Everyday worship

We had a great time last night at the launch of Jonny Shepherd's worship CD Raise Your Voices. Home-grown kids worship created just a few streets away. Awesome. So we've been learning some new songs in the kitchen today. Which sort of underlines how catchy they are.

Deeper, underground

I was getting things ready in my new classroom yesterday, painting a blackboard on the wall (like you do in an old Victorian schoolroom) and as I moved some stuff out of the way of the drips, I picked up a children's history book I'd not seen before. It wasn't particulary good, not a patch on the Ladybird histories of my childrhood, but I flicked through it anyway.

Back at home for teatime, Kate and the children had been to the library. They got books on Parkour, a Doctor Seuss, and a book about Harriet Tubman. It had a bronze statue of her on the front.

Kate said, sort of anticipating my bemused look, "Yeh, I don't know who she is." Not exactly bemused, but strangely warmed, I replied: "Actually, I'd never heard of her... before today. But she was in this history book at school, and she helped free slaves on the Underground Railroad." Felt a nudge from God to find out a bit more about her. She was known as the Moses of her people (which resonated with this morning's bible study notes on Luke, Tom Wright making the connection with Jesus' new kind of Exodus.)

Slavery, freedom, safe houses, the everyday heroic...

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

The Meerkat anointing

I just keep coming back to Dutch Sheets' book Intercessory Prayer again and again. It's shaped my praying life in lots of different ways these past six years or so. I was a bit sluggish though, in response to the riots. Maybe I was still on a I'm-just-back-from-a-week's-camping-at-New-Wine-and-not-really-following-the-news thing. Then things kicked off in Manchester too. And we're off to Manchester this weekend (and London next week). So it was clearly time to pray. So we set aside the best chunk of the evening to pray for our cities and all the strands we could discern within that mess.


In his book, Dutch Sheets uses a few animal images to illustrate the different aspects of intercession in the Old and New Testaments - the she-bear anointing, the butterfly anointing etc. And I was really focusing on the chapter about Watchmen, and how that's connected with cities, and so the next day I thought I'd try to unpack that a bit in a way my children could understand. And we got researching meerkats, because they seem to encapsulate the watchmen characteristics of alertness, watchfulness, urgent communication.

Gotta dash - just spotted a Martial Eagle.

p.s. Praise God that it was a quieter night. I just loved turning on the news to hear that, err, nothing had happened. And that it had rained (there had been loads of specific prayer about that.)

Obedience

Here's how I hear from God sometimes. A nudge, a reminder, something falling into place. Before you know it, I'm joining the dots.

We were in Bristol last weekend visiting Kate's sister and her family, and they mentioned how we'd be going along to a different church in the morning because their friend Josh was getting baptised. And how in the past few months there'd been a few baptisms there, new Christians or guys on the leadership team who just hadn't gotten round to it for ages. [A little nudge for me there. It's only since I've been in Rugby that I've heard anyone say that I really ought to get baptised as an adult believer, and I really was going to pursue that. I even told an elder once, but he only saw the need for references, which threw me a bit.]

Saturday bedtime and I'm trying to get three little cousins settled. And my nephew chooses a Bible story. It's from the book of Acts, and it's about Philip. And the Ethiopian Official in the chariot. Who makes a decision to follow Jesus (once he finds out who he is) and then asks to get baptised. There and then. In the nearest available puddle. [The nudges are getting bigger now.]

So I fasted in the morning, went for a run around the nearby streets and parks, and kept listening. I'll take a towel and change of clothes in the car, just in case. That's where I get to in my head. Then I ask one of the leadership team while they're setting up, and then the senior pastor. And they chat to my brother-in-law, to Josh, to my wife, just checking things out. It's all a bit eye-wideningly sudden, but they're up for it. And I've stepped out this far, so...


I'd wanted to get someone to baptise me in Cardigan Bay a fortnight before, when I went in fully clothed just to show Kate that I was still up for daft things. But it didn't happen that way.

I loved having so many kids around, they were just hoping to get splashed I think. And seeing Alice and Chris too. I was at college with them a lifetime ago, and I'd bumped into them once in the past twenty years. But it was like God put them there to remind me why I needed to do this declaration thing as an adult, like my early teenage confirmation ceremony wouldn't quite wash because of all the rebellion that happened after that, when they were contemporaries.

So, big thanks to pastor Tim for being so flexible, and the folks from the Community Church at Southmead, and Josh for letting me crash his miniature pool party. And Barny, for choosing that bedtime story. But above all, to Jesus, for his example, the one I always want to follow.


"I'm baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. The real action comes next: The main character in this drama—compared to him I'm a mere stagehand—will ignite the kingdom life within you, a fire within you, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He's going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives. He'll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he'll put out with the trash to be burned."

Jesus then appeared, arriving at the Jordan River from Galilee. He wanted John to baptize him. John objected, "I'm the one who needs to be baptized, not you!"

But Jesus insisted. "Do it. God's work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism." So John did it.

The moment Jesus came up out of the baptismal waters, the skies opened up and he saw God's Spirit—it looked like a dove—descending and landing on him. And along with the Spirit, a voice: "This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life."

Matthew 3:11-17 [The Message]

Where's Wally?

That was the rainiest Sunday for quite a while. I didn't even set foot out of the house.

We got the story quilt over us and snuggled up in the sitting room for a few pages from Arthur Ransome's The Big Six. I guess I was drawn to it in the library because we're doing a Rivers topic at school, and I was intrigued by the whole Swallows and Amazons thing. I find myself shaking my head at when The Big Six was written (1940) - it's surprisingly fresh and pacy, and gripping (I am just a sucker for pike fishing and youngsters just building a boat and heading off for days on end and smoking eels and...) No wonder the BBC are set to make a film or two, trying to find a franchise to fill the gap now that Harry Potter's finished.

And Where's Wally has turned out to be a good way for us to pass the time, say, waiting for the bathroom to clear while one or other child does teeth cleaning, or long car journeys. So the rainy day list of indoor things to make and do now includes making our own Where's Wally page. We started with good intentions to draw lots of stuff, but it was A3 paper and after 15 minutes we bailed out and used photocopied chunks of the original book, along with photos of ourselves.



We got some images from the Where's Wally website, but we checked out the Where's Waldo website too just in case it had some snazzy stuff - but they're both the same.

See, in the US, Wally's called Waldo. I knew that already because a while back I'd read John Ortberg's book God is Closer than You Think. (Because you need to Get out of the Boat and Get to Know Him.) He uses the image to contrast the Michaelangelo God-Adam-finger picture on the Sistene Chapel, and to highlight a paradox about how hard it can feel sometimes to feel God's presence, given that He's everywhere.

Where’s Waldo—he’s right around the corner; he’s lurking where you least expect him; he’s right there on the page; he’s anywhere people are willing to see the whole world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder and with a tongue fluent only in praise. He’s closer than you think.

-

I got an email today about the possible art project on the security barriers at the GEC recreation ground (see below). It'd been forwarded through various layers of the Council's structures, and by the end it seems like they want to take it a step forward. Which was good to hear.

And I liked what one member of staff had said, just one line, as she forwarded it up the chain of command. It said:

There is hope in the world.

Now, hear me right. It's not about me. I'm not the hope. I only point to it. Or I at least carry it. In the way that Jesus says I am the Light of the World and then says to his followers You are the Light of the World. Tag, you're it. Go and do likewise. (Actually, I got this from a Bill Johnson talk. I don't pray I must become less or None of me, all of You, Father. He loves us to bits! More like All of me, covered by all of you.) For me, it's about getting God into the everyday. Or if he's in the everyday already, then making Him a bit clearer. A few pictures, a few words, an email here and there, and people I've never met are feeling more hopeful.

And for me, that stuff is just like finding Wally's cheeky little stripey jumper, right behind a dragon or a drainpipe.

Ah, there He is.

Rec wreck

God's timing's always catching me unawares. Before we went away to Wales for the half-term holidays, I'd scribbled down in my diary that there was going to be a community fun day at Hillmorton's GEC Recreation Ground (aka The Digger Park) on Saturday 4 June. And maybe I could help man the Rugby CAP (Christians Against Poverty) stand. But that wasn't going to happen, because it was also the day we travelled back from Cardigan Bay. We covered the 195 miles in a little over four-and-a-half hours, arriving back in Rugby at 4.00pm. On the dot. Which is precisely when the fun day was scheduled to finish.

Only it didn't. Because it hadn't actually started.

A quick rummage through the mound of post and the Rugby Observer article explained why:

That car must've had quite a dent in it to have caused a decent chunk of the wall to cave in. I felt a bit miffed for almost half a second, before the crazy little grassroots artistic activist in me kicked in. Because we've been here before. It's how lovelevenshulme got started, it's how I got into doctoring Grand Theft Auto IV posters in bus shelters (ahh yes, redemptive subvertising I called it back then.) It's all Shane Claiborne's fault really. And Banksy. But mostly I put it down to the Holy Spirit showing me that there's often a dimension of prophetic declaration in a particular location, of putting a marker down that says to the enemy: Hands off, this is God's patch.

Here's another bit of timing. Miriam and Theo were out at the children's work at BEC Cawston, and they were finding out about Joshua and Jericho. Which is at least a little bit about crumbling walls and declaration and offbeat ways of getting God's things done. So when we got back, we got creative, making posters for the security barriers that said things like... well, I'll put some photos up, it'll be quicker.


I guess it's also a nudge for me to get out prayer walking the local facilities more.