the word Dirty has a small history in my view of God. there is the book 'Jesus with Dirty feet' and the Audio Adrenaline song 'Dirty' wich has the line 'Let's get Dirty, let's get used', but even more than that it's the childlike meaning of the word dirty, dirty is somthing impure and therefore somthing God doesn't want us to got involved in. and yet dirty is a great word for the world, it is impure but it's also dirty because it's covered in dirt, in mud and earth and dust. yet as christians were's supposed to be above all that. we belong to a kingdom of pureness and light not dirt and darkness. we are expected to witness by our very pureness. who really expects that anyway? 'God'? well i fail, i fail and i fail and i run and i hide and i just screw up. and God expects that, God knows me, God see's me as a work in progress, a creation he's still finishing, still shaping and changing and transforming. the only one's who expect me to be squeeky clean are the people who think i'm different than them. and we're not. yet we try and ignore that, to define ourselves by our christianity and that by the comfort rating of given moments on a sunday morning. but we're called to more than that, more than the pretence of a masked existence, more than the witness of the pure, we're called to recognise, embrace, and be transformed by getting dirty. so i call you to think about what you are, take those closeted parts of you and turn them from what you are ashamed of and give them to God, not just to repent and unburden but to be willing to be changed and perhaps even challanged to do something that though may get dirty may just let your life be moved on into a place you never thought you'd go. i'm gonna do it. i'm gonna admit that i get it wrong, that i could make a long list, but i'm not gonna stop there. i'm going to take those traits and say to God use them, use the foolish and the broken to make something beautiful. teach me by my experiences and show me ways to move on.
The clock has just clicked round to 12:20 and I'm sitting, literally speechless, staring at the curtains. The mp3 recording of a talk has just finished and I'm wrecked. It was a lovely talk that at first was preoccupied with news of the speakers expected baby girl. It was the second in the series which portrayed the idea of movement. And asked the question 'what wrecks you', as moses was wrecked by the beating of an Israelite slave, or Jeremiah was wrecked by the state of the temple. What have we experienced that has wrecked us? Divorce, violence, poverty, neglect? And there I sat dumbfounded as I realize that I am wrecked by the lonely child, sliding off the radar, crying out for meaning and community in this confusing minefield of life; I am wrecked by the congregation written off as 'not youth friendly', excluded from good resources for the young because they have valued their traditions rather than jumping on every bandwagon. I am wrecked by exclusivity, and I am moved. Moved to pursue a place in a building and a community where I can turn my wreck into service. Moved to abandon myself to something that is mostly unknown, but reliably cradled in the heavenly fathers arms. Nb. If I have ever belittled or not encouraged you to act on what wrecks you I apologize, though I didn't find the whole talk agreeable the speakers point on witnessing wrecking so as to be moved I very much agree with. There is something beautiful and bizzare about bus trips from the midlands to Dubai? we followed this bus through a sleepy midlands village for some way surpressing laughter. However, as the teaching at the parish weekend away this weekend highlighted, for many people the idea of church is eaqually as bizzare. Why would we want to join an outdated judgemental group of people. People who are tied to rules, and demands that our daily lives must be restricted. 'The street bible' uses the word liberator rather than messiah, but somehow our culture portrays the process of liberation as oppressive! This is what i think the church is really like. the picture is from DPchallange and won the challange 'highcontrast III' it's called 'Espresso Explosion', even though the liquid is actually oil. but to me it's a beautiful illustration of the church. the pristine china cup that we are often portrayed as, and the messy blackness exploding from inside, revealing our true nature, revealing that the one thing that holds us together is a recognition that we are sin-sick, fallen, messy souls who have come together to be transfromed by God. to be transformed by his pristine purity and cleanliness, to have our dead sediment oil turned into lifegiving water. i was hugely tempted to call this entry bedpost notches but thought that there were too many people that may not see the joke. i still have, after many years, a love of writing in pencil, though pencil fades over time and the latter marks outshine the former leaving you with faint pages of theories and musings that combined with the dubious spelling makes for near imposible translation. some years ago i found out my poem book, it was a well worn notebook full of such pencil lines and from what i could decipher i typed up the entries. it means that i now have poems dating back through my teens and a blog that takes over about two and a half years ago allowing me to see the reaccuring beads i thread and the movements of thoughts. it's fancinating to read back and quite profound to do so regularly. starting a fresh blog has given me a good reason to once again examine these old pages, typed thankfully so that i can once again decern the pencil marks and discover that every step i have taken, every rule i have fought, every tear i have cried and every mistake i have made has been cradled by the almighty. Last sunday i went to Revive (the older youth service at sunnyside) where we talked about prayer and dedicated some time to just going away on our own and being still. i wandered for a while then came back to the room with the art materials and wrote some words on a postiit note. next thing i knew that note was on a sheet of paper and i had started to pour out phrases and comments and prayers all around it. sadly the prayer time ended long before the large sheet was covered and i briought it home determined to continue. this prayer canvass is the result. as yu can see there is a lot of blank space to carry on praying and writing in but the mst important idea is that it's a constant developing prayer. a love letter if you will. the writing between the hands is the original post-it note words ' There is, as there always was, a place of belonging, a hope or eternity, a chance to hear the birds sing and the leaves of every plant dance.' prayer is a gift of great beauty and it's such a privillage to do something where i feel i'm expressing some of that beauty in my prayer. Well this is something of an experiment for me. moving away from the land of hotmail and it's associated blogging space i've decided to set up on Weebly and change my blog for the first time. Blogging is something i do enjoy but i'm awear that it's something i want to be better presented and more accesibly linked into the other stuff i'm doing. so here goes. it may die but there is nothing but an hour or two lost in simply trying. |
The other siteWho is GfeefGfeef is the name that my writings have been under for some years. As far as I know it's unique to me. Originally from the UK, I now live in Serbia but continue to have a passion for childrens and youth ministry. Archives
October 2014
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