The Joy Challenge: Easter Sunday 20th March 2014

Thank you for journeying with me on this relentless pursuit of joy. Today is the last day of the Lenten Joy Challenge though really it is but another daily opportunity to continue pursuing, to keep telling ourselves where our hope is. I am struggling with being ill. The world, in love and concern but without definite hope, says keep your chin up. That is not good enough. I do not keep my chin up in my own strength. I do not by myself raise my head, induce positive thinking and plod on. I hope in god. I tell my soul to do it. Psalm 42. This is what today is all about. The reminder that hope is real, tangible, eternally promised. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. He is risen and so will we be. We have resurrection hope that shatters through the world's night, through the darkness of yesterday - the dead day, the dark day, the day where Jesus is still in the tomb - and into the glorious light of Easter morn. 

The slam poet, Mary Kate Makkai says, "You remind me to get up and get on with it, you remind me that flowers can bloom through stone, remind me that Jesus Christ promised heaven to a dying thief, remind me that it has to get darker before you can see the stars.' Yesterday it was oh so dark: friends fled, disciples grieving, Satan victorious, the demons shouting with jubilant joy. But death was the foundation for God's greatest victory; the moment of God's seeming absence from his son on the cross is oh so beautifully re-understood in the light of that same abandoned son sitting at his right hand in glory. He is risen indeed. Thus, on this day of days we cry, Oh death - oh sickness, oh suffering, oh pain, oh plodding on, oh failure, oh repeatedly sinning in the same way - where is your sting? Where is your victory? He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. Come on soul, REJOICE

The Joy Challenge: Good Friday 18th April 2014

Last night, Hamish and I went to see Noah at the cinema and I came away feeling really angry and confused. Forced to confront the judgement of a God who cannot bear what we do to each other and to this world, I came home sad and fearful and thinking about Hell. I slept very little, mulling over the film, frustrated by a distortion of God muddled with moments of truth, and yet as I ran this morning all I could think about was Jesus. Not Aronofsky's capricious, merciless deity, but the one who stands as a lamb that has been slain (Revelation 5:6). In the film, God is silent. Unspeaking. Unmoved by his broken creatures. The Guardian Review puts it this: "There is no literal God here, just haunted abstractions...an actual character would have risked absurdity. But leaving him out, or transforming him into some pantheistically correct concept, is to flinch from the strange, stark mystery of the story itself; a story in which God speaks to humans on what is almost a level playing field. Here, Noah must absorb and ventriloquise God's word: Crowe is effectively playing both Noah and God as a frowning alpha-patriarch hybrid." And yet today - more than most days - we remember that God speaks definitively through his crucified Son. (Hebrew 1:2) Love's definition (1 John 4:10) hanging on a tree thinking of us as He dies, becoming the sin that is entirely contradictory to his nature so that we might be set free from the sin that is a part of ours, becoming a curse for us that we might be liberated from the curse that shackles us. "What does love look like, is the question I've been pondering" - sings Misty Edwards - "but then I saw him there hanging on a tree, looking at me, he was looking at me, looking at Him, staring through me, and I could not escape those beautiful eyes, and I began to weep and weep...He had arms wide open, a heart exposed; arms wide open; He was bleeding, bleeding. Love's definition, love's definition was looking at me, looking at Him, hanging on a tree.This is how I know what love is." Oh, rejoice today, on this good-est of Fridays, that we do not worship a silent God, an unconcerned God, a distant God, but the God who went beyond any length we can imagine to get us back.

The Joy Challenge: Wednesday 16th March 2014

Praise god for refinement. "Endure trials for the sake of discipline.God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? Discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." Hebrews 12.7,11. Ouch. Seriously. Ouch. And yet, God is oh so jealous for our holiness, so desirous for us to be like his son that he will stop at nothing to refine us. Through illness, through difficult relationships, through revealing the depths of our own depravity in our irritations with others, through iron sharpening iron as we are grated against each other. Proverbs 27:17. This refining is a painful business. And yet oh how we long for its fruit. How we ache to be holy and clean and pure, washed and rinsed and mangled to perfection. He disciplines for our good that we may share in his holiness. Hebrews 12:10. Hallelujah.

The Joy Challenge: Tuesday 15th April 2014

Good old Mary Mary. Sitting in costa feeling a little down in the dumps and the 90s remix on the radio blasts out..."Take the shackles off my feet so I can dance. I'll praise you through my circumstance." So again I say, come on, soul! Yesterday I had a really frustrating hospital appointment. No one's quite sure what's wrong with me but my body still insists that I'm not very well and I'm finding it difficult to not fall into self-pity. But but but. God is sovereign. He actually is. That is amazing. He's perfectly in control of all things and He works them for our good. Somehow. 2 corinthians 12.9-10. If we want to know his power then we need to accept, and even DELIGHT (!) in being weak. So, here's to delighting. Let us delight in our broken humanity, our inability, our groaning bodies that long to be clothed with heaven so that we know his power today.

The Joy Challenge: Monday 14th April 2014

Flagging this morning... Come on, soul! Rejoice. Pray. Be thankful. In ALL circumstances. Grumpy monday mornings are not the exception to the rule. Do not just rejoice in yesterday's goodness, in scrabbling together a list of thankfulness from the past - although that isn't a bad idea - but wake up to the reality of today. His mercies are new right now. His plan is unfolding as I text. He is pouring out his goodness and love over a broken and hurting world with each character that I type. He is setting his love minute by minute upon us. Oh, come on, soul! Quit your grumbling, your whining, your can't-really-be-bothered-ness. Breathe in deep, look up into the blue sky, smell the freshly dug soil and be GLAD.

The Joy Challenge: Saturday 12th April 2014

May I never lose the wonder, the wonder of the cross. May I see it for the first time, standing as a sinner lost. Undone by mercy and left speechless, watching wide eyed at the cost. May I never lose the wonder, the wonder of the cross. Today's joy is deep and wide and high and long. Fathomless and bottomless, eternally mysterious. Justification, propitiation, sanctification. Scapegoat, exchange, debt paid, bridge made. An inexhaustible array of metaphors at our disposal to try and make sense of the unsensemakeable, the unbelievable, the unthinkable. The shamefilled folly of it: love saturated lunacy on full display as we watch the beautifully perfect God Man dying in our place, becoming estranged to remove our estrangement, being forsaken by the father to take away our forsakenness, willingly becoming lost that we could be found. Oh, this is deep magic indeed.

The Joy Challenge: Friday 11th April 2014

There are some words in the English language that are reserved for special purposes: "gurgling" of streams and babies. That irresistibly contagious sound that bubbles out of a baby when they're laughing, forcing everyone in the room to coo and giggle along. As our godson Dennis did this evening: the whole room captivated by his tiny, irresistibly joyful face. "Gambolling" - a word I have only ever heard in relation to lambs, that jumping, skipping, playing, leaping, prancing, frolicking, young legs splayed thing that lambs do because they don't quite know how to move any other way. Just as babies do the gurgle thing because its their peculiar expression of happiness, of being alive, so lambs do the gambolling. Us humans - especially us adult humans - are missing a trick; we're forgotten how we're supposed to play. Lambs and babies are a pretty good reminder that playing is important, that God is the good Dad and we are his little children. And so, today, be playful. Do something outrageously silly just for the sake of it. Find a peculiar expression of happiness and practice it with all your might. 2 Samuel 6:14.