Just Been Thinking

Back when my husband and I were part of God’s Squad, a group of motorcycle riders who hung out and shared Jesus with outlaw riders, John Smith, the president, said something that has stuck with me. He was preaching at the time - can’t remember the message 20 years on, but he was talking about being true to the truth, being real people with a real Gospel. He was telling us about an unholy attitude he had discovered in his life that had challenged him and remarked that he was impaled on his own preaching.

I get that.

If we believe what we say about Jesus and His life words, and if we are following Him, there will be times, often in hindsight unfortunately, when we realise we haven’t walked what we’ve talked.

Sometimes we just stuff up, get angry, shoot our mouth off or behave selfishly. Sometimes we deeply compromise what we know to be truly God’s heart and standard.

Either way, when that important moment of realisation and regret comes (conviction), it can feel like you have been pierced.

Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not, particularly if it leads to a searching understanding of your soul, and a humble honesty that prompts you to take the sin and your need of a new start to Jesus.

This is the power of the unchanging Word of God. It’s not shifting, morphing, compromising or ducking and weaving around us or our culture. It just is.

God stands steady and constant in the midst of any life that has been given to Him - loving us, shaping us, challenging us, and yes, when necessary, pulling us aside and correcting us. See, His vision of us is magnificent, eternal and all seeing. Nothing is hidden from Him. Our personalities, our experiences, our joys, passions, hurts and tragedies. Our attitudes, prejudices, weaknesses, insights and misunderstandings. His love doesn’t waver and neither does His truth. We are steadied by love and truth, we are inspired by love and truth, we are challenged by love and truth and we are re-oriented by love and truth. He HAS begun a good work in us and He WILL complete it.

What the Holy Spirit can do in your life and mine is amazing and vast. If we agree. If we are willing to be a duet with our Lord and not go solo.

I made a commitment when I started writing this year.

I made a commitment to you that I would talk with you once a week in some way or another. I even made a point about it. And, ironically spoke of my inability in this area!

I’ve been impaled on my own words!

I can’t do the once a week thing. I’m sorry. It isn’t working and was not realistic.

I hope you will forgive me.

I will talk with you often. (Sounds a bit like Jesus saying to His disciples - I’m coming back soon!!). It’s definitely going to happen, just don’t know when…and my idea of often may not be yours. But I would dearly love you to stick with me on this.

See one of the challenges I have as a follower of Jesus is that although I love much, I am not wired for methodically planning my life. I mentioned that in the ‘chicken bone’ blog. In some ways it frustrates me, and others I’m sure, but it is who I am and there’s other aspects of who I am that are great. So I just have to keep plugging away at it and asking Jesus…and my Dad…and Holy Spirit to help me. You too. Speak to you…soon!!

Love and truth to you.

Ann

Note to self: Inheritance has already been received, not in it’s final entirety of course, but definitely in terms of freedom, authority and identity.

Note to self: Spend it wisely, confidently and with thankfulness. It’s a big one.

Note to self: Remember Jesus the Christ, Father and Holy Spirit, the one and only God, who gave you your inheritance…and love Him back.

Note to self: Pay it forward…

Love, Ann

HOPE…
Beyond what we can see or even imagine.
Hope is, for me anyway, the infinite space that God inhabits.
It’s full of creative power and compassion, because it’s full of Him.

I’m doing a couple of paintings about hope at the moment.
It’s making me think about how to represent such a concept.
Colour, absence with the potential for presence, confusion with the potential for clarity,
darkness with the potential for light. Maybe a progressive revealing of truth, pattern, form.
Lots of paradox and mystery.
Hmmm.
Painting ‘hope’ on a canvas is like representing the vast truth of God
with a phrase on a page.
But…I love a challenge.
May God’s hope expand your insides.

Love, Ann

For the last two-and-a-half months I’ve been downloading a podcast from iTunes onto my iPod and listening to a guy called Brian reading Scripture each day for about 30 minutes. It’s mid May and I’m catching up…I started on 1st January in mid February and I am near the end of April now and closing in fast.

Daily Audio Bible is a big God idea which is beautifully simple and works. I am so addicted. It really works for me and I’m getting so much out of it. I feel as if God is stacking my shelves every day. It’s great.

This fella reads a piece of Old Testament then New Testament, a piece of a psalm and then a piece of a proverb. He has a really simple beautiful soundtrack running behind his voice and after I got over the American accent, which is very benign, it was very easy to listen to.

He reads sequentially through the Bible every day and has been doing so now for about four or five years. By the end of one year, you’ve been right through the best book in the world and then he starts again and you grow and grow and grow, as does he. He reads fresh every day and includes you as part of a massive and growing virtual community. At the end of the readings he talks about what he’s read, sometimes a bit about his day and what God’s doing in the ‘DAB’ community and then there’s a time for people who’ve rung in for prayer from other listeners.

He is a sound engineer and music producer, going as far out into webtech world as he can with his trusty team in order to get the Word out in audio form. I encourage you to have a listen online and a look around the website at www.dailyaudiobible.com or search for it through iTunes as a podcast. Wonderful stuff. Go Brian! Our God is a techo!!

Love Ann

So I’m sitting at the dinner table last night and we had just finished dinner. The dishes were still there but everyone had scattered.

Peter was doing the third of the days’ taxi runs with one of our daughters and I was ‘just thinking’.

I happened to focus on the two plates in front of me and noticed how very different the post dinner arrangements on the plates were.

Look at that….

It may seem not particularly profound to you, and possibly somewhat bizarre, that I would share this totally random image.

But what struck me about this little vignette is that it is SO much the way Pete and I are individually wired. His plate is on the left by the way. Neatly stacked chicken wing bones, one uninvaded potato, and a full glass yet to be savoured.

Mine…well as you can see, there is no evidence of any process other than eat, drink and enjoy.

Funny thing is, if you know us, this is pretty indicative of our personalities. Kind of a symbolic or metaphorical image.

Pete is an orderly sort (not anal by the way) who approaches life steadily and sequentially. He has lots of self discipline and enjoys life practically and relationally.

I, on the other hand, am more random and would say I approach life more as an adventure with lots of possible paths. I don’t have as much discipline as I would like to (work in progress that one!) and I enjoy life relationally and artistically.

These fundamental differences have been both difficult and beneficial in our marriage. We have to work at understanding each other because our essential languages are very different. But I can honestly say, if and when, we are able to appreciate the differences as differences and not faults (!) and we cooperate rather than compete (my way’s better than your way) we are very complementary. I need his order and he needs my adventure. Iron sharpens iron.

That’s why this dinner scene struck me. One - because I have to be watchful over my own reactions to the differences in Peter and I and this illuminated it. Two - because I have always been fascinated and challenged by the diversity of personality and life approaches I see in the people I know. We are an interesting bunch and, if you like to communicate, support and enjoy people, this is a big one!

Now some might look at those plates and judge, others might not even see what I see, some wouldn’t care and maybe one or two would look and stop, laugh and think. Isn’t it great that God has worked such uniqueness into us. It might be more predictable and orderly if we all thought the same and did the same but it would be a whole lot less creative.

Fortunately in God’s personality, both order and creativity are in glorious, beautiful balance. Look at Creation. Vision - His love and creativity conceive the plan. Action - His order brings the cells of life together and makes it happen. The same is echoed in how we as humans, created in His image, bring children into the world. The same is echoed in how we build and manage life.

Sadly, sin, in judgement, competition, greed and selfishness, wars against the vision of oneness God has for us in Him, Creation and each other. Sin is a cancer that eats away at the creative order and balance of our existence in the universe. It eats away at the adventurous freedom of love.

Grace and forgiveness…and humility (!!) are God’s antidote. Ironically, the restorative need for grace, forgiveness and humility throw us right back to a dependence on God himself, bringing us round to cooperative complementary relationship. Double helix. DNA. The building blocks of life. Hmmmm - I need to think!

Amazing where a dirty dinner plate can take your thoughts isn’t it!

Love Ann

I hate wars. They kill people and breed fear.
I hate cruelty. It breeds fear and kills joy.
I hate jealousy. It kills joy and breeds strife.
I hate fear. It breeds strife and kills life.
I hate hate. It is death.

Jesus said
‘My command is this: Love one another as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’
- John 15:12,13

Lest we forget.

Easter was good this year. What makes Easter good for me?

Time to slow right down and just chill with our family.

Focusing on what the Kingdom of God is, and isn’t, and whether I/we are active in advancing the territory of that Kingdom.

Also, time to consider Jesus Christ the man: who He was, how He lived, how He impacted the world He lived in, what He loved and didn’t love, how He did what He did.

What did He mean by ‘it is finished’?

Who is He now?

Mellow, soft-edged autumn weather where I appreciate the warmth of summer past and get a shiver of anticipation as the winter cold licks the edges of each day.

Big Easter tides crashing enthusiastically against the boardwalk at our surf beach and skies rinsed softer pastel shades than summer intensity blue.

Life’s just that little bit quieter somehow than a couple of months ago and I’m thinking about my next painting.

‘Hope’.

love Ann

Easter - such a glorious, powerful message from Father, Son and Holy Spirit, saying I have a plan to save you, I love you with everything I am. Come to me, live through me. In Christ you have fullness of life eternally. Physical life and physical death are not the whole story. We are spirit as God is Spirit, we are flesh now but we will exist beyond this life, and Jesus has gone before us. Even today, He still invites us to follow Him. Without Him we cannot be in the presence of the holiness and splendour of God our Father and Creator. With Him we will live life beyond what we can ever imagine. ‘Follow me’, He calls to us now, today, in kindness, love, generosity, truth, justice. One precious life at a time He calls for us to join Him and live so differently.

The fabric of our biological world is fraying. Holes have been torn into the earth, forests removed, ice caps melt and oceans warm.The fabric of the atmosphere is thin, tearing under the strain of factories pumping toxicity and gases through it. People stagger under the strain of living in poverty AND affluence. So many long for peace, rest and meaning.

No ‘BIG CHOCOLATE BUNNY MESSIAH’ can save us. He is inconsequential, sweet to taste, hollow and signifying nothing. In the heat of a world buckling under the weight of use and abuse, this chocolate idol trotted out once a year to satisfy the masses is a fragile, melting monument to consumerism.

Jesus Christ has saved us. He still stands, no longer flesh and blood, yet warm, alive and constant in this fragile world. His ways of love and wisdom have not changed, His offer of eternal life and belonging is always available, His Holy Spirit is always here. He is not absent, but present, in the midst of our global convulsions He steadily, faithfully, lovingly calls us to understand that there is more to life than life.

Christ has lived and died and lives again. Selah…

love, Ann

Here’s a picture I took. Storm coming over Eden. Intense, brooding.
You know when the air gets heavy and still on a hot day before a storm front.
Like the atmosphere is holding its breath.

It made me think about the statement Jesus made in Matthew 16, about how we can read the weather but are all but oblivious to the times. He was talking about the fact that the Pharisees and Sadducees (who incidentally didn’t get on with each other) were fine to read the weather by the look of the sky but couldn’t see that Jesus, the Messiah, had literally come amongst them.

Now, here we stand, reading the weather, reading the changing climate, the environmental, cultural devastation of greed, society, culture, politics, our own selves, and we know that Jesus said He will return. I wonder if it looked and felt like this before God sent Noah into the boat (ark) he’d been commissioned to build. Were the storm clouds brooding? Was it heavy and still, whilst people just kept going, kept playing, kept working, oblivious to the time? The storm let loose from the sky and the land, too big to stop, too big to quickly take cover. Yet Noah had been building that boat and warning that generation for decades in plain sight. Much to their disdain and amusement.

I wonder how connected we are to what’s happening in our times.

Sometimes a storm takes a while to climb over the horizon and form, growing, intensifying. On our coast, we usually watch it building, keep surfing, swimming, lying on the beach etc until the lightning gets too close, the rain drives us off the beach or the wind whips the sand up to sandblast level. Then we jump into action, call the kids in, pack up the gear, move. Fast. Take shelter if we can. Watch it from a safe place. Go home.

I was talking to a friend of mine a month ago. We hadn’t had any rain for three months at home, everything was crispy. She works in marine biology and we were talking about ecosystems, climate changes and events the world has been experiencing. She was in tears at what she sees and is afraid for her young children’s future. She does not yet believe God and His story of the universe and our world, nor does she yet have the hope of a future for her family in the safe heart of Jesus. She sees the storm. So do I. I also see a shelter. The big hands and heart of our God who made it all and knows the beginning and the end, who has given us a place to shelter through the storm to come. I want to take her there. The ark is waiting.

Love, Ann

OK, I’m sorry I have been off the air for so long. Hello?…Is there anybody out there?

I have a confession to make…I often have next to no discipline. I have been slack.

Lateral, creative, go with the flow, not so good at the straight line stuff. CCCCOMMITMENT.

Poor editor! He’s very gracious…

I’m making a commitment to writing at least once a week, or maybe painting or photographing.

I will communicate in some form at least once a week.

Do you have aspects of your approach to life that need work? Come join me.

Together in our imperfection. You work on your stuff, I’ll work on mine and we’ll walk it out each day.

I’ll see you on the other side when Jesus has put it all together or maybe meet you along the way somewhere.

Love Ann