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