On Pomp and Circumstance…

Yesterday evening was my first time participating in a formal academic graduation ceremony. I’ve been involved with various commissioning and graduation services in the past, what with the various internships and courses that have filled the last few years, but this was the most full on ceremony that my studies have led me to so far.

The ceremony was held at the Christ Church Cathedral, which is a fairly central and large church that sits on a hill at the top of the main street of Nelson. Graduation is a goal – I know that there were moments during the last year of my degree when I’d walk through town and look up at the Cathedral, knowing that we’d be graduating there at the end of the year – but it’s also a milestone. Last night was a chance to stop, and reflect on the last three years of study. There have been successes, and challenges, and growth…

I think that the ‘pomp and circumstance’ – if you will – of such a ceremony, is positive. On one level, it seems like a lot of fuss and could be considered to be a bit elitist… but on the other hand, it represents three years of learning and growth. Particularly in a theological community, I think that graduation should represent more than the individual intellectual achievements of graduands, but (hopefully) more of the full picture – that at its best, studying theology is both academic pursuit and personal transformation, both of which need to be done alongside other disciples of Jesus.

On the perfections of God…

“What is meant by God’s perfection? In this context, God’s perfection refers to God’s metaphysical rather than his moral greatness. God’s perfection is not only God’s maximum moral goodness; it is the repleteness of his life, the fullness or completeness of his being, the entirety with which he is himself. As the perfect one, God is utterly realised, lacks nothing, and is devoid of no element of his own blessedness. From all eternity he is wholly and unceasingly fulfilled. Conceived in this way, God’s perfection stands in close proximity to such divine attributes as his infinity – that is, the unrestricted character of his being and of his presence to creatures – or to his sovereignty – that is, the entire effectiveness of God’s righteous rule over all things. As the sum of the divine attributes, however, ‘perfection’ is a more comprehensive concept, indicating the full majesty in which God is who he is.”

- John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (T & T Clark, 2005), 155.

The perils of the supermarket trolley

I realized this afternoon that I am quite hopeless in a supermarket. I share cooking with the three other girls I flat with, and we each cook one night a week.

If we were to be productive, we would go shopping together, plan meals, and make ONE trip… instead, we usually all make individual trips to the store, and for me, I will quite often make multle trips to the store over the space of a week. Silly, I know… but planning takes head space that I don’t normally have.

My odd shopping schedule dealt with, the major problem is that I don’t usually plan what I will cook. Most weeks I will pick up a free recipe card, find a packet mix, or wander to the meat section to see what is looking good and then buy the rest of my ingredients based on that. Other times, like today, I wander. I meander. I peruse. I spend half an hour shopping, and at the end of it can still go through the express checkout because I found six ingredients.

This meandering… drifting… is dangerous because it means I will sometimes be halfway down one aisle and realize I missed what I needed, so execute a u-turn or three point turn to get what I need. Woe to any small child who is in my way, as they are 25% more likely* to be run over by me than by anybody else in the store. It’s also dangerous for the sanity of other people in the store, who I am sure start to question why I have passed them for the tenth time in as many minutes.

And because my trolley is usually not very full, it sometimes glides faster than I expected… I have caused trolley traffic jams and trolley crashes.

Next time, suggest I take a basket instead.

* 39% of statistics are made up… But you knew that.

Confident in love…

Last January I attended the New Zealand YWAM Jubilee – celebrating 50 years of Youth With A Mission – immediately followed by the Call2All missions gathering. It was incredible to spend a week surrounded people who feel like home for me… there isn’t a YWAM base or much of an ongoing ‘missional’ presence in Nelson beyond the local churches and ministries. However, the moments that stand out to me weren’t so much to do with the missional aspect, but with an ambush that God set up that significantly changed the shape of how I have spent my year. Having gone right to the edge of burnout the previous October, I thought I was dealing with it well and would be fine to continue in an active ministry role, but within the space of a half hour prophetic conversation with two friends, it became very clear that things had to change.

The short story of a long journey was that after some further conversations and evaluation, I stepped out of ministry entirely, eased up on my study schedule, and sat in a place of emptiness and brokenness for months. This is an excerpt from my journal at that point,
“I want to be needed… and yet somehow the fact that God doesn’t need me… but he wants me… has failed to make a deep and lasting impression in my heart.There is this experiential gap between ‘knowing’ I am loved by Him… and experiencing that love. And I want that gap fixed.”

And so, today I found myself thinking about that conversation that I had almost a year ago, and in particular the challenge that I needed to be awakened to love… it’s a phrase that was prayed over me then, and a phrase that I’ve adopted this year, asking the Lord to awaken me to love. As I was walking home from work, mulling over this general concept of love and praying through it, the phrase “Confident in love,” came to mind. There is a difference between being awakened to love, and being confident in love. Being awakened to love means we become aware of what we have not known and experienced before… of the areas in our lives where there is not real engagement with the reality of being loved by the Father, and we are no longer able to settle back into the same dull rhythm without intentionally killing the longings that are in our heart – longings that were placed there in order to lead us back to the One who is Himself love.

Being confident in love is different to simply being awakened… confidence is defined as, “the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something” by the Oxford Dictionary. We move beyond awareness of what we don’t know… and consistently experience a reality. Confidence is built on history, on trust, on prior knowledge and revelation… we move into a new level of surety, of faith, that removes insecurity and doubt. I haven’t yet reached a point where I am consistently confident in the knowledge of God’s love for me and over me… but I think that’s a good thing to be going after in this season.

t.r.u.s.t.

I went to bed at 9pm, and now it’s 12pm. I’m sitting at my computer, WIDE awake, attempting to get my mind off my lack of sleepiness. This is all compounded by the fact that tomorrow I am doing my first solo supervisor shift at work – I’m a little nervous, and the worry of potentially sleeping through my alarm before my 7am start would usually keep me from sleeping well. There are a number of things weighing on my mind tonight… nothing significant, but little things that niggle at me in the night…

What does it mean to trust? I have realised that I have a gap in my trusting in God – I trust Him to lead me when everything is going well and I am responding and being led well… but I don’t have the same initial impulse towards faith when I know that internally, not everything for me is as strong as it should be. I don’t always trust that God will effectively and wisely lead me out of the holes that I so frequently manage to dig for myself and find myself in.

Romans 8:28-29 has been one of my favourite meditations lately. Most Christians can quote the fact that God works all things out for good – but not many who I have asked lately can go on to expand on the context. Paul writes in 8:29, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” In some ways, that brings a whole lot more clarity to the ‘working out for good’ that is promised in the verse prior – the good is that I would begin to look more like Jesus. I just have to translate that – that everything will work out for good in a way which develops the character of God within me – into my midnight niggles…

Dreaming of Adventure

I’m a dreamer and a planner. I always have been. There was a period of about three years between the age of 9 and 12 where I was constantly using our computer (WOW! a real computer… Windows 95 and everything!) to create little documents which I would then get my parents to sign… all in the pursuit of going to Holland where one of my best friends of the time lived. I used to come up with crazy plans of how I would get there and how I would save and even sold jam at a farmers market for a whole Saturday… all to no avail. I still haven’t been back to the Netherlands.

One of the big things for me in the last year has been learning how to dwell… my favourite translation of Ps 37:3, rather than saying ‘dwell in the land and do good’(NIV) reads ‘dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.’ (NASB). I love the imagery that is produced by that last phrase – cultivate faithfulness. Cultivation means to prepare and use land for growing crops, to acquire a skill, to improve or develop, to break up soil in preparation for farming. I want to be preparing my life for faithfulness… to be intentionally developing habits and patterns and rhythms of living that promote faithfulness within me.

But what am I faithful to? Is it to the plan, to the program, to the pursuit of success… or is it faithfulness to the quiet voice of God in His pre-eminently wise leadership. It’s faithfulness to the One who is faithful – not a negative theology, stating that since humans are faithless, God must be perfectly faithful, or an eminent theology, stating that God is the perfection of all good that humans are… simply the God who describes Himself as the God who IS. He cannot change or be inconsistent with Himself – His very nature defines that. If I truly trust that the way He is leading my life is good and just, then that trust lends itself to a heart that is settled and secure in where I am right now.

I have a tendency to always be dreaming of the next big thing… the next adventure, the next plan, the next exciting location… yet, that’s not the way to grow in maturity. It’s not the way to grow in faithfulness and it certainly isn’t the way to position myself among people who will love me and call me out and give me a good kick in the pants when I need it. Without community – people to run with, and journey with, and to spur each other on – our spiritual development risks becoming increasingly selfcentred and will result in severe navel gazing syndrome.

These thoughts were spawned by a meeting I had this morning with one of the senior lecturers of the postgraduate studies programme I am planning to enter once I finish my degree at the end of next year. I’m hoping to go to Israel for a semester abroad as part of my Masters… a pretty expensive trip, which does require a certain level of financial planning now. I want to make sure that I’m not uprooting my heart… and if this trip is going to do that, I’ll have to reevaluate the plan.

Finding a delicate balance

I’ve maintained extensive blog silence for the last year, mainly because I’ve had nothing to say. Nothing profound, nothing that was suitable to broadcast onto the web… in many ways this last year has been a hard season – but ultimately, it has proven to be a very good season. In the grace of God, and in His perfect timing, He dealt with some of the areas where I was ‘crooked’ internally – in the way I was doing life, in my motivations, and simply in needing to learn my own limits. Suffice it to say, the journey is not over, but I’m no longer spending my prayer life complaining about feeling trapped, or spending forty hours a week volunteering at Church and putting my school work and my prayer life second place.

I now find myself in a different place of managing tensions – one which I think will likely become the subject of many coming entries on this blog as I wrestle through a balancing act that there are not many people in my world who really understand. I am talking about the distance that I find between studying at a theological college, and the local church and ministries that I am involved with. I love most of my lecturers, and I am wholeheartedly into everything that the church I go to stands for… but sometimes, I don’t get it.

I am studying at a small, very traditional campus, completing a three year degree in Theology. At the moment, having just finished my second year, I am tracking towards going straight into postgraduate study for a further two years. My university subjects are things like ‘Luke’ and ‘Trinitarian Theology’ and ‘Psalms’ and ‘Biblical Interpretation’… most of which I adore.

I also go to a local church where we are going after signs and wonders, healing, deliverance, and believe that God has restored the five fold offices (apostle, prophet, teacher, pastor, evangelist) to equip EVERY believer to move in the power and authority that is ours through Jesus Christ. If Jesus said it, we get to do it.

Both of these sound great – except that for my theologian world, all revelation and experience must be only considered in the light of the Word, theological thought and tradition, plus we don’t talk about things like deliverance, healing and prophecy today… and in my church world, there isn’t a lot of way to connect the ‘theological ways of thinking’ that I am learning, with what we are going after. I find myself feeling caught in the middle, and determined to wrestle this through… determined that there must be a way to be a raving Pentecostal, in love with Jesus unto a life of intimacy with Him, aflame with His desire for the nations, looking towards the reality that He will return… but to be theologically credible in the academic world of theology.

I have no answers… yet.

when the cord gets broken…

This afternoon I got a phone call from the computer store, so I went in, planning to pick up my laptop power cord which got sent away for repairs. It was working, but only intermittently. Something had worn away inside the cable and to make it charge, I had to either hold the worn section at a certain angle, or position it and then leave something heavy on top so it wouldn’t spring out of shape.

The manager saw me coming and sighed, “I wish you’d called first… because we don’t have your cord, and it was too hard to explain on an answer machine.” Supposedly my cord had worked fine when it was sent to Auckland… and the problem was something to do with the specific combination of my cord, with my laptop. Now they need my laptop and my power charger before they can fix the problem. The issue with this is that I use my laptop every day for study… so finding a time to send it away is going to be hard.

I’ve been a bit of a silent blogger the last three months. It’s not because I don’t love you (*hugs the reader*) but more that every plan I had made for this year fell to pieces in a couple of weeks. I’m no longer working at Church, I’m no longer in the part-time job I had lined up, and I’m back at Bible College full time. None of which were on the radar two months ago.

All that to say – keep watching – I’m on a journey, and I hope its going somewhere good…

Life of a Nelson Ninja

I’m currently sitting on the bus driving to the airport.

Yep, that’s right, Wellington airport link now have free wi-fi! And that makes this drive so much more pleasant… add to that the fact it’s a public holiday and there’s like no traffic on the roads and its a reasonably nice drive. Especially since the bus is very empty and I don’t have to put up with any random people sitting next to me… public transport has its flaws and the scary people that use it are amongst them.

Christmas Eve was a birthday BBQ in the evening for Mum’s 63 birthday… Christmas Day wasn’t particularly nice weather since it was grey and overcast. We went round to Lisa and Drew’s house (sister and her husband) for a brunch in the morning with everyone, then everyone scattered to different places for the afternoon. In the ultimate social event of the year, Lisa, Drew, Graham (Drew’s brother) and I went to the beach in Days Bay… where we sat on the beach in a line for an hour and all read our own books. It then got even more windy and cold, so we returned to their house… and then in the evening we all converged on the parents house again for dinner.

It’s always nice coming back to Lower Hutt, and I usually try to time my visits around a Sunday so that I get to go to the services at Hope Centre. Hope Centre was the Church I attended for about 5 years before I moved to Nelson, and I love the fact it still feels like family… I can walk in and while there are lots of new faces and I don’t know everyone, there are enough faces and hugs that while its no longer my home city or my home church, it still feels like I belong there. Yesterday was no exception… including the usual Holy Spirit blasting that has been rampant at evening services for as long as I have been going there.

Today, it’s back to Nelson and hopefully back to the sunshine!

Avatar: the Kate review

I’m home for the holidays. Because Christmas and summer collide, the entire Christmas-New Year period extends until at least mid January for most, and into February for students. I’ll be heading back to Nelson in a few days, but for now I am with my family in Wellington.

Tonight I went to see Avatar with my sisters and nephew (arriving slightly late to a grumpy sister waiting in the foyer with my ticket; in self defense I did tell her to go in and I’d text when I arrived.) Visually, it was stunning… however, while it was filmed and edited in New Zealand, it does not look like that here! Most of the graphics came from inside the Weta Studio building. The dialogue was okay, the storyline was okay… but what really got me was the creativity and imagination.

Movies are powerful as a form of entertainment, because they unlock our imaginations. The question that flowed through my mind as I watched these incredible images of another (non-existent) world was ‘Just how much better is eternity going to be than this.’ To be honest, the idea of spending eternity singing choruses from overused praise songs doesn’t draw me… but the idea of an eternity encountering the One whose eyes burn with fire when he looks at me does. The idea of being in a bright shiny room for eternity doesn’t make my heart beat a bit faster… but the reality that one day the Lord will fully renew and restore the earth does.

Avatar made my heart long for a different reality… to be in an epic adventure, to be romanced, to find myself doing things I never imagined… to find myself at home in a world that isn’t my own. I know it’s there… it’s here and it’s coming… better than the movies.