Unexpected adventures...

When I sent out my August newsletter at the beginning of last week, I titled it, "Summer Adventures." Little did I know just how adventurous life was about to become!

Our main upcoming ministry project for August was a trip to Switzerland to run the first ever French-English B2b seminar for young and emerging leaders. We were supposed to be flying to Geneva on 12th August, staying for ten days and returning to Spain on the 22nd.

Then, just three days ago, disaster struck. One of our team mates within Switzerland contacted us to let us know of pending legal changes being made by the Swiss government as part of the ongoing coronavirus restrictions. Anyone arriving from Spain, or any of 40 other so called "high risk" countries would need to go into isolation on arrival in Switzerland and spend ten days in quarantine. We were horrified, as our trip was only to be ten days in total, and we had no desire to spend it locked up in a hotel room somewhere. It would make the B2b impossible!

We were faced with a difficult dilemma. Should we cancel our trip, and try to work from a distance, helping our Swiss colleagues to run the B2b without our leadership involvement and experience? Or should we drop all our plans for the coming week and try to find a way of flying to Switzerland on the 7th instead of the 12th - so that we would beat the new quarantine regulations by one day? One problem with that second option was that there were no flights from Malaga to Geneva on that date; we would need to fly via France instead, perhaps to somewhere like Lyon.

But the biggest hindrance from my perspective was the still unresolved situation with the insurance from my car, which had been involved in an accident at the beginning of the month. The car had been written off, but I still hadn't been told what the compensation pay out would be, and so my car was still sitting in the workshop. The people from the workshop had begun phoning me, saying they wanted to get rid of the car before closing for the summer holidays.

So, on Thursday morning this week, it looked highly unlikely that everything could be resolved in time for me to travel nearly a week earlier than planned. I wrote to my intercessors and made an appeal for prayer. I couldn't participate in B2b unless a number of pretty big miracles happened.

It was a complicated and rather stressful day, trying to sort everything out in time but - to cut a long story short - all the miracles happened. I finally managed to get a verdict from my insurance company about the pay-out for my car. Then, I managed to arrange for my mechanic to tow it to his family business, so that I didn't have to start paying storage costs at the other place. And, after a long time of phoning the airline and searching online, I managed to change my flights (for a fee, of course) to make it possible for me to travel on Friday. All three of these things were truly miraculous, given the short timeframe involved. (Then I had to stay up till nearly 1 am, packing my case and getting things ready at home for my cat-carer during my absence.) But God had answered prayer and had proved Himself faithful. We would be leaving for Switzerland the next day.

Click on this photo to enlarge the maps

After only around three hours of sleep, it was time to get up again and head to the airport. I met my team mates there for the morning flight from Malaga to Toulouse. We had to hang around a bit before our afternoon flight from Toulouse to Lyon. Finally, in Lyon we were met by two of our hosts from Switzerland, who had driven the seven hour round-trip to take us back over the border into Switzerland.

Despite our exhaustion, and the four hour drive, it was a pleasant scenic trip through south east France, then over the border into Switzerland with four hours to spare before the quarantine regulations were introduced. From Geneva, it was only a short drive to the YWAM training centre in Burtigny, where the B2b is being held; a nice final leg of the trip, with lovely views of the lake and the snow-capped Mont Blanc in the background.

How strange to sleep with a duvet on my bed (It's way too hot back home to have any bedding) and to wake up this morning to the sound of Swiss cow bells instead of twittering birds and shrieking parrots. How strange to go for my morning prayer walk among green fields of corn, with rose hips and apple trees at the roadside, instead of olives and fig trees. Burtigny is a small village in the heart of Swiss farmland and I clearly remember when we as YWAM French Switzerland were able to purchase the farm, a former Christian orphanage, forty years ago. So, on my walk this morning, as I was thanking God for the beauty of this place, I was also thanking Him for His faithfulness and for the many little miracles that have made it possible for us to be here today and to be part of the exciting B2b ministry that will begin next week.

Thanks for your prayers for protection on our health and good fruit from our ministry while we are here.

Coping with cancel culture...

Those of us who lived through part of the twentieth century will remember that it was a time when many "freedoms" were won for mankind. Following on from the reforms of the nineteenth century, which saw, for example, slavery and child labour abolished in many parts of the world, the twentieth century saw quite a number of advances in the righting of injustices and prejudices, as well as in legislation protecting freedom of speech, freedom of religion, workers' rights, healthcare for the poor.... etc.

While most of the freedoms were positive, others were less so, leading to increases in divorce, abortion, and a variety of "alternative" lifestyles and sexual choices. But it seemed that the bad and the good mixed together in a general consensus that personal freedom was a good thing - unless it led to the committing of crimes, as in the case of a serial killer or child abuser.

In these first decades of the 21st Century, we're beginning to see the pendulum swing the other way. Having enshrined certain "freedoms" within our society and our education system - things like same sex marriage or the freedom for transgender women (biological men) to use women's bathrooms and participate in women's professional sports events - we've now pushed beyond that to the point where daring to express a different opinion could mean that you are accused of a "hate crime" and could face legal proceedings and even imprisonment.

Even beyond what could happen to you officially or legally for daring to say something like, for example, that there are only two biological genders, there's all the censoring, shaming, attacking and destroying of reputation that happens now by the pressure of what's "politically correct" and the power of social media.  This is what is known as "cancel culture." If you don't toe the political line, what you say or write might be censored outright by the powers that be, or you might find that people make a public spectacle of you, destroying your livelihood (if you're a celebrity) or your ministry (if you happen to be in Christian work.) 

2020 seems to have been a benchmark year for the suppressing of many freedoms that previous generations fought to win. On top of the political, social and educational power that had been granted to the LGBTQ movement in recent years, 2020 saw the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, closely followed by widespread race riots in the aftermath of an instance of police brutality in the USA.  These factors have all seemed to merge together in creating a culture where, if you express an opinion that is considered "undesirable," you could find your Twitter or Facebook post deleted by the authorities, thus "cancelling" your different point of view. Or you could be so shamed and vilified in the media, and social media, that the entire world is constantly faced by news reports of how reprehensible you are.

One example of this was when leading doctors spoke out, expressing medical opinions about Covid-19 or about the wearing of masks or the value of lockdown. It happened often that opinions which didn't align with what governments wanted people to know were simply censored and made "unavailable" on whatever media platform they had been written and posted.

Another example of this was seen recently when a well known British author said that, although she had nothing against transgender people, she felt that we should be allowed to express the opinion that two biological sexes do exist. Otherwise, she said, if we all have to say that there are no genders, but just a spectrum, it denies everything that billions of people around the world have experienced by being a man or being a woman. Some transgender people agreed with this, pointing out that they wouldn't need to take sex hormones or apply for gender-reassignment surgery if the existence of two biological genders wasn't a scientific reality. However, the author was publicly shamed and attacked in the press, as a worldwide outcry arose over her opinion that you are born biologically male or female.

And there have been countless other suppressions of freedom of speech and freedom of opinion over the past few months. Countless violations of what Americans would call their "second amendment rights." It's beginning to seem as if only minorities have their freedom of speech protected and so there's a "silent majority" who don't dare to express their opinion - for fear that the simple holding of an opinion or belief will cause them to be regarded as a bad person or be accused of "hate speech."

While civilised societies do need to have some measures in place to prevent genuine hate speech and inciting to violence, this is not the same thing as censoring or censuring an individual simply because they hold a different opinion. Creating a society where there is only one correct opinion has historically always been an expression of totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler's Naziism or different expressions of Communism or capitalist dictatorships in the past. The argument for freedom of speech has always been that people have a right to express their sincerely held opinion, even if that opinion happens to be wrong.

People of faith are always going to be particularly vulnerable in this area. We've all heard of times and places in the world where the church is persecuted and you can be put in prison or put to death for daring to speak about your faith in Jesus. Sadly, people of faith also seem particularly susceptible to expressing intolerance and perpetuating attacks on those who feel or think differently.  As Christians, we can only hang our heads in shame when we read of the millions of Muslims and Jews that were killed by the so-called "Christian" Crusaders in past generations.

History seems to have proved the reality that, whenever we try to silence or get rid of those who disagree with us, all kinds of atrocities generally happen. And history has also shown that the persecuted minority has sometimes experienced considerable growth when pushed underground and when allegiance became something costly. By opposing other people's right to express their opinion, we risk helping their opinion to gain sympathy and power. And by promoting a culture that silences socially unacceptable views, we risk creating a culture where even the truth can be muzzled and silenced.... just because the truth is deemed unacceptable and is now only believed by a minority.

In response to this recent trend of censoring and silencing "unacceptable" viewpoints, a number of celebrities recently wrote an open letter, expressing their concern about the censorship and suppression of freedom of opinion in our modern world. I guess quite a number of these people happened to be white, because their open letter and its expressed concerns were immediately hailed as invalid, because those who wrote it were writing from a place of "white privilege." If I understand this correctly, these people's opinion was considered unimportant and unacceptable, just because they happened to be white or because they happened to be rich. (They weren't even writing about race or about wealth; just writing about freedom of speech.) To cancel someone's opinion because they happen to be white is just as ridiculous as ignoring someone's opinion because they happen to be black. To deny someone an audience because they happen to be middle class is just as unjust as silencing their voice because they happen to be poor.

A similar thing happened just last week when the New York Times published an article claiming that people gathering together for church services was a "major source" of covid infection in the USA. However, in that very same article, they published statistics that proved that covid infections among churchgoers accounted for less than one tenth of one percent (0.216%) of the millions of coronavirus infections in the USA.

Someone wrote an article, pointing out this "false news" reporting on the part of the newspaper, and stating that contagion was more likely to happen in the context of thousands of people shoulder to shoulder in the streets for mass riots than it was in the context of a hundred people sitting respectfully in a church service with appropriate social distancing measures.  Needless to say, this seemingly logical observation was attacked and "cancelled" by many, who claimed that it was an expression of racism. Now, I have no idea whether the person who wrote the original article was black or white.... but the simple suggestion that mass rioting could represent a risk of people's passing on the virus to others in close proximity was deemed an invalid opinion and was therefore vilified and cancelled by many. Seemingly, the approved line in the current climate is that destructive rioting is a good thing while peaceful church services are a dangerous thing. To me, this seeming caricature is a true example of what cancel culture and suppression of free speech looks like.

I find it a worrying trend, because I know that people of faith are very often the victims of a cancel culture. We've seen believers' businesses destroyed because their conscience wouldn't let them make a cake for a gay wedding; we've seen priests and pastors fired or forced to resign because they were unwilling to carry out that same-sex wedding ceremony. We've seen people lose their jobs as teachers or TV presenters because they voiced the opinion that there are two biological genders or that it is inappropriate for our education system to teach six year olds about oral sex and masturbation. 

Of course, if we feel that freedom of opinion is worth upholding, we do risk seeing a lot of nonsense out there on TV and on social media. We live in a world of incredible moral confusion. Reading this week in the fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, I couldn't help thinking that verse 20 is like a description of our modern world: What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter... We do in fact live in a world where things that would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago are now embraced by the masses and protected by governments; a world where speaking out an opinion that pretty much everyone believed to be true in the relatively near past could now put us in the line of fire or even led to our being accused of a crime. Isn't freedom of speech too dangerous a concept in such a climate?

I tend to feel that freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are something valuable, even if it means that some people will misuse that freedom to to express wrong opinions or ungodly lifestyles. We need to find a balance between protecting the children and the vulnerable in our midst, without totally silencing those whose opinions are different from the majority (or from the more vocal and aggressive minority.) If we promote a cancel culture, I fear that we who believe the Bible may very often find ourselves being the ones who are cancelled and censured in the present and in the future.

Sudden endings and disappointments

It's a weird feeling when something comes to a sudden and unexpected end. At its worst, it can crash upon you with a sense of debilitating grief - like when a pregnant woman has a miscarriage, or a family member suddenly dies of a terminal illness, or a previously fit person becomes paralysed in a traffic or sports accident. At the milder end of the scale, it can leave you with a sense of disappointment - like when the electricity cuts off just before the climax of that movie or football match on TV, or when your dreamed-of trip to Niagara Falls becomes a wash-out because the rain or fog prevents you from being able to see the fabled landmark.

We're only in the second week of July, but already this month has had two "sudden endings" that brought disappointments with them for me.

One of those sudden endings was our ministry decision to postpone the Leadership Development Course that we had been planning to run here in southern Spain this autumn. Hundreds of hours have been invested over the past two years, communicating with the participants and staff, registering the course with the university, negotiating with the self-catering apartments that we'd be using for delegate accommodation.... and then, suddenly, we had to make the hard decision to postpone the course till next year - because of factors caused by the ongoing coronavirus situation around the world. What a sense of loss and disappointment that ministry decision brought with it.

Then, only a week later, another sudden ending crashed upon me: literally crashed, when a bizarre accident left my little car overturned at the side of the road. The day had started out with a lovely, peaceful walk in the forest, an opportunity to enjoy God's creation in the cool morning hours. But on the way home, when I'd only driven a few hundred yards and was travelling at a mere 6 kph, something seemed to malfunction as we went around the bend. A few seconds later, we had crashed into large rocks at the edge of the road, and my car had flipped over on its side.

I am so thankful to God for his protection: that the slow pace and the quiet road meant I emerged from the wreck relatively unscathed. But it brings many sudden endings with it: not only a sudden end to our pleasant morning outing, but probably an end to all the other outings (for swimming or hiking) that I might have done over the summer weeks, and very probably an end to the car itself... as I suspect that the cost of repairing it will probably be more than the market value of the car. (It's thirteen years old.) These bring their own sense of disappointment.

Encountering disappointments is a normal part of life and learning how to navigate them well and rise above them is a life skill that we need to be developing from our childhood years. If not, life's disappointments, especially the ones that come upon us suddenly, can derail us and rob us of all the good that the future holds for us. We've probably all met people who never seemed able to move beyond that divorce or bereavement, that loss of a job or end of a relationship... 

Learning to find our comfort and strength in God is crucially important at such times. I wrote about that a few years ago on this blog, in a series of three posts about what to do in a crisis, I reflected on David's response in a time of great loss. You can find those posts by clicking here.

But this morning, I was reflecting on a different way of avoiding disappointments - not the kind of disappointments that are thrust upon us by life's circumstances or by other people, but the kind that we can inadvertently cause for ourselves or for God. Read on in the post below to consider one way that we can minimise feelings of disappointment and regret.

Living life with minimal regret

I've recently begun reading the book of Isaiah in my morning times alone with God, and this morning I reached chapter 5, that well known prophetic parable about a man who planted a vineyard. Despite all the time and care that he put into it, it produced only sour grapes and he was bitterly disappointed that it didn't produce the sweet harvest he had been hoping for.

Of course, the story is an allegory of God's relationship with the people of Israel - that, no matter how much love and care and kindness He showed them, they turned to idols and to evil lifestyles. God looked for justice and righteousness in His people, but He found only injustice, oppression and violence.

It's a sobering thought to be reminded that God has emotions and that it's possible for Him to experience grief and disappointment when He looks at our lives and doesn't find there what He is hoping to see. When He looks for truth in our lives and finds lies; when He looks for generosity of spirit and finds selfishness; when He looks for trust and faith, but finds worry and doubt.... What a sense of deep disappointment that must bring to the heart of God.

I found myself writing a simple prayer in my journal: "Oh, Father, I don't ever want to be a disappointment to you. Keep me sensitive to the areas where my life isn't producing the kind of fruit you would long for." A key factor of the Holy Spirit's work in our lives is that He makes us aware of the things that need changed, the things that would bring disappointment or sadness to God. The Bible calls that "conviction" and it's a precious gift because it allows us to ask forgiveness and put things right.

If you develop that thought a little further, you realise that living life with intentionality is one of the ways that we can avoid disappointment and regret - not only the sadness that we might cause to our Heavenly Father, but also the sense of remorse and regret that we might cause to ourselves.

In the post above, I wrote about "sudden endings" and how they can cause us disappointment and grief. Sudden endings rob us of the opportunity to put things right. How many times have you seen a Hollywood movie where someone dies in a plane crash or suffers some other tragedy and one of the other characters says, "I didn't even say goodbye," or, "I never told her that I loved her," or, "We had a fight this morning before he left for work." There's a particular sense of grief and disappointment that comes with "unfinished business," with the sense that things didn't end the way they should have done.

One of the ways that we can avoid this sense of regret is by "keeping short accounts" with others in our lives. If we speak unkind words to someone or lose our temper with them... let's be quick to seek them out and ask for forgiveness.

Another way to avoid regret and disappointment is by deliberately living our lives as if time were short: making wise choices about how I spend the valuable time that's left to me; making decisions today that I wouldn't be sorry about if tomorrow were to bring some kind of sudden ending across my path.

There's no way to avoid all of life's disappointments, losses or trials. There's no way to foresee the sudden endings. But we can minimise our regrets by living each day with a conscious awareness of redeeming the time, loving God and seeking to bring joy to His heart.

We walked to John o'Groats

May dragged by in some ways, as the Spanish quarantine lockdown kept being extended for more and more weeks confined to our homes. But in another sense, it seems to have gone by very fast. It was a month where I had a lot of work "online" - many meetings and classes by video-conferencing, coaching and coach evaluations also happening over the internet - as well as other work that is simply done from behind a computer.

We seem to have turned the corner here in Spain. As the summer heat begins to increase, the coronavirus statistics seem to be decreasing. Deaths, which were hovering around 900 per day at the beginning of April, have dropped to just two or three per day, and there were two days this week when we had no deaths at all.

As a result, we've begun a process of "de-escalation" where we are slowly being allowed a bit more freedom. Mask wearing is compulsory in public places, but restaurants and coffee shops are beginning to open, and we're now allowed to venture more than one kilometre from our homes.

In the second stage of relaxing the lockdown, we are allowed to go into friends' homes and meet in small groups of fewer than ten people. My church house group met in person for the first time this week, with five of us meeting face to face and four others (still stranded out of the country) joining over the internet. Church services are allowed to begin this coming Sunday, but only with one third of the usual capacity, and so people need to reserve their places in advance. As I have a lung condition that puts me in the "vulnerable"category, I've decided just to join the service over Zoom, and not to attend the church in person yet. I did go to house group this week, though. 

Our locally based leadership team of five people for the LDC also had a face to face meeting over coffee this week, and we got the good news that the hotel and apartments we planned to use as accommodation for the leadership development course will be opening their doors again from 1st July. Now we only need to wait and see if borders and airports open sufficiently for us to go ahead with the course this autumn as planned.

While most of the world has been in lockdown, with limited access to the outside world, there's been a flourishing of websites encouraging you to "virtually" walk the Camino de Santiago, the Inca Trail, or other famous hiking routes around the world. You do it by walking around your own home or garden, or within the limits that are permitted in your own town, and some kind of app counts the kilometres that you've covered.... until they announce that you've now walked the equivalent of Lands End to John o'Groats. I decided to count up our current kilometre count, and discovered that we had indeed walked from Penzance to John o'Groats, from Malaga almost to the French border, or a good chunk of the way from Cape Town to Johannesburg.

Part of the key to this success is the use of a new canine-rucksack I bought, which is worn by one of the three bigger dogs (they take turns) and means that they can carry their own bottles of water for the hike. I'd been finding that my arthritic shoulders weren't strong enough to carry water for the dogs as well as for myself, and so it's made a huge difference to have the dogs carry their own water. Still within our current "de-escalation" regulations (ie, within our town limits), we've been able to go a little further than would otherwise have been possible for me. This week, a friend and I climbed the mountain to the wolf's lookout - a spot with amazing views over the Mediterranean coastline. (That's the photo at the top of this post.) Another day, I took the dogs for a long, shady walk in a nearby forest. It's been good to get out into nature, to compensate for the many hours spent looking at a computer screen. Looking ahead, further freedoms may open up.... and other kinds of ministry involvement can begin again.

Keeping on track...

For this year, 2020, we (that's I and the dogs) have had an annual goal of walking 2020 kilometres. I calculated this week that, if we’re to keep on track with our target, we need to be averaging just over 168 km every month… 

I was pretty sure that coronavirus quarantine lockdown would have completely sabotaged our progress,  as it meant we were forbidden from doing our usual spring hikes in the mountains and limited instead to making shorter circuits much closer to home. (The photos are from February, when we were still allowed out and about.) In fact, I've been incredibly thankful for the dogs, as they represent one of the few valid reasons we've had for leaving our homes over the past seven weeks. People without dogs have not been allowed to go out, except for doing their supermarket shopping.

With our movements so severely restricted during March and April, I was pleasantly surprised and encouraged today to discover that, despite the lockdown, we’ve somehow managed to clock up (and donate to charity) more than 700 km by this last day of April. We're still on track!

What are the areas where Covid quarantine presented a danger of throwing you "off track" and preventing you from doing things you'd hoped to do? Or are you one of the people who suddenly found yourself with lots of extra time on your hands, and were actually able to get back on track with things you'd been postponing for ages?

When the apostle Paul writes to a young man called Timothy, he tells him to continue in what he has learned and knows to be true; not to let anything throw him off track. (2 Tim 3: 14)

What are the things where you need to keep on track during the weeks that lie ahead?

Are you among the courageous?

How courageous are you?

I suspect that most of us don't particularly think of ourselves as especially courageous. Somehow, the word conjures up thoughts of war heroes or people who face incredible trials and dangers.

In the Old Testament, in 2 Samuel 23 and then again in 1 Chronicles 11, we read about David's "mighty men." Some Bible translations call them King David's "warriors" while other translations refer to them as "heroes."

If you're reading in a Spanish Bible, they're referred to as the valientes - which simply means courageous: people of courage. You don't need to be a warrior to be courageous; you don't even need to be a "mighty man." You can be a woman, or a child, and still be a person of courage.

And so it's interesting to read what the Bible actually says about these heroes, these people of courage.  The accounts of their exploits are strangely different. Sure enough, some of them were brave warriors who killed vast numbers of enemy soldiers. One of them was a strong guy who pursued and killed a lion on a snowy day; another was a courageous soldier who killed an Egyptian giant.  

Yet there are others in the list whose achievements were not nearly so spectacular. One of them was called Eleazar, and all that we're told about him is that he stuck by his commander even when others had fled; that he persevered even when he felt like giving up, and that one time his hand was so tired that he didn't even have the energy to lift up his sword. 

Have you ever been in that place? Have you ever reached the point where you felt that you didn't have the energy to go on? Have you ever felt so tired or discouraged that it would have been tempting to give up and run away? If you didn't do that, if you chose instead to "stick by your commander," to persevere and stay faithful to Jesus even when others didn't, then you're just like Eleazar. You are a person of perseverance and courage.

Another of the "valientes" was called Shammah, and all that we're told about him was that he held his ground when under attack and he defended a field of lentils. Nothing very glamorous about that; saving a field of lentils doesn't sound like a particularly significant achievement. And perhaps you feel that your life is not particularly significant; that your involvement for the kingdom of God is not especially spectacular or praiseworthy. But it's not about how big or small your involvement is; it's not about whether you teach a Sunday school class of six kids or whether you lead a church of hundreds of people. It's about whether you "hold your ground" when the enemy attacks, seeking to discourage you and make you give up.  It doesn't matter how young or old you are. It's about whether you're willing to stand strong for your field of lentils.

Faithfulness and perseverance are what mark us as people of courage, no matter how large or small the territory that has been entrusted to us. Are you numbered among the courageous?

Read on below for something that was perhaps even more important about David's mighty men.