A lifelong journey of prayer and action (part 5)

So, after the first four parts of the odyssey, can I answer the question?

Here it is again:

In your partnership with God, how has the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

I used to repeat the line about praying as if everything depended upon God and acting as if everything depended on us. Now, I just don’t believe it. I pray because everything depends on God and I need his perspective on absolutely everything. I also trust him to show me. I act as if everything depends on God too. I fret less about his work than ever, I worry about the lost and broken less now because I know that he holds everything. I read recently something about Jesus’ life looking pretty disorganised with his distractions, off-the-cuff actions and reactions, spur of the moment story telling and responses to people. Yet he seemed unfazed. He was completely at ease because He trusted his Father that the plan was in his hands, the job would be done. Other than ‘get to Jerusalem and die’ Jesus did not appear to have much of a plan. Jesus said that He just did what he saw his Father doing, and displayed a daily freedom because he knew his Father ‘had it covered’.

I’ve really benefitted from making the effort to chart my journey. Although it has taken several posts, it still is only a scant summary of the whole story. I’d be very interested to hear from others on this, so please take a moment – or longer – with the question and comment below.  

As to my own answer,  whether the balance between my role and God’s role, my prayer and God’s action has in actual fact changed, I can’t answer. What I can tell you is that from my point of view, there is a world of difference. God has defeated the external voices and the internal voices driving me to so much unnecessary or pointless or draining activity. Now he is blessing me with the freedom that should come with serving him. I spend more time with God than doing things for God, I spend less time trying to look busy on his behalf, and I  am more able to trust that He is about his business. I take God and his role more seriously than ever, and I trust him to do his part, which is clearly the larger part. I also trust that the role he gives me is to be taken seriously, and is worth my obedience. I am really happy with this balance, and happy to acknowledge that I need to let go more, to play more, to trust more, to explore more, dream more and embrace more adventure. I know I have a long way to go, but the journey is worth it. There are breathtaking views along the road towards the ‘life in all its fullness’ that He has promised us all.

A lifelong journey of prayer and action (part 4)

For the last few days, I’ve been telling my story as my way of answering the question:

In your partnership with God, how was the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

On event that gave illustration to the above question was my school reunion. I moved away from the town I grew up in when I was sixteeen, just after finishing school. This meant that I hadn’t seen most of the people from my school for twenty years. I probably wouldn’t have heard of any proposed school reunion, or entertained the idea of going had it not been for Facebook. I’d joined that social networking site because of the connections I was making in the present and the possibilites for future networking. I was therefore very surprised one day to see a photo of a thirty-six year old whom I hadn’t seen sinice she was sixteen, looking at me from my computer screen, requesting my facebook friendship. Once I’d accepted, there was an avalanche of old schoolfriends getting in touch. It was so fascinating to me to see how we’d all turned out that when a reunion was suggested, I was ready to make the long journey ‘home’.

I’ll never forget that evening. We all knew each other really well, because we’d shared those years together, even though we didn’t really know each other well. I was quite shocked when one bloke told me he’d often wondered what I’d got up to as he’d always looked up to me. I was a bit lost when another bloke said something similar half an hour later, recounting that I’d so helpful and a real inflence on him. One woman said I’d really been there for her at a really difficult time of her life. I was having trouble taking all this in, when an old friend sidled up to me and revealed that so many people were so happy to see me. She said many had made a point of telling how seeing me was a highlight, that they were glad that I’d travelled so far to be there. just when i was gettign a bit gobsmacked she went further. She knew I probably wouldn’t understand or remember any of what they were talking about, but that lots of people had found me helpful in those teen years, that I had said some really good stuff to them and been there for them, and had a big influence them.

Now, before you think I’m getting really big-headed, let me tell you she was right. I had no idea what she, or anyone else at the reunion was talking about. I have no memory of being there for anyone or saying anything encouraging or helpful or uplifting. I certainly cannot recall being a good influence on anyone (I’m sure one teacher told me the exact opposite). All I can remember is an awkward, emotionally repressed teenage boy who struggled to reveal any feelings at all.

I found all this a bit overwhelming….

…. and then I foud it encouraging. This was all when I was a teenager. This was before I knew what to do with my life. I had no plans, no ideas of what to do with my life of even what I could do at all. This was before any sense of calling or vocation, before any understanding of spiritual gifts, before any pastoral training or experience, before any ordination or commissioning, before any recognition of me as a pastor and a proffesional christian minister. This was me in the raw.

And even back then, before I was concious of anything called ministry, God was using me and giving me what I needed to encourage people and build them up and say some little thing to help them flourish. 

And I had no idea at all that I was doing it.

How is that for an example of God’s role and action, never mind my prayer and my role?

A lifelong journey of prayer and action (part 3)

This is part three of my story, told in response to the question:

In your partnership with God. how has the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

The next three years contained so much wrestling with God that at time it resembled a bloodbath. I guess this is because whilst there was space for God to do His role and action on the outside, there was still much space to be cleared internally. A lovely caring prophet eyeballed me one day in a very scary way and asked “Is He enough?” I answered yes, knowing what I’d given up for Him. The prophet asked again, “Is He? Is He enough?” (I felt like Peter on the beach… “Lord, you know…”). I wanted to shout “Stop asking me that question! If there is something I haven’t given up, something I am not doing, just tell me!”

I discovered that when God gives a confusing, difficult word, it is not to taunt us, but it is an invitation. In a way God was teasing me, he was provoking me and upsetting me. He was also wooing me, wanting me to come closer, inviting me to play with the puzzle, to search more deeply for the clues which would tell me why He’d asked such a question.

 I’m giving you this detail because I think it is important. I wrestled with God with such anger and frustration and desperation. “Why won’t you just tell me plainly what to do?” was a frequent question. God had promised a new house and garden with space for hospitality, prayer, creativity and growing things, where much of what he was calling us to would make sense… but it wasn’t here yet and there was no sign of it. After much research and prayer I realised what God was asking me not to do regarding the education of my children… but God seemed very quiet when it came to what I was to do. During this time a prophet would only have to come within a hundred yards of me, or on one occasion my wife, and they would be blurting out that I was a writer…. but I had written nothing. God prompted one person to tell me I should paint, and another person to send money for art lessons… but I couldn’t paint, had no time to paint, couldn’t find any art lessons or any time to get to any art lessons. God would tell me clearly what work I should not do, what jobs not to apply for, and eventually not to be employed by someone else at all… but said very little about what I should do or how to earn money. Many times God would direct us to do something that we did not have the money to do.

 And so it went on. Whenever I met someone new and they asked “What do you do?” I had no idea what to say. The one thing I was confronted with over and over again, in so many different ways, from so many different angles, was “Be still and know that I am God.” Gradually, step by step, with different experiences and friends helping along the way, I tried putting that verse into practice. The more I learnt to be still, the more I found I could trust God. The more I stopped fretting and asked God to show me things from his perspective, the more at ease I became. Also, I was getting used to spending all the money I had on something God was asking me to buy, knowing that this would mean that there was no money left for food for the rest of the week, and then God provide money or food in an unexpected way. I think God was delighting in finding new ways to surprise me with his provision. When this happens over a period of months and years, I suppose we naturally learn that we can trust God for our needs, and for the other things he has promised but which aren’t here yet.

 I spent some time with one friend who, after many years of discussing “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” actually seemed to be living it. Over all the years I had known him, I had never seen him so relaxed and at peace. He was working hard, but his work, for him, was easy. He spent enough time in prayer, enough time with his family, enough time relaxing, and enough time working. He was working less hours and less frantically than I’d ever seen him, but achieving so much more than ever; the fruit was more bountiful and spreading further than ever. His secret was in letting his Father show him what to do and then doing just that and no more.

 Alongside this, I was beginning to understand self-limitation. God gave us free will and in that one stroke, deliberately limited his influence over us and gave his power away. Jesus came to earth as a human, even a baby, and deliberately limited himself and gave his power away, even to the point of public execution. I could see how missionaries I knew had limited contacts, limited language, limited resources, yet were able to achieve so much. In my own life, I had limited time, limited opportunities to meet and encourage others, yet when I did get the chance to meet with someone after a month of trying, we would have such an important, God-ordained conversation.

God also showed me very clearly one day, that I was serving him in praying what he asked me to pray, where he sent me, when he sent me. This might only happen once in six weeks, but these rare opportunities were all that God needed for me to partner with him. Sometimes God sends me to a particular place in the city where I live, and when I get there I follow the small prompts I have to pray and do certain things. In this way, I have seen the landscape and environment and activity in those places change in ways that astonish and humble me. God takes me and my role seriously, and so should I. I might not be involved with the sick, the poor, the lost, the badly housed, the addicted every day. I may feel like I am not doing the work of the Kingdom at all sometimes. Yet, if I can surrender myself to Him, and do the little bit he gives me to do, then that is enough.

 I thank God for the turmoil of the last few years. Step by step, slowly but very surely, God has taught me to trust Him. When fear whispers that I have limited the opportunities for my children and hampered their chances of success, when doubt questions God’s promises and renames them fantasy, when frustration triggers anger at yet more foolishness, when the future looks further away and more impossible than ever… I am now in the place where God has nurtured me to the point of trust. He is my friend and I can trust him. When nothing he has said seems to be happening and nothing he has shown me seems real, He is enough.

A lifelong journey of prayer and action (part 2)

How would you answer the following question?:

In your partnership with God, how has the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

Yesterday I began recalling some of my own story as a response to that question. Part one covered roughly five years of full time paid ministry. Part two stretches across the next eight years:

Slowly, gently, using many other people along the way, God wooed me and challenged me to seek intimacy with Him as a priority and give more time to prayer.

 I started by giving up one day a month to join with a friend at a retreat house. We both knew we should pray more and both knew we wouldn’t do it unless we booked it in advance, with each other so that one of us cancelling meant letting the other down.

 A couple of years later, my church kicked me into an empty room two days a week. They knew God was calling me to spend two days a week in prayer, but that I would never do it unless they got involved. For a while I justified giving up so much valuable time by praying for my church and the town I lived in. Until God clearly, patiently, told me to stop that. I was to seek intimacy with Him alone. This was my priority.

 As I look back now, this was probably a tipping point. There was no going back. The importance of prayer found new weight and carried more influence in my diary. I would book prayer into my diary up to eight weeks in advance, so that any pressing matters did not squeeze out prayer, but instead slotted in around it. In learning to spend time with my Father I became a much better version of myself. My experience of prayer and my experience of ministry, alongside what I read in the Bible, came together to signal the way forward.

 My experience of ministry was starting to show me that however fresh and innovative the programmes and strategies I was adopting may have been, there really were no shortcuts or magic answers, and that the teasing theory of a church with exponential growth (if you just got the right conditions and right strategy) was just a lie. However many conversations I could have with people that would change their impressions of God, Christianity, or Church, I was simply going to have to leave most of the work to the Holy Spirit and the individuals on their own journey.

 My experience of prayer was that it was like breathing…. I couldn’t live without it. I simply could no longer operate as a man, a father, a husband and a pastor without responding to God’s call to spend time with him.

 What I read in the Bible was things that Jesus said like “My sheep hear my voice”, “I only do what I see the Father doing,” “You can do nothing apart from me” and, as above, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”.

 God called me further. He asked me to forget all my ideas of how I would do ministry, all my plans for how to plant and grow churches. He called me out to the wild places, to spend time alone with him and to simply offer grace to those who came to find me and the path I was following. Of course, this led me onto a direct collision course with so many fellow believers.  Prayer was important, they would tell me, but I was taking it too far. Yes, prayer is the work, prayer produces fruit… but when are you going to show us the fruit? When are you going to start reaping this harvest you have sown?

 This is when the balance of God’s role and my role really began to change. Slowly, painfully, I let go of all defence, all rational argument, of trying to preserve my reputation, my credibility as a planter and a pastor, my church, my ministry, my employment, my home, my future. Because God had asked me to, and for no other reason at all, I surrendered everything.

I was left with no job, no income, no ministry, no home, no idea about my future, and to be honest, no idea what God wanted me to do next. My wife and I, with our four children, spent three months without a home or money to find one, driving around staying with friends and family, desperately trying to hear God on where our future lay.

 Sorry if I’m labouring the point here, but it is important to say that I had no role and no action left. I felt so lost and confused and stupid, and a failure as a father. All because I’d tried to follow God.

But…

We’d done it. We’d stopped trying to preserve our own ministry, our own reputation, our church, our reputation and credibility…. it had all gone. Maybe with my role and my action gone, there would be more space for God’s.

A lifelong journey of prayer and action. (part 1)

Just over a week ago my friend posed me a question:

In your partnership with God, how has the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

This is the kind of question that would keep me talking late into the night. As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to spend time considering it, dwelling on it, sifting and weighing it.  As I did just that, I came to see that the answer to this question could easily be seen as the story of my life and ministry. I guess that is why I was asked to supply my answer.

However, I’m not  sure I can articulate a coherent answer because this is my life we are talking about. I’ve been busy living it, not recording it. I can only answer it from the perspective I have today. Indeed, it may be that in actual fact, my role and Gods role have not changed at all, only my perspective and understanding has changed.

I’d love to know how others would answer this too. So, I’ll post my story over the next few days and would love it if you would comment and share your journey, thoughts, and questions.

I will start with a memory I have of writing my part of the final assessment at the end of the two years training I received prior to being commissioned into full time Christian ministry. I expressed a desire to be so close to the Father that I would know just how to respond to every person and situation… just like Jesus did. I just knew that effective ministry needed to be based on finding quiet place to be alone with God and attempting to do what I saw my Father doing.

 So, what happened to that fine ideal when I tried to put it into practice? Well, first there was the battle of the urgent stealing my attention away from the important. Next there were the administrative demands… if I would only prioritise, I was repeatedly told, I could get all the necessary paperwork and organizational tasks done without any problems. I’m afraid that didn’t work for me; any time I set out priorities, prayer would come first, people second, and administration at the bottom of the list. The first decade or more of ministry carried with it the weight of many things simply not getting done. Ministry is never finished, there is always more to do. This is one reason why God invented Sabbath: a day of the week where his people stop, regardless of whether they are finished or not. I couldn’t seem to work that in, even though I really did try.

The expectation of others is a big factor as this creates the environment in which we operate. Many colleagues worked long hours and expected me to do the same. Many thought prayer was “all very well, but when are you going to do something?” The congregations I served had expectations as to my availability, visibility and work rate. As I saw many colleagues burn out and leave ministry, I resolved that I would work and pray in a way and for as much time as would make me the best pastor I could be. If that meant one day I was available and visible for fourteen hours, working for only five hours and praying for three the next day, and then taking a day off the next, then so be it. Well, that was my theory.

Prayer in those days seemed to be about bringing the day job, ministry, the needs of the church and the mission of the church before God. Any bible reading tended to descend into gleaning for sermons.

 In this environment I would try to make sense of Jesus’ words “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” I mean, that is ridiculous, isn’t it? Do you see any pastors taking it easy? Since when was ministry a light burden? I wanted to believe those words. I did believe those words, in theory. I just had very little experience of them in practice. Visiting people, preparing for meetings, leading worship. preaching, setting up outreach programmes, fretting about finance and administration… it was hard work at times.

Have you had visions of how you think things should be, or dreams birthed by scripture or the stories of others, that just don’t seem to be borne out in real life?

More of my story soon…

He interrupts normal service to bring you… DREAMS

“Jesus lived life with the clearest and highest purpose. Yet he veered and strayed from one interruption to the next, with no apparent plan in hand other than his single, overarching one: get to Jerusalem and die. Otherwise, his days, as far as we can figure, were a series of zigzags and detours, apparent whims and second thoughts, interruptions and delays, off the cuff plans, spur of the moment decisions, leisurely meals, and serendipitous rounds of storytelling.”

” ‘My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted,’ Henri Nouwen said near the end of his life, ‘Until I discovered the interruptions were my work.’ “

These two quote are from Mark Buchanan’s book, “The Rest of God”. They blew me away when I read them on holiday and their rumblings continue to affect me now I’m back at home.

As I returned to my normal life, refreshed and relaxed, I needed to trust that God would give me all I needed to serve his purposes. I was feeling unprepared and ‘out of the groove’. The first ‘test’, was a meeting I usually have weekly. Having nothing ‘prepared earlier’ to offer, I listened and chatted a bit and got to the point where, really, there was nothing else to do but pray.

As I prayerfully picked my way through the highlights of the conversation we’d been having, God interrupted and turned up the volume considerably.

IT IS TIME FOR DREAMS

I found myself praying for all kinds of people, that their reality would be smashed open by breathtaking, large scale, consciousness altering dreams, and that the very structures, networks, social conditions and environments around us would be transformed as a result of God’s explosive dreamgiving over this summer.

Sometime last autumn, I blogged about hope and the sensation I was having that we were entering a season where the long held promises of God were to be fulfilled, prayers answered and dreams become reality.( If I were a proper blogger I’d insert a link here. I’m not, I can’t, so you’ll have to find it in the archives yourself. Autumn 2009.. that means September to November, Hope, and that’s all the clues you’re getting).

I have seen many of the long held, long wrestled with dreams and promises of my friends answered. Since those entries there have been announcements of pregnancies, births, new homes, engagements to be married, building extensions, restarting of lapsed regeneration projects and more. I’m praying for more during the rest of this year.

However, even the most dramatic and wonderful answers to prayer, even the most breathtaking fulfilments of long held promises are but seeds and signposts of the greater dreams coming.

For me, even the notion that God is about to do this has changed the way I see the next month. The small things have suddenly become infused with possibility, because I know God is up to something.

I’m praying for the courage to receive these new dreams-beyond-our-dreams. This summer is going to see an invasion of Kingdom-bringing dreams, vastly beyond those we have been living for during the last few years. The dreams we have been carrying are mere shadows of the reality God is beginning to shape this season.

Let’s be open to receive, first the small indicators, then the huge scale dreams that I believe God wants to send this summer.

May God give you rest, and into that rest, may he pour big dreams.