Archives For essentials

I can't drink from a fire hose

December 8, 2011

I deleted 52 blogs off my feed reader today. They were all good ones too. Now I have only 10 feeds remaining, one of which is my own blog.

Why would I do that?

I realized that I can only drink from a cup, not out of a fire hose.

I was spending a lot of time scanning through numerous pages of blog posts, anxious I might miss something if I didn’t read all of them. Or I would look at my feed reader and read nothing because it was too overwhelming.

I subscribed to all of those blogs because they offered something useful to me at the time. But regardless of how useful they were individually, as a combined fire hose of information they simply generated anxiety.

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes 12:12 ESV)

The skillset of our internet age no longer has finding information at the top of the most useful list, now we have to be better at filtering information – taking in only what we need. This is something I am having to learn, having been educated in the era when books were the only source of reliable information.

Oddly enough, this situation is a little like the very first temptation – reach out and take knowledge (Genesis 3:5-6). Yet having grasped knowledge we now find that unlimited information is in fact empty and burdensome because we ourselves are finite. Satisfaction does not come from trying to become like God, it is found by submitting to God and trusting in my Creator.

What I need to refresh me is to drink from a cup of still water, something that has had time to sit and allow the sediment and crud to settle out from it. God provides this, He leads me into spaces in which there are restful waters to refresh my soul. Deep, living water bubbling up from His Word.

He leads me beside still waters.
(Psalm 23:2 ESV)

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Image of fire hose: iStockphoto

In Year Focus ,
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Plan to endure

June 18, 2011

Mt Cook

Only a fool would attempt to climb Mt Cook without a plan.

Likewise, it has become popular to have a ‘Life Plan‘ or similar sort of personal ‘mission statement’.

Interestingly, we Christians don’t tend to have much of a plan with regards to following Christ. I’m sure there are some rare individuals out there who do have some plan for serving God, but the more common approach seems to be either no plans at all or else waiting for God to give us a ‘call’ to do something particular with the life He gave us.

God does appear to call some folks to serve Him is particular ways, He certainly calls all of us to follow His commands. What I’m beginning to realize is that I have never given adequate consideration to how I am going to deal with the hazards and obstacles which will certainly arise in serving Christ. It is one thing to know my goal, quite another to have a plan of how to reach the goal.

Currently my thinking is fuzzy on this, but just as someone climbing Mt Cook needs to consider how they intend to cope with the cold, avalanches, rock falls, crevasses, ice, rock, falling off, &etc; so too I need to consider how I will cope with the obstacles and hazards known to be part of following Christ.

What might those hazards be?
  • Growing weary ( Galatians 6:9)
  • Disillusionment
  • Lack of faith
  • Love of the world ( 1 John 2:15-16)
  • Satan snatching away the word from my heart ( Mark 4:15)
  • Falling away during a time of testing ( Luke 8:13)
  • Being choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life ( Luke 8:14)
  • Temptation ( 1 Corinthians 10:13)
  • Sin
  • Prayerlessness
  • Inadequate fellowship
  • Failing to rejoice ( Philippians 3:1)
  • Being unfruitful

Having only compiled this list right now (and I am sure there are more hazards I could add), I don’t yet have a plan for dealing with each of these potential obstacles to my following Christ. I am going to need to ponder and pray over each hazard and come up with at least an emergency strategy for each. As with physical hazards, experience of the real thing teaches valuable insight into how to best overcome them so my tentative plans will no doubt evolve and be modified by experience over the years ahead!

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ (Luke 14:28-30 ESV)

How would you cope with these hazards?

By your endurance you will gain your lives. (Luke 21:19 ESV)

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Image of Mt Cook: Fraser Gunn

In Year Focus
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Companions for the journey

June 11, 2011

Being alone in fellowship with God feels nice. However, we are designed to be part of a community rather than loners so attempting to chart a course for heaven as a solitary adventurer is doomed for failure.

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In Year Focus
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Two wise women and a dull man

March 29, 2011

Within five minutes this evening the wisdom of two women brought the focus in my life back to where it should be. A conversation with my wife about how the last week has really been for me took her only seconds to zoom in on a key element of wellbeing that I have been ignoring. Then a blog post by a woman of thanksgiving who was feeling pressured carries a hint right at the end about goals for the year set and forgotten.

In January I wrote about making 2011 a year of essentials – one of the first non-essentials was identified as too much time spent catching up on internet happenings, a focus that has been lost in just a couple of months!

When I am finding the world and life all a bit much I like to retreat into the quiet spaces of my days and pursue ideas as they arise. Blog links and Google give extra leverage to such a process. However, the time spent has to come from somewhere, in my case it gets stolen – from my usual time with God and from time that should be spent asleep. This is actually stealing from God, or at least taking something God made as good and corrupting it for my own selfish ends. Consider the following extract of an article by John Piper:

A Brief Theology of Sleep

Why did God imagine sleep? He never sleeps! He thought the idea up out of nothing. He thought it up for his earthly creatures. Why! Psalm 127:2 says, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved in his sleep.” According to this text sleep is a gift of love, and the gift is often spurned by anxious toil. Peaceful sleep is the opposite of anxiety. God does not want his children to be anxious, but to trust him. Therefore I conclude that God made sleep as a continual reminder that we should not be anxious but should rest in him.

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” ( Psalm 121:4). But Israel will. For we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day. How humiliating to the self-made corporate executive that he has to give up all control and become as limp as a suckling infant every day.

Sleep is a parable that God is God and we are mere men. God handles the world quite nicely while a hemisphere sleeps. Sleep is like a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Man is not sovereign. Don’t let the lesson be lost on you. God wants to be trusted as the great worker who never tires and never sleeps. He is not nearly so impressed with our late nights and early mornings as he is with the peaceful trust that casts all anxieties on him and sleeps.
In quest of rest,
Pastor John

I think it is important for me to be humbled by the reality of my need for sleep. I also need to remember in whom I should put my trust as I sleep:

At the very least, sleep is a good opportunity to entrust yourself, your entire self, to God’s care. You’re trusting something when you lay down your body and, with it, the control of your conscious mind. That moment when you consciously choose unconsciousness, and let yourself go, is a daily opportunity to relinquish control to a God who you have to trust.
(Fred Sanders 2007, The Theology of Sleep)

I must admit that I don’t generally consciously entrust myself to anything other than my mattress and bed when I go to sleep – I have been blessed with the ability to go unconscious within minutes of my head hitting the pillow so sleep just happens. Perhaps I need to learn the prayer I was never taught as a child:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I pray for my children before they go to sleep, that God will keep them safely in His arms whatever may happen, yet oddly I do not pray the same for myself!

Sleep is an essential element of being human. I need to thank God for sleep as a gift and also as a command to cease striving and rest, trusting in Him for things left undone and for His renewed blessing every morning. Perhaps one of the reasons we must sleep is to be awakened to the wonder of God’s blessing of a new day, every day.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
(Lamentations 3:22-23 ESV)

Gifts I have noticed this week (#301 – #311):

301) Two-year-old playing at washing dishes in the kitchen sink.
302) Pre-warmed socks.
303) Precious baby giggles playing peek-a-boo.
304) Taste of a fresh apple reminding me of childhood orchards.
305) A weekend away in a beautiful place.
306) Our accommodation being upgraded for no extra charge.
307) Fine weather despite a rainy forecast.
308) Seeing my kids playing on a jungle gym the same as I played on when their ages.
309) An evening with no computer.
310) Feeling so much better after only one night away.
311) Being nudged towards at least considering a big decision that I don’t want to make.

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holy experience

In Eucharisteo, Year Focus ,
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Focus

January 14, 2011

Human mesenchymal cell

I have set myself to make 2011 a year of focusing on essentials. One of the most fundamental elements of our lives is how we spend our time. Don’t panic… I’m not going to start preaching about time management! I am more concerned about some of the junk I spend my time on. Junk such as Facebook and casual internet browsing. I can easily kiss goodbye to several hours in an evening on those two alone. It always feels important at the time, and often is interesting stuff I am reading, but that time spent keeping up with 20 blogs pushes more important things out – such as reading the Bible or praying for my own kids.

“One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.”
— John Piper

Therefore I have decided to put some self imposed limits on these things. I’m not going to tell you what my own time limits are, or what blogs I have dumped off my RSS feed, these are things specific to each individual and to the phase of life we are each in. I think the internet is a great tool, but there is no need for me to turn the tool into a time-wasting toy. I am choosing to be “intentionally uninformed” so as to leave time in my days to inform myself about God.

Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread,
but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.
(Proverbs 12:11 ESV)

In the end it is about focus. If I want to see God I need to focus my attention upon Him and purposefully block out other distractions. This is similar to how a telescope or microscope works – they each have lenses which focus light, they also have a tube (or equivalent) which keeps extraneous light out. The only light you want in a microscope is that which is directed through the sample and lenses, the stray light in the room reduces the clarity of the image and reduces resolution. This is especially so with fluorescence microscopy, good fluorescence images require a darkened room, meticulous sample preparation, a sophisticated microscope and a lot of skill. Obtaining a few high quality, informative images can take weeks of preparation – work that requires skill, concentration and focus, even through all the boring steps of what is a long, and at times tedious, process. Yet these images have opened up new ways of seeing and understanding the very basis of life – well worth the effort in my opinion.

So too with seeing the glory of Christ, it takes time, discipline and sometimes a bit of tedium, but the vista is far better than any microscope image!

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In Year Focus
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