died in 1998.

He was to me an unconditional man i.e.) he was always the same, no matter what I did, said, behaved he didn’t change towards me, he was always happy to see me, his love felt absolute, constant i.e.) unconditional.

I knew him two ways...most as my granddad but also as my Sunday School Teacher (for a year at least). Everyone loved his class, as I said previously he was always funny (sometimes unintentionally)but more than that you got something from him that went deep.

We probably didn’t realise this as children, we just enjoyed as much the Bluebird Toffees he would hand round at the end of the class. Maybe that’s the thing with deep it takes time to come through. This is what I feel at the moment...deep.

I am learning from him now. I even feel that part of his legacy is being lived out in me. In part I am doing what I am doing because of him. I hope I am doing him worthy. I hope that one day I will see him again, but in the meantime I will try and live life as he did, with fun, humour, purpose, determination and most of all love. Andy

Patience

For those that know me they will know that patience is not one of my strengths. I am often living tomorrow at the expense of today, always feeling life should be happening quicker and speedier that what it is. This can be very frustrating at times! Often these feelings come from a place of insecurity and lack of trust. Our thinking will go like this..."if it doesn’t happen now I’m going to miss out". This thinking implies life does not have an ultimate purpose or plan. Contradictory to my previous confession I believe that my life has a plan and for that matter an ultimate purpose. The psychologist Viktor Frankl said "Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life. Everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it" We need to trust this absolute truth and stop feeling we are in a race against the rest of the world....the only person we are truly racing is ourself. Andy

Make it count

Too many times we hear great stuff but then do absolutely nothing with it. The past few months have been an 'interesting' time for me. In fact it has probably been the toughest 6 months I have gone through. I feel I am now emerging from the other side. Certainly not the same but equally still unsure as to who I am or indeed who I want to be! I am ok with that though and feel sure over time I will find what I need (all sounds very ambiguous I know) but hey this is where I am! Life is simple but at the same time incredibly complicated, challenging and easy, fun and hard work, joyful and sorrowful.....contradictions all the way today!! But one thing I know is that it has to mean and count for something. Whatever that something is. I can’t drift through life and think when I come to the end of my days what have I done, what was it all about. My / your life has to count for something. Andy