There is a Season, Turn Turn Turn

Most people who view Christianity and Christians, seem to have the idea that it is all about having and living the quiet life, the easy life, kind of saying ‘we can’t make it in the real world’ or ‘I’m a Christian because I’m a loser’ or ‘I’ve flunked out’ or some such things, usually negative. Basically, those who can’t make it in the real world, in one way, shape or form. However, in one sense, all Christians are outcasts from the world, or should be.

‘15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.’  (1 John 2:15)

There is a balance to be made, between trying to rehabilitate the world and seeing it as irretrievably lost. And, although Christians should see the world as a harsh, unfair, divided and deeply unjust place, we cannot take the weight of it on our shoulders. Nor is our primary motive to challenge injustice in the world. It is to seek God, the coming of God’s Kingdom and all His true values, not the passing fads and fancies of the world, however important they may seem now. Rehabilitation begins with us first. We cannot, even as Christians, go around preaching against sin, or preaching for Jesus in any way, until we are rehabilitated. Now, I know that we are all a work in progress, and not one of us will reach perfection until Jesus does a final work in us all, but all of us who live out the Christian faith in our lives will get to a point, perhaps in spite or because of our struggles, where we are operating enough in Christian faith, basically in an intimate relationship with Jesus, where we can correct people in love and can preach the Gospel. I don’t just mean standing on a street corner holding a Bible in your hand, or as a reverend in a church, I mean in the course of your day, in your workplace, who you eat lunch with, where you get your coffee (or tea, if you’re English, my dear!), and where God takes you and places you. We don’t need to be officially religious or get paid by an organised church to preach the Gospel, or simply just profess our faith, BUT we need to live out our faith in obedience, well before we preach it, and perhaps even before we just talk about it. We need to walk the walk, before we talk the talk, brothers and sisters!

 

Boring Christians!? That’s the image, right? Boring, staid, rather sensible, non threatening. Emasculated men, placid women, and all rather torpid as lukewarm coffee (or tea, if you’re English, my dear!). It never sounds very inspiring... church committees, jumble sales, Tuesday meetings, etc etc blah blah blah! It isn’t like that, or it shouldn’t be.

 

I wouldn’t change one thing about my life, not the fact that right now I am suffering very badly with chronic fatigue syndrome, literally can’t work and have bouts of depression, nor the sadness of some of my past, either. Even if I wanted to, how could I anyway? It’s wasting time going over things I can’t change. My Christian walk with the Lord has had its ups and downs, in fact it’s been like a rollercoaster, but that’s life. Trying to avoid the bad, does not enable us to enjoy the good... because as sure as eggs is eggs, good and bad will come, and as someone said somewhere at some time, sometimes they run on parallel lines. I have already had a life of adventure with the Lord... I wait with bated breath, and hope unending at what is to come.

‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: 

2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, 

3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, 

4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, 

5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, 

6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, 

7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, 

8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.’

(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

What Has Right Wing Politics Got To Do With Christianity, Anyway?

In the US, people in general, and this is a generalisation, seem more ‘full on’ than people in the UK and Western Europe. At the same time, obviously, people in the UK in general, and this is a generalisation too, are more laid back. This goes for Christians, as well. American people seem to be on a quest, or some purpose, whereas I would suggest that British culture and people lack a real sense of purpose, and perhaps Christianity in the UK does, too. Americans always seem to be goal oriented, whereas we Brits tend to amble along hoping everything turns out right. We could definitely learn something from our American cousins, but perhaps they could learn something from us, too. Life is both a journey and a destination. We need a purpose in life, but we also need sometimes to take stock, be content with what we have and just be glad to be alive. I noticed that people who are too consumed by any purpose, particularly when that purpose is not from God, seem to miss the blessings both large and small that God scatters all around us, but I also noticed that when people don’t have any real purpose in life they can deteriorate, not every person, but some people can lose sight of what is important. We Christians need a purpose, but we also need to know that when we are seeking God’s kingdom and putting God’s values into effect in our daily lives, He has it all in hand. We can literally let go, and let God take over. Didn’t you know, it’s that simple?!

 

I’ve struggled to understand for a long time what very hard right wing politics and Christianity have in common. It’s not  really an issue in the UK, although it creeps in here and there, but in the US it seems that for many they are inseparable. Why? On some level, perhaps superficial, my view is that Christianity actually has more in common with a kind of communism, or more like a communalism or kibbutzim in modern day Israel, where people live together selflessly and work for themselves and the common good as well. The very word socialism, let alone communism, seems to send those on the political right in America into paroxysms of fear or hatred bordering on the pathological. Yet the Bible says this:

‘44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.’  (Acts 2:44-45)

Now, I’m no political theorist, but that sounds as darn near communism in its basic form as anything could be. Is the embracing of Christian faith by the right wing actually a pathological knee jerk attempt to distance what they see as Christian faith from that biblical description? Methinks the hard right wing doth protest too much. But by aligning themselves with Christianity, the hard, perhaps even ultra, right wing in America attempt to gain themselves a respectability they don’t really deserve, they legitimise their political stance as if endorsed by God Himself, and more worryingly refute the basic notion of Christianity, which is to love your neighbour. Let me also note, I am not saying Christianity is socialism either, because the left wing has deteriorated, too, but I do find it offensive to presume that if someone has left wing or even left of centre politics, it is rather bizarrely assumed to be at odds with a Christian faith. Not sure where that comes from. I am firstly a Christian, and then have left of centre political views. I can’t be bothered explaining why, but if someone wants to know why, I will happily explain why. But it has nothing to do with wanting to live in some socialist utopia. I believe they tried that back in Russia onetime... Nuff said.

 

The Prosperity Gospel?

Ah, the ‘prosperity gospel’, that gospel that says capitalism and the worship of money is actually what Christianity is all about, which again rather strangely as in the case of American right wing politics, seems to coincide exactly with the views of wealthy and powerful Americans. God evidently likes wealthy and powerful authoritarian right wing Americans, and dislikes left of centre ... er, well basically anyone who doesn’t fit into the former category. Yeehaaaaa!!! It’s obvious, being serious, that Christianity is incorporated into something that is actually, more or less, the exact opposite of what lived Christian faith should be. Say it long enough, loud enough and with as much sincerity as you can muster, and add the magic ingredient ‘expedient convenient faith’, no doubt bought from Walmart, and you too can convince yourself and many others that the worship of money and materialism is sanctioned by God, especially if you are a right wing conservative American. I did notice, rather strangely, that the very wealthiest proponents of the prosperity gospel are against unions and workers rights and no doubt a fair wage for the people doing entry level jobs. Isn’t that strange, that prosperity is only for the very wealthiest, and not for ordinary people doing ordinary jobs?

 

 

‘9 People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 11 But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.’  (1 Tim 6:9-11)

Say goodbye to the ‘prosperity gospel’, and hello to Jesus!

 

Who Needs a Billion Dollars?

As the rights of workers, unions and legislation on the side of employees has been seriously undermined in Britain, and the price of university education has been tripled, there is more and more the idea we should all move on and move up in life, just as any kind of pretence to equality and fair play is itself removed. So, as things are made harder for ordinary people to move on and move up, the propaganda machine has gone into overdrive. We must all be rich, or else we only have ourselves to blame for our poverty, not the rigged economic system we now live under. In America, it seems everyone wants to become a billionaire, so they can then tell everyone how much of a regular guy they are, and they still live in a rented house and drive a good second hand car, and still eat at the local diner! You can do all those things without owning a billion dollars. God does not command us to become super rich. It is the worst folly of the Western world that the pursuit of wealth makes people happy. It doesn’t. It makes everyone hard, callous, selfish and in the end, empty and miserable. Take a look, take a real good look at any number of billionaires and super wealthy people. Do you see what I mean? Nobody needs a billion dollars. A million dollars might be nice, but I suspect the majority of people reading this blog have got by most of their lives without owning anywhere near that amount either. Where I’m standing, If I had $1500 (about £1000) that I didn’t owe anybody and it was all mine, I’d feel pretty blessed with that at the moment. The world may tell you to be wealthy, the very core of your soul may tell you that the whole vindication of your life might be to be wealthy. But, what is God saying?

There is a God! Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life!

Religion binds and ties people up into all kinds of complicated knots, whereas walking with Jesus releases us from the religion that some people actually think is why Jesus was crucified in the first place. And they couldn’t be more wrong. Dead wrong. So wrong it seems that many people stay away from church, from the idea of a living God and won’t go within a hundred miles of a Bible, and I notice that some of the biggest critics of the Bible are almost always those who have never read it. It is almost as if they fear they may become converts themselves...

 

Whatever someone believes, or doesn’t believe for that matter, ultimately it all boils down to one completely salient point: Is what they believe the truth? That’s it in a nutshell. For Christians, the major point is whether God exists, or not. If He does, then we have a God who is there for us. If He doesn’t, then all Christians are in trouble, not to mention Orthodox Jews and Muslims. What I do struggle to understand sometimes is the vehemence against God from some atheists when they don’t believe in God, and how some atheists seem to spend more time thinking about God and Christianity than even some Christians might.

 

The anger some atheists have towards Christians, and I suppose all people who believe in an all powerful God, is that in the name of Christianity many injustices, horrors, wars and genocides and many other awful things have been committed. There is no way around this. I am not as a Christian being blasphemous, because I am not for a minute accusing God. But in the name of God and the Christian faith many evils and atrocities have been carried out throughout history. But, if God exists, is He to blame? And if God doesn’t exist, then people were definitely to blame. I believe God exists, in fact I base my whole life and my future and everything I am on Him. I stake everything on Him. Believe me when I say that if God hadn’t proved He existed to me, I would not be writing this blog. I just wouldn’t be. I would be writing about something else.

 

I’m not a professional religious person, like one of those priests or vicars who earn a good living preaching a sermon on a Sunday morning hoping they’ll impress someone and move up the old chain of command and end up earning big bucks wearing a nice cassock, or something. Not me, I’m just an ordinary bloke, have no interest in being a professional religious person whatsoever because I feel that in some cases the structure and the hierarchy has become far more important than having a living and transforming faith in Jesus Christ. When I see the way many organised churches have become, vast and sometimes impersonal bureaucratic organisations with different doctrines emphasised, sometimes it is almost as if Jesus would be an intruder in all of it. A simple carpenters son perplexed by multi million pound/dollar budgets, a faith that sometimes seems above and beyond the concerns of ordinary people, but He picked fishermen to be His disciples and not the professionally religious, and turned His back on the professionally religious and religious authorities of His day to move, live and be amongst ordinary people. Religion even then had become the preserve of the rich and powerful, really I suppose to manipulate and control and administer punishment. Such things always fall to those who are rich, powerful and influential.

 

Part of the Gospel, the Good News, of Jesus being born, was to challenge power structures, particularly power structures that were supposed to be for the good of all people involving religion, and even way back when had become the preserve of the affluent, the powerful and the connected. What started out as good and liberating became more and more bureaucratic, hierarchical and more and more the preserve of a professional religious elite and other groups like the Pharisees who took the truth and the freedom it was supposed to bring and turned it into suffocating rules and regulations, which nobody could keep and which made them focus on other people in frustration. It became a religion of judgement and punishment, instead of being a faith of justice and mercy.

 

 

I believe Jesus specifically picked fishermen, common ordinary men, and not the professionally religious, men who were intimately involved with their trade because they simply had to earn a living, because He wanted to say ‘you don’t have to be involved with religion to know me, and know me intimately’. I think some of the anger towards Jesus was just because He didn’t go to the chief priests and temple authorities, the religious authorities, and instead lived amongst and right in the midst of the chaos, struggles, every day ups and downs, fears, tears, joy and pain of the ordinary people, because He was an ordinary and common man Himself. Yet He is also creator of everything. What does that tell you about God? If Jesus had been born in a palace, in luxury and comfort, paid for by the taxes of poor people, what message would that have given out? It would have been ‘relax folks, it’s just business as usual’ like when a new political party takes over from a very unpopular one, or a new president is voted in promising changes for the better for everyone, and inevitably leaves most people feeling let down and cheated somehow.

 

Jesus coming to earth was not ‘just business as usual’, it was a cataclysmic and seismic shift in the way our Creator wishes to relate to us, the operative word being ‘relate’ as in relationship! Religion is one thing, but believe me, relationship with the Son of God is something else! Nah, don’t believe me, believe God. Because there is a God, and He has heard your lonely cries in the wilderness.

 

There is a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life!

In Praise of the Unique, the One Offs and the Oddballs!

That title sounds quite funny, but really the subject for me is not particularly funny at all. You see, I have always felt different from other people, and I am not really sure why. But coupled with that has been this feeling for most of my adult life, and probably when I became a teenager that somehow I wasn’t worthy enough, or not good enough, or not worth bothering with. It’s akin to low self esteem, but its more than that. I never felt I was good enough for any woman I met, but I could look at another guy and no matter how unattractive he might be, I would think he had a better chance than me, and more going on for him. Next to people who were or appeared confident, no matter who they were, I would feel inferior and lacking in confidence. This actually went right to the core of my being. I never thought I was good enough for a normal life, never thought I had anything to offer, and I truly felt for a long time that I was ugly. People tell me often that I am not, in fact some women (and some men!) have told me I am handsome, but I still have issues here. I’m not sure why this is, I mean the whole thing of feeling worthless for so many reasons, but I can guess at why.

 

 

 

I grew up quite poor in an inner city part of a big Northern English city, and am most definitely from a working class background. My mum worked as a shop assistant and got a reasonably good education and my dad worked various jobs, including as a labourer, fixing street lights, a chef and cleaning buses, no doubt amongst other jobs I never knew about. I would not say we were poverty stricken by any measure, but we were poor as were most of the people around us. In fact, I had a pretty idyllic childhood even though the area was run down. It was the early 70s when most people had a job. The problems for me came as I started to become a teenager.

 

I know that when I was a kid, I had no pressure on me, no push to succeed, no future fears or stresses of any kind. I was hermetically sealed in my own little bubble and in my own happy little world, which was essentially a number of streets, a park which I went with my parents and a holiday to Wales each year and days out here and there on school holidays paid for by my Nan. What a small world it seems now, but it was happy. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away... Anyway, back then I had peace, and now and since then I have felt for a long time that I am running from something, but what? The fact I am a loser? The fact I have wasted my life? The fact that so far I have been a failure with women? The fact that I am just making time till something else bad happens? The thing I am running all my life from, I think... is me.

 

Well, that’s a happy little tale all told, isn’t it?! I am a selfish person, naturally selfish, not even maliciously or purposely, just a naturally selfish person. Yet, it’s always been about other people, fearing them, walking on eggshells around them, making time for them when they couldn’t care less about me, chasing people, wanting them to like me, trying to find a woman to love me, trying to impress people, but somehow never seeming to get real friends. Essentially, I have been a people pleaser, and at times I have felt an extremely lonely person, too. I have bouts of self hatred and large doses of cynicism, as well. You wouldn’t think so to look at me though. I am generally very smart, and even when I dress in a hoodie and jeans and trainers (sneakers), I tend to look quite sharp, and I look very sharp in shirt and pants! Really. And I am an articulate and well educated kind of guy, too, and generally friendly and chatty. I like being out and about and making conversation with regular ordinary people, and having a laugh and  a joke. But, still something eats away at me.

 

It’s all an act. But slowly and surely, through the pain and suffering I have endured, I see that God is forging my character. Who I am, intrinsically, the person who never saw anything in myself, that thing deep inside that has always felt uncomfortable meeting people and being around people and being any kind of focus of attention, that has felt empty, left out, crippled inside and left on the shelf... My social awkwardness, my unwanted uniqueness, my complex and complicated nature, I now see as a strength. God hasn’t told me that I should stop being me, He has actually told me to start being me, and to stop worrying. To stop trying to live my life, and just actually live it.

 

 

I am a ‘one off’ for Jesus, there is no one quite like me. I am glad of that. Just as well God only has to deal with one person like me! God hasn’t finished me with yet. That’s all I know, and all I need to know. All the rest is propaganda.