1 John 1:3-4

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you can have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and his son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make your (or 'our' depending on translation) joy complete.

What does it mean to have fellowship with God? To be incorporated into the Trinity? To be called friend (John 15:15) by the Creator King of the universe? What does it mean that we can draw close to the unapproachable One? (1 Timothy 6:16)

More than that: we are in union with Him: Whoever is united with the Lord is one with Him in Spirit. (1 Corinthians 1:16) The word is kollao, to glue, cleave, keep company, to be intimately connected. We are glued to the King. We are intimately bound to Him. And yet this is no mere tacking on. We are not simply pritt-sticked to God or tied loosely to Jesus like some spare part. We are somehow in Him and He is in us. Jesus asked the Father and the Spirit has come to live within us (John 14:16-18). The Eternal God has taken up residence in us. We have become his permanent dwelling place, His home. (John 14:20, 23) Christ in us is the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). We are hidden inside Him. (Colossians 3:3) 

This is madness. We exchange all that we are for all that He is. This is a covenant in which we are the infinitely weaker party; we have nothing to offer and yet we are given everything in return; we are invited in. We are asked to dine with our Maker (Revelation 3:20); we are asked to have fellowship with Him.

1 John 1:1-2

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes  which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim to you concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

The impossibility of proclaiming what you have not experienced. John knows Jesus. He knows all the glory and goodness and beauty of God as revealed in Jesus first hand. He had seen, heard, looked on, touched.

What then of us? When was the last time we truly knew, truly encountered, truly allowed ourselves to be awed and shaken by all that He is? (I am reminded of the lyrics from a song by Cate Lear, "I have felt the deep compassion of my Jesus shaking through my every bone...)

Before we can proclaim Him we must see Him. The Greek here is theáomai: to gaze at a spectacle; to observe intently, especially to interpret something and grasp its significance so that it impacts us. 

And so, do we get it? Have we really beheld Jesus? Have we seen him and understood what he is worth? Have we stared at the awesome spectacle of the cross and been changed by the encounter? Because then, and only then, will we proclaim...

The Word (in bite-sized chunks)

I think for most us of who want to study scripture and get to grips with what God says in his word, the sheer volume and density of the Bible is terrifying. Where to start? How much to read? How to keep persevering? I am the queen of making a bible-reading plan and then failing to get past day three because the aims that I have set for myself are too ambitious; day three arrives, I fail and then I feel disappointed, guilty and demoralised. Hopefully others can empathise with this same dismally repeated course of action: we have every intention of reading the bible; we just don't.

A couple of years ago, I worked through all of Ephesians in tiny chunks, focusing on just one or two verses at a time. I realised - quickly - that there was a huge amount to digest in just one verse of the bible, let alone a whole chapter. I found the process incredibly life-giving. A verse is always doable. (No matter how much we might try to kid ourselves that we don't have time) On good days I would reflect more deeply and spend time delving deep into the intricacies of each word; on bad days I would simply read one verse and that was it. But I was reading the bible, and slowly but surely I made myself through Ephesians.

And so my friend Elaine and I have decided to give it another go. I am reading 1 John; she is reading Galatians. The aim: just one or two verses a day and a quick reflection whatsapped to each other. Again, on a good day, a well-thought through reflection happens. On a bad day, I just read the verse. On a really bad day, I don't read anything at all. But really bad days are few and far between. Especially when you have a friend holding you to account for reading just a little bit of the Word of God each day, a tiny bite-sized morsel to sustain and refresh in the midst of life. 

And so, I invite you to share the journey. Each day (ish) I will publish a little thought on the verses of John that I've been reading. If you'd like a texted / whatsapped version then let me know...

Guess how much I love you

One of the first books that Sarah was given was a little storybook called Guess How Much I Love You. The book tells the story of Big and Little Nutbrown Hare. Little Nutbrown Hare wants to communicate to his father how much he loves him: he loves him as high as he can reach, hop, jump; he loves him right the way along the lane and over the hill; he loves him all the way to the moon. Each time Little Nutbrown Hare tries to tell his dad how much he loves him, his father responds with an even bigger statement of love: if Little Nutbrown Hare loves his father as high as he can jump, then the father loves the son as high as he can jump; if Little Nutbrown Hare loves his father to the moon, then the father loves him to the moon...and back.

It is a tale of competitive out-loving. A children’s story that touches on the profound impossibility of truly articulating how much we love one another. Love is the stuff of similes and metaphors. We cannot grasp adequately at the right words to describe it. We dance around the deep truths of what it is to really love another because that love is beyond us; it is bigger than us; it cannot be tamed by language. Language is tricky. It slips and slides away from us. We struggle to trust it, struggle to believe in its sincerity. Sometimes even the most heartfelt words tumble and fall to the floor (to coin a phrase from Emma Healey’s remarkable novel, Elizabeth is Missing) because we cannot grasp hold of them. Perhaps this is why Paul uses so many words to try and describe what love is like in 1 Corinthians 13. He uses so many words in the hope that just one might stick, that in our wrestling to understand something of the height, width, depth and length of the unfathomable love of God (Ephesians 3:18) we might manage to cling on to the smallest part of it, because even the smallest part of it would encompass all of us; it would overwhelm and surround us, enfolding us in the boundlessness of the love of our Creator.

When Sarah was born, the intensity of what I felt towards her took me back. It was something entirely new: a fierce, jealous, protective love that gushed out in hot tears. As I held her tiny body, and whispered hello to this new little life over and over again, I was racked with love for her. As the days and weeks pass, I cannot help but look at her and love her. I cannot help simply looking and beholding her smile, listening to her clucks and gurgles, watching her little tightly clenched fingers wrap themselves around mine.

One morning as I read her the story of Little and Nutbrown Hare, I felt that God posed the same challenge to me that the little hare poses to his father: guess how much I love you. Dare I believe that the King of the Universe feel towards me what I feel towards my daughter? That fierce, hot love that bubbles up and over into tears of joy? That ache in my chest that is almost painful? That innate protective instinct that would do anything to keep her harm? Dare I believe that the love of God for me is such that he would give his only son to have me back? He would give the most precious thing in his possession that I might be restored to relationship with him and allowed to call him Father, Abba, daddy?

I could never give Sarah up. The thought of giving her up for for someone else is entirely unthinkable. I cannot allow such a thought to form in my head because it is so ludicrous. And yet God’s love for us is such that this is exactly what he did. For the Father so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. (John 3:16) Let those overly familiar words sink in. Wash away the jadedness of a verse that we quote too often and too unthinkingly. That is how much our heavenly Father loves us - that he would allow us to murder his Son for our salvation. And that is how much the Son loves us: that he would agree to such a plan, that he would willingly walk the way of the cross, that he would be held to the cross not by nails but by love. No one took Jesus’ life from him. He laid it down. (John 10:18) He was not forced to the cross by an angry and abusive Father. He chose it. We are not left to guess what God’s love for us looks like. It looks like Good Friday. (1 John 4:9-10) It looks like a Son who knows that the only way for his lost brothers and sisters to come home is for him to be abandoned by his Dad. A Son who embraces our estrangement from the Father, who is forsaken that we might not be.

I do not claim to understand any of this. I am scratching the surface of something that is too deep and too wide. My words are tumbling to the floor even as I type them. They are too fickle and too insubstantial to hold Him. And yet they are all that I have to communicate something that is too precious to be contained within the bounds of language. And so that is my prayer on this dark Saturday before the glory of Sunday’s sunrise: that we might know the love that passes knowledge, that we might be filled to the measure of all the fullness of our God (Ephesians 3:19), that we might dare to trust in the love of a Father who gave up everything to win us back.

God can get tiny if we’re not careful

I have been wanted to write this blog for a long time. The title is another quote from Boyle's memoir. When recounting tales of life in amongst Los Angeles' Projects he reminds us that God can, all too quickly, become tiny; made in our own small image instead of being allowed to be Himself. 

I think I have been guilty of this in recent weeks. I have made God tiny.

In part, this is due to the massive upheaval of all things since Sarah's arrival. She is beautiful, joyful and I am totally besotted, but she is also exhausting.The first two weeks of her life lulled me into a false sense of security as she mainly slept through them, but now that she is the world's most wide awake newborn, I am struggling to make sense of what motherhood is supposed to look like. Especially motherhood with Jesus. All of the normal ways in which I connect with God - writing, reading scripture, silence, guitar playing, blogging - have been stripped away (mostly by the fact that breastfeeding teaches you the art of onehandedness and most of the above cannot really be done well with only one hand) and I find that my relationship with God feels dry and empty. I ache to spend time with Him in the ways that I am accustomed, trying desperately to squeeze in some space in the fleeting moments of each day (like this one) in which I might determine what I do with my time, but, those elusive moments are usually interrupted, or else never quite recognised as possibilities because I decide that I need to do the washing up instead.   

And then I start to feel resentful. Cross at Sarah because she won't nap and I am tired of ceaseless rocking. Cross with myself for not being able to multi-task. Cross with God because He feels distant. Cross at the fact that I have no idea how to share the love of Jesus with others when my energy is completely spent. I have perfected the art of making God tiny: squeezing him into the cracks and crevices of my day and then wondering why it is that He doesn't seem to fit.

A few days ago, I listened to a sermon by Danielle Strickland in which she talks about much the same thing as Boyle: the miniaturising of God. In putting so much emphasis on our own personal relationship with Jesus, she says that we run the risk of forgetting just how big and wonderful and wild his redemptive purposes are for all of creation. We make much of accepting Jesus into our hearts instead of recognising that, by saying Yes to Him, we are drawn into his heart. We are united with Him (Colossians 3:1) and invited to work alongside Him in changing the world. This is not to make little of the wonder and glory of a personal relationship with the King of the World - that in itself is pretty spectacular - but simply to say that although salvation might start with us it is not intended to remain so: we are saved that we might share the joy of salvation; we are welcomed in that others might also come in to join the party. (1 John 1:4) 

In the past few weeks, I have despaired that my own personal relationship with God seems somewhat of a shambles. Seems being the operative word because, of course, it isn't. God is no smaller, or further away. He has not changed. He is faithful and constant and always working. (John 5:17) He is at work restoring all things. In recent weeks I have lost sight of this big-ness. In the darkness and loneliness of the early hours feeding Sarah, I have lost sight of the hugeness of God's plan. So intent have I become on bemoaning the shift in my relationship with Him, and the failure for Him to fit into my agenda, that I have stopped asking Him what His agenda is. 

I have made him tiny.

This came to a head last week. A friend cancelled on me so I suddenly found myself with a spare hour in which to do my mad cramming-squeezing God routine. I could go on a prayer walk. I could go out for a coffee with my bible. I could hang out with Sarah and listen to some worship music. The possibilities were endless! I determined that it was prime blog-writing time and started to ponder how I was going to communicate this truth of making God tiny. And then, ironically, and somewhat annoyingly, God interrupted my pondering: You're making me tiny right now. You're trying to fit me in to your ever-changing, tightly structured agenda instead of being part of my plan. Instead of asking me what you should do with this time, and how you might join in with my world-changing, you're trying to make me conform to what you want to do. 

Oh dear. 

And so, slightly belligerently, I stopped my plan-making and prayed: well, what do you want me to? 

Of course, it isn't always possible to scrap our plans and commitments. We have jobs, meetings, responsibilities that need our attention and our time management. But I think God's gentle nudge to me, as Strickland's sermon had been, was to say Don't make me tiny. Don't be so intent on creating the times and spaces where you want me to do something that you forget that I am always the one doing, all the time. I am working when you are exhausted and barely able to keep your eyes open as you calm you child; I am working when you don't have time to see a particular person; I am working in the hearts and lives of all around you, and in the whole of the created order. And what's more, if you would only stop and pay attention, you could join in!

And so, this week, I am trying to be alert to the purposes of God. I am trying to do what Jesus did in only doing what the Father is doing - which presumably meant he had to keep asking the Father what he was doing (John 5:19).

I am trying not to make God tiny. 

Colic and Compassion

Our three week old daughter, Sarah, has colic. No one – including doctors and health visitors - seems to quite know what colic really is; a miscellaneous discomfort vaguely connected to trapped wind. It is horrible to watch. When she feeds she screws up her tiny little face, arches her back, writhes and then – of course – screams. And screams, and screams and screams. On Monday she screamed for three hours. I should have swallowed my pride and rung any of the wonderful parents I know admitting defeat and bidding for their help, but fierce independence kicked in and, instead, I simply joined Sarah and sat on the floor and cried. I cried because she was crying. I cried because she was in pain. I cried because I couldn’t make it stop. And because her screech was so loud and so persistent that I thought the neighbours might ring Social Services.

I have struggled with irritable bowels for nearly a decade. Whilst in pain on the loo in the early hours of the morning, I have often questioned why God doesn’t heal me. I have shouted and ranted and raved at him. I have given him the silent treatment. I have been bitter and resentful. But these past few days, I feel like God has spoken something new. In the middle of the night, as Sarah has cried and writhed and I have wanted nothing more than to hide under the covers and go back to sleep, God has shifted something within me: I have sat, remarkably calmly, with my daughter, praying for relief from the pain in her bowels. I have massaged her tummy gently, looked at her tiny, red, screwed-up face with tenderness and thought, I know. I know what that feels like. I know what it is to be frustrated and uncomfortable and to not be able to make it right. Whereas on Monday I felt a deep frustration and anger welling up from the core of my being, instead I have been overcome with love for her. No every time. Not every cry. But more often than not, I have felt what I want to call compassion.

I am not quite sure what compassion is. I don’t think it’s just feeling someone else’s pain. I think it’s something to do with sitting with someone in their pain, with choosing to align yourself with the discomfort of others which isn’t quite the same as trying to fix it. I have not been able to fix Sarah’s colic. Sometimes no amount of burping, massaging, walking, patting will do the trick and we just sit together, waiting it out till it passes.

In Gregory Boyle’s astonishing memoir about his work with gang members in Los Angeles, Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle recounts a conversation with a bunch of teenage inmates about the distinction between sympathy, empathy and compassion. The class go through some examples of the first two, but are silenced by the latter until one inmate says, “Compassion – that’s sumthin’ altogether different. Cause that’s what Jesus did. I mean…Compassion…IS…God.”

I’m not trying to suggest that my own bleary-eyed actions at 4am are the same as the kind of compassion that Jesus shows us. Far from it. But Jesus, in some sense, is only able to have genuine compassion on the people that he meets because he comes close to them. Compassion doesn’t work from a distance. It’s messier than that. If I didn’t know what it was to struggle with bowel pain, it would be hard to share Sarah’s pain and sit with her in it. Similarly – perhaps – Jesus’ compassion for humanity can only be so beautiful and so full because he becomes one of us. He comes to sit with us.

Boyle puts it like this, “Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is the world of difference in that. Jesus didn’t seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn’t champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast…the strategy of Jesus is not centred in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place – with the outcast and those relegated to the margins…the Beatitudes is not a spirituality after all. It’s a geography. It tells us where to stand. Compassion isn’t about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing them in towards yourself.”

This is altogether more challenging than simply recognising and feeling someone else’s pain; it means we sit with them in the midst of it. To be compassionate as God is compassionate is, as Boyle puts it, a question of geography. With whom do we align ourselves? Where are we standing? Do we watch from a distance and comment on what it what someone’s burdens might be like (sympathy), acknowledge that we have had a similar burden ourselves and thus know what it is like (empathy), or do we do the Jesus thing, the compassion thing, the sumthin’ else altogether?

Scarcity

What we have is enough…and more

If we lack anything, it is the

simple pleasure

To enjoy what we already possess.

Mark Scandrette

Last night, I had a panic about our moses basket.

We had been given a beautiful basket by a friend but for some reason, yesterday, I was suddenly anxious that it wouldn’t be appropriate. What if the mattress was too old and therefore not firm enough? Did we even have the right bedding to go in the basket? Were we supposed to be using those sleeping bag things or blankets or both? The list of questions in my mind spiralled endlessly.

Similarly, a few weeks ago I had a panic about the ‘coming home’ outfit from the hospital. We live in a ridiculously and extravagantly generous community and have been given more baby outfits than one tiny child can ever possibly wear, some brand new and still in their wrapping, ranging from tiny baby all the way up to about 12 months. But I was suddenly overcome by the fear that we had nothing suitable for our poor naked daughter to wear.

You could simply blame such irrational thinking on being heavily pregnant. But I think there is something much deeper going on. I think what I am actually afraid of is much bigger and much more consuming: I am afraid that I do not have enough.

In her book, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life, Lynne Twist identifies this condition as something she calls scarcity.

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn’t get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

We live in a culture that constantly – in both obvious and not so obvious ways – tells us that we do not have enough. Most obviously, this applies to our relationship with wealth and material possessions. We simply do not have enough money. We do not have enough stuff. We need the latest, the newest, the most expensive model of just about everything. And we are told this every day from every angle. But, more subtly, this way of thinking filters down into the way we think about other things too: We do not have enough confidence to do that; we do not have enough patience to refrain from shouting at our children; we do not have enough time to invest in the relationships that matter.

I think this way of thinking must make Jesus really sad.

In Twist’s book she describes the remedy to scarcity as “the surprising truth of sufficiency.” Sufficiency is not a set amount of anything; it is “an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and we are enough…it is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances.”

Jesus takes this even further. In the economy of the kingdom, the remedy for scarcity, for thinking that we do not have enough and are not enough, is not sufficiency but abundance. Our God is stupidly generous. He is our provider and he delights in being so. In Beautiful Outlaw, John Eldridge draws attention to the first miracle of Jesus as listed in John’s gospel: turning water into wine at a wedding. This is a miracle of extravagant, abundant and (quite frankly) unnecessary generosity. Eldridge explains that Jesus produces the equivalent of 682 litres of wine. That’s 908 bottles. And this is at the end of the wedding. Presumably the party was going to tail off quite soon - or at least it was until Jesus provided an excessive amount of booze – but now it is party time all over again. 908 bottles’ worth of party. And this is “the first of the signs through which [Jesus] revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11)

What is it exactly that the disciples believed at this point? That Jesus liked to party? That he was a miracle-maker? A problem-solver? I have no idea what they were thinking, but something about this outlandish gesture of generosity gets their attention. They start, in some way, to put their trust in him, to believe that, maybe-just maybe, he is who he says he is. He is God. And he is the God who loves to give gifts to his people. He is the God who longs to look after them and be trusted by them. He is the God whose deepest lament is that his people have forgotten who he is (Jeremiah 2:32, 18:13-15) and started to trust in anything, everything, else apart from Him.

Much later on in John’s gospel, Jesus reminds his disciples of his trustworthiness. He is about to leave them. He is about to go to the cross and die and he needs them to know that he can be trusted. He is who he says he is. The sorrow of this difficult and confusing conversation is (understandably) too much for the disciples. They are filled with fear and dread about their precious Jesus leaving and, when Jesus tries to reassure them that he is going ahead of them in order to prepare the way for them, they start to panic:

“Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” 

(John 14:5-10)

In my mind – and without wanting to superimpose too much onto scripture – there is deep sadness in Jesus’ reply to Philip: “Don’t you know me…even after I have been among you such a long time?” I imagine Jesus locking eyes with his friend and gently saying, Do you still not trust me? Even after all you’ve seen? Even after all the provision I’m made for you? Even after the feeding of multitudes, the calming of storms, the steadiness of me being with you; even after all that, you still don’t trust me.

This morning, as I reflected on my moses basket panic, I felt God ask me the same question: why don’t you trust me?

Mark Scandrette raises the same question in his reflections about how we really, practically live out the teaching of Jesus in an age where His commands have become counter-cultural and seemingly nonsensical. It does not make sense to not be anxious about anything (Matthew 6:25). There seems like a very great deal to be afraid of (John 14:27), and we feel the overwhelming need to cling to what we have rather than be generous to others (Luke 12:33, 16:9, Matthew 6:19-20).

And yet, we like Philip, must make a decision. We must “shed our sense of scarcity” (Practicing the Way of Jesus: Life Together in the Kingdom of Love p.140) and instead choose to trust in the abundant provision of a loving, heavenly Father who knows our every need and longs for us to ask Him to fulfil them. Scandrette warns “if we don’t make conscious choices about our relationship to money and possessions, the forces of a dominant culture will tend to make those choices for us.” (p.144) The dominant force of this culture tells me that I need a new moses basket. I probably need two moses baskets actually. Just in case.

But the Way of Jesus is not the way of culture. Jesus invites us to trust. His is an invitation to live in God’s abundant provision regardless of whether we actually have plenty or not. An invitation to trust that He is enough. His grace is more than we need – not just for our material wellbeing but for our emotional and spiritual wellbeing too. Thus, today’s small step is a response to that invitation: to stop worrying about what we do not have, or might not have, and instead delight in the simple pleasure of enjoying all that we already possess.