Images of Spain

Well, after six weeks without a computer, we finally got it back in January (the day before I left for Spain) but we were disappointed to discover that we had lost all our documents and photos in the process of having the computer fixed. I was particularly disappointed to have lost all the photos of our recent holiday in Canada/USA, as well as all the teaching notes and Powerpoints I had been working on during October and November. Needless to say, I've learned my lesson and will be careful to back up more regularly in future. I'm pleased to report, though, that I've ordered a new laptop (the first computer I've owned since my last laptop went the way of the dinosaurs about ten years ago) and I'll get it when I return to Scotland in February.

The south of Spain in winter reminds me a lot of the Western Cape in winter: sometimes there are cloudless blue skies, but it can also be cold and windy, and there are some days of torrential rain. It's sometimes necessary to build a wood fire in the evening. The photos above show my house mates, Brandy and Simba, as well as our little street and the local goat herd passing by.

I'll be working on a couple of writing projects this month, as well as trying to re-create some of the teachings and slide shows that got lost when the computer crashed. Thanks once again for your prayers, and I wish you God's blessing in 2008.

Of sacrifices and shame...

I’ve sometimes thought about the life of Mary, and wondered about the qualities in her life that made God decide to choose this unknown teenage girl to be the mother of His Son, the Saviour of the world. As Christmas approaches, we think again of how Mary was visited by the angel and how she started out on a journey that would change her life - and our lives - for ever.

A couple of weeks ago, at a church service, I watched two actors perform the part of the story that the Bible doesn’t tell us about. Their drama piece depicted Mary’s dilemma as she had to go to her fiancé and break the news to him that she was pregnant. It was sensitively written and performed, and suddenly my eyes were opened in a deeper way to the cost that Mary faced when she agreed to be obedient to what God asked of her.

It hit me in a new way that, when this teenage girl said yes to the Father’s will, she wasn’t only saying yes to a nine-month pregnancy; she was actually declaring herself willing to pay the price of a whole lifetime of shame and misjudgement. In saying yes to God, this godly young woman knew that she was probably going to be judged and found guilty by her family, friends and maybe even by the man she loved. Because, let’s face it, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone was going to believe a far-fetched story about a baby conceived by the Holy Spirit. Mary knew that; and yet she was willing to say yes to God, even though it meant that her former good reputation might be destroyed and lost for ever.

And, in marrying her, Joseph knew that too. Even though time passed and people’s memories perhaps faded a bit with the years; even though Mary and Joseph continued to live godly lives and went on to have more kids of their own… it’s possible that people continued to whisper behind their backs, and that the people of Nazareth always thought of Jesus as, “Mary and Joseph’s eldest son. He was illegitimate you know!”

Thirty years passed before Jesus began His public ministry and gave any evidence at all of being anything other than the biological son of Mary and Joseph the carpenter. And, even then, there were many who didn’t recognise who He really was. My heart hurt to think that Mary had lived for thirty years, or maybe even for her whole life, knowing the truth about what had happened, and yet being constantly confronted with the fact that other people were judging her and believing a lie about her. (Because you usually can’t change history, as it was perceived, and it’s unlikely that people ever changed the impressions and the judgements they’d formed about her at that time.)

What sacrificial love! What costly obedience! We sometimes say, or sing in hymns, that no price is too high to pay and nothing is too much to give up for the One who loved us and died for us. Thinking last week about Mary’s situation, about her willingness to embrace a whole lifetime of shame and misjudgement, maybe even of gossip and rejection, allowed me to understand “radical obedience” in a new light. And yet this radical obedience of a teenage girl has allowed hundreds and millions of us to experience friendship with the Messiah and God of the universe.

As we think about how the Son of God gave up everything and came to be born on earth at Christmas time, my prayer for my own life is that I will continually grow in my capacity for sacrifice and in my willingness to say yes to the Lord; my readiness to say, “No price is too high, no sacrifice is too great, no pain or shame is too deep… if the result is that I and others can know the living God in a deep and personal way.” I still have a lot of growing to do in this area: saying yes is one thing, but embracing the consequences and hanging in for the the long term can sometimes be a real challenge that involves daily dying to self. The depth of Mary’s sacrifice still leaves me stunned but, deep down, I know that this kind of unconditional surrender to God is the deepest desire of my heart. Quite simply because He deserves it and He can always be trusted with lives that are committed to His purposes. Wow!

Crashes, call centres and cathedrals...

If you're trying to reach me by email at the moment, you've no doubt been met by an ominous silence. My computer crashed at the beginning of December and is still in hospital in a "coma." It looks as if it will only be sorted out sometime next week, and so I might not be able to have email access again until then.

When the crash happened, I phoned the manufacturer's customer helpline to report the "death" and find out what needed to be done. These call centres are seldom in the UK, and so you spend half your time spelling out names and addresses, because you find yourself speaking with foreigners who don't understand your accent and you don't understand theirs! I was passed from person to person and, after I was put on to the fifth person, I began to realise that everyone I'd spoken to had a South African accent (Indian, Xhosa, Afrikaans or whatever.) When the sixth person asked for my address, and wasn't able to call it up automatically when I gave her my postcode, I finally said, "You're not in the UK, are you?"

"No," she answered, "We're in Cape Town!"  How bizarre: to sit in the UK with a broken computer, and to end up speaking about it with technicians in South Africa! The last lady told me that it was warm and sunny in Cape Town, so that made me very conscious of being back here in the winter half of the world.

Anyway, the winter weather hasn't stopped us reaching out to the people of Glasgow. We've just finished our FireStarters discipleship and outreach weekend for December. The theme this time was, "Passion," and the young people were challenged to consider what motivates them and what are the ways that God would possibly want them to make a difference in their world.

During the weekend, the eight teams of young people were involved in a variety of different kinds of outreach. Some teams ran clubs and Christmas parties for local children; some ran a drop in centre for the youth; one team went out to serve practically by washing windows and doing odd jobs for the elderly and infirm. Another team held a ceilidh (pronounced "kayley" and, in case you're not familiar with what it is, it's a kind of party with Scottish dancing.) Young people from local church youth groups were invited to come to the ceilidh and bring their non-Christian friends with them. So it was another positive and fruitful weekend, as we approach the Christmas season.

When Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) comes, some of the older teens and young adults are going to be out in Glasgow city centre, giving out free bottles of water to the revellers who are already drinking other beverages (!!) and waiting to bring in the New Year. The bottles will bear the logo of "Hope '08" - a Christian outreach initiative that will be happening in towns, villages and cities throughout the UK in 2008. The water distribution will be followed by a special worship and commissioning service in Glasgow Cathedral. (When I was in England, last week, I was able to attend a gathering in Birmingham Cathedral to pray for some of their initiatives for Hope '08.) FireStarters is very involved in the Hope '08 plans for the city of Glasgow and, as well as all kinds of things throughout the year, there will also be a special outreach initiative next July.

That's all for now. There will only be more news from me once my computer is restored to life again!

From nation to nation...

When God spoke to me earlier this year about leaving South Africa, He reminded me that He'd previously given me many Bible verses about being called "to the nations." Little did I expect just how many nations I would go to in the course of the next few months. Since May this year, I've been in eleven countries (South Africa, Hong Kong, Madagascar, Malawi, Spain, Canada, USA, Norway, Switzerland, Scotland and England.) In fact, it's actually thirteen countries if you count the fact that I had airport stopovers in Zimbabwe and in Germany!

After being in Norway and Switzerland earlier this month, last weekend I was one of the guest speakers at the "Women of the Word" convention - a Christian ladies' conference which was held at a hotel in the Scottish borders. Then I took a flight down to England, where I'll be speaking every day this week in a PCYM (Principles in Child and Youth Ministry) training course.

Words, Watching and Waiting

The waiting theme continues. This week, God reminded me that He’d spoken to me earlier in the year through Micah chapter 7 verse 7, which says, “And so I will watch for the Lord; I will wait confidently for the God of my salvation.”

Last week, I was having lunch with an old friend who had been a student on one of our YWAM training courses in Paisley, and she asked me, “Have you ever done a word study on the word wait?” A “word study” is a skill that we sometimes teach the students in our child and youth ministry schools, and in the pre-school teachers’ training course. Our goal is to help students build their ministry with young people firmly upon the Word of God, and so we teach them several different ways of studying the Bible for themselves. A word study, or topical study, involves finding out the original Greek or Hebrew meanings of words that are used in the Bible text.

Well, I hadn’t in fact done a word study on waiting, and so I decided to follow her suggestion and begin that Bible study this week. The two words used here in Micah 7:7 (watching and waiting) are the Hebrew verbs tsâphâh and yâchal. Both of them express the idea of trusting God completely and waiting patiently and expectantly for Him to speak or act. But it was interesting to note that the Hebrew dictionary also defined tsâphâh as, to lean forward, to peer into the distance, to look up or to keep watch.

These twin ideas of looking up and also peering into the distance suggested to me that really trusting God sometimes also includes waiting for things that can’t yet be seen - and keeping on looking up to the Lord during that waiting time. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to wait for a train or bus, or perhaps for a person who was coming to pick you up at the airport. I guess it’s a lot easier to wait for that bus or person if you can already see them coming a little further up the road. The waiting is more open ended if you have to “peer into the distance” and can’t yet see them coming. It probably requires more trust, as you need to believe, for example, that the person has remembered to come and pick you up as they promised they would.

For some reason, it made me also think about growing tomatoes in my garden in Cape Town – a process that would usually begin around this time of year. Waiting for the fruit to be ready is a lot easier when you can actually see the tomatoes getting a little bit bigger and a little bit riper every day. The waiting’s a bit more uncertain when you can’t yet see any blossoms or any sign of the fruit that will come. Sometimes one or more of the plants would just wither away and never come to anything at all. It struck me that waiting confidently for God, or for God’s timing, involves believing that He will be true to His word; that He will not be like a person who forgets to pick you up, or like a tomato plant that fails to bear fruit. Because we know the unfailing character of God – that He is totally faithful in every situation and circumstance - we can wait with confidence, knowing that He is already “on His way” with the things that we can’t yet see.

I have been astounded to see how much favour there is and how many doors God seems to be opening for me here in Scotland at the moment. When He spoke to me earlier this year through a verse that said, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn and the quarry from which you were cut,” I knew that He was speaking about my returning to some sort of ministry roots and origins… and that this would also include being back in my home country of Scotland for a season. But somehow I never expected that He would be giving me quite so many ministry opportunities during my time here. I’ve had the privilege in recent weeks of speaking at a number of church services and ladies’ meetings, as well as linking in with some youth ministry initiatives that I was involved with in the past, before moving to South Africa.

And so there’s been a real sense of fulfilment during these weeks: a sense that “waiting” is not about hanging around doing nothing, but is about being faithful and obedient to God in every season and situation - whether that place He’s put you in is your permanent home or a place that you’ll be in for only a few weeks, months or years. Thanks for praying with me as I continue “waiting” and enjoying the things that God has for me during this time. I pray that you’ll also know clearly which doors He’s opening for you in this season of your life.

Waiting

In recent weeks, my times of personal Bible reading have been full of verses about waiting. Last week, it was the story where God tells Jehoshaphat to simply, "take up position and wait." Before that, it was the well known verse in Isaiah that says, "Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength." And at other times it has been Bible stories about various people who received promises from God, but had to wait quite a while for those words to be fulfilled.

So, if you come up to me at church this week and ask me what I'm doing these days, there's a good chance that my answer will be, "I'm waiting." As I already sensed earlier this year, it seems that God feels there's no rush to confirm the details of the next steps He has for me, but wants me to be able to enjoy and draw the most from this transition season of waiting. My friends' picture of the bow and arrow (see post from 14 September) has been a constant encouragement in this time of having pulled back from the old, but not yet launched forward into the new.

During this waiting season, it's been great to have time to type up new teachings and prepare slide presentations for them. I'm teaching at a number of different church services and women's meetings this month. Last Sunday, I also had the privilege of leading intercession (about children, youth and Halloween!) at a Sunday morning service, and next Sunday I'll be speaking at an evening service in Falkirk.

Waiting seasons are also great times to catch up with old friends, and this week I'm getting together for meals with friends from Glasgow, Paisley and Falkirk. Give me a call if you'd also like to get together for coffee sometime this month.

Bear with me

I'm back in Europe yet again, having just been on holiday for two weeks with my parents. We were on a tour of New England and Canada to see the beautiful colours of the autumn foliage. One day, as I was looking out the bus window and admiring the flame red leaves, it struck me that all this beauty was only possible because these leaves were dying. We visited a farm where they make maple syrup, and the farmer told us that the brilliant red leaves are a sign of sugar production caused by the biting cold weather. Sometimes in our lives, we encounter painful situations that feel like a death; it's our choice whether such things bring out bitterness or bring out sweetness in us. My prayer for my own life is that the difficult and challenging seasons will be times when I can willingly "die to self," so that other people can see the beauty of the Lord in my life.

I'll be in Scotland for all of October, and a number of things are in my diary for the coming weeks: I'm speaking at a few women's meetings and church services, as well as connecting with various friends and ministry leaders here. There will also be a couple of "special events" at my home church, which is celebrating its bicentenary this year.