unity

Every Wednesday night at Edenvale Baptist church (my church) the young adults have a little get together that normally comprises a talk and some small group discussion. Last night was my first time going and the evening’s theme was unity. We focussed on Jesus’ prayer for believers in John 17 and then started to discuss issues of unity amongst ourselves.

We chatted about many things but one thought has lingered with me and so I’m going to try and get it down onto paper (well, screen).

The discussion question was the following: “If a person had to come into your church setting and pick up on disunity, what would that reveal?” And so there was the usual string of cliché but fundamental answers: “that we don’t love God enough”, “that we don’t love man enough”… but there was something deep to this question that was clawing gently at my mind. It was a good clawing. One that felt more like a back scratch when the back is itchy… Lame analogy. Apologies.

The thing with people is that we will always have differences. BUT the one thing what unites over and above those differences is when collective man has a common GOAL. When man is striving towards something, differences become unimportant because there is a drive to fulfil the common goal and such differences become less important and even less noticeable.

This is all seeming like common sense and maybe there is nothing profound here but when I started to piece together my thoughts I realised something so simple and yet so cutting: Is the common goal of loving God and loving man important enough among believers to sideline differences? I look around this miserable planet where so often Christians are part of that misery and I wonder what our goal really is… Are we really as selfish as our disunity lets on? Are we really living thinking that loving God is not all that important? Or at least that it is not important enough for us to forget differences, embrace commonalities and get on with it?

and the clock stuck 5:30

i wake up unassisted at what must be 5:15 am... I can feel that it is almost time. My eyes are wide open and my thoughts are surprisingly active. But there's still what must be 15 minutes left. Suddenly every one of those minutes seems worthy to be savoured. I start to think about how ironic it is that i pottered around my flat for 15 minutes before bed without thinking twice. "a minute in the morning counts more surely?" I try to console myself. "Flip, what do i have to get up for again?" the question may warrant a different answer to the one I gave myself before going to sleep. "A lecture?... that's all?" "Can't i just do the lecture here at home... i mean, i do have have a study guide. I will know exactly where to go." But my evening state has already prepped my brain on how convincing my morning state can sound. And he has already told my brain to not listen to him and to just stand up when the alarm goes...

"But the alarm hasn't even gone" declared my morning state so loud and convincing that to argue with it would be futile. It was like the plaintiff delivered some lethal point to the court that made the defense cower. So there I was, at what must have been about 5:20am, with my more logical side being defeated by a ruthless carnal need for sleep.

"Shh, just go back to sleep", whispers my morning mind. I don't have to hear it again. I know that lure. I know that trick, and boy how I love falling for it. No really, I love falling for that one... and so i started falling.... drifting.... I felt like Edmund going back to the witches house for more turkish delight. Suddenly unafraid to disappoint my evening brain I float on the stream back to that place where 8 minutes will feel like a few seconds... . . . .

"BEEP BEEP" "BEEP BEEP"... It's the nokia. He needs to be fed. Oh no. It's trying to tell me something. I look at it's screen.... what is it trying to tell me? What is it saying? Oh my. It is giving me options! What is the word down in the right hand corner that i see? I squint my morning eyes and try my best to read a screen i read nearly every morning of my life. "Snooze" ??! Whoa! What a delightful option that one is. The is no inner dialouge this time. The defense seems to have withdrawn his case. I push it without thinking.

The phone is programmed to snooze for 10 minutes so I am not quite sure what happened this morning. It was way less than 10. In fact I am doubtful of whether or not it even let me snooze for one. Regardless, the time changed from 5:30 to 5:40 in a matter of seconds (Maybe it was God making up for the Gideon sun incident in small doses). So there I was again. 5:40am. I have to be out by 6 otherwise I will sit in traffic for a full hour wasting petrol and becoming late for a lecture that I could be doing by myself at my desk in an hour when it is warmer. FLIP, stop thinking like that, Carl.... it's not helping your education. YES! my defense has a voice... He is in the courtroom! There is still a chance!

With an insane amount of bravery i reach my hand out of the blanket... i feel the cold instantly but i tell my morning voice to speak to my lawyer. I find the switch and it's genesis 1 all over again except this time the light hits my eyes and not adam's (this is me using poetic license) but I'm blown away all the same.

My morning voice tries his last tactic but I know this one too well to be fooled again. "Hey, maybe you can snooze one more time and then you can shower in 1 minute, eat in 2, dress in 2 and be out of here in time." Sounds convincing but i'm not convinced.

I push myself out of bed and start to move. There I go. I win. Well sorta. After all that I am still the winner to one half of myself and the loser to the other half.

And now the clock is striking 7:30 and it is time for my lecture.....

faith

so carl has had the craziest holiday EVER, but im not going to sit telling you about it cos i don't really enjoy doing that. i merely am trying to make the fact that i have not posted something in a while seem forgivable.

From the 7th to the 12th of July I took a team of young guys into Botswana to run a short term mission in a local church there. I was kinda scared leading up to the whole deal because spiritually speaking i was kinda between a rock and a hard place. For weeks I had been at my usual place.... you know that place we all tend to hang about at.... there and there about but nowhere at all.... you know it? maybe it is just me :-) Anyways, i was feeling quite scared because now i was being asked to lead a mission and i felt like having a moses moment: 'Not me, Lord'.

Yet something inside of me just wanted to push into God. To be somewhere spiritually. To push myself out of a rut. So i pushed. And God was faithful. Should I have expected less? HE came to my aid. HE started whispering in my ear again. HE pulled as i pushed and i felt my team mate walking beside me again. Fearless, it was like i became a new man in a few days. And what's weird about it is that i rose to the occasion because i had an occasion to rise to. It couldn't have been much different. The next few days I was going to be in charge of the spiritual dynamic of a team and I needed my A-game. I was not prepared to go minister without it.

And so God was faithful. The build up to the mission was incredible. I remember praying things and knowing that God was going to answer. Knowing that i was asking for what i couldn't achieve, I felt God pleased that my life was requiring faith at last. I was depending. I was needy. And i think God was loving that (I'll clarify that in a while). God blessed our team with incredible divine unity and with a spirit of prayer and boldness. There we were... relative strangers but feeling like we have known one another for months.

I would love to tell you about the whole mission and what happened every day because it was a trip of constant highlights. But I will tell you about my favourite afternoon. We arrived on the Saturday and on the Sunday we had planned to do a few open-airs. This is where we take our sound system to a car park or field and try to get a crowd around us by doing dances and dramas and then share the Word with them and hope that God bring people to know him. Already that is sounding like a rather scary experience hey?! Well anyways, to make matters difficult our sound system broke on the sunday morning. I asked the pastor to try work something out and get us another one but he was unable. hmm, big obstacle this was. But somehow i still felt that we should go for it anyway and the team were all feeling the same. I suggested to the pastor that we try to use the sound system of the shops at the centre. i will never forget his response: 'No, they are all asian people. Very difficult people. They will never let you.'

Well, i had to try something... so i started asking at shop 1 of 5. A flat refusal. Maybe the pastor was right. Shop 2: NO, and a few heated words. Shop 3: A polite lady! who still said NO. Shop 4: Same as 2. Shop 5: I meet this guy called Lee. He's about 50 years old and about 2 feet tall and after rattling off my needs he says 'sure, no problem'. He then walks inside his little shop and plays a CD player which is attached to a 15 inch sub woofer outside his store. Whoa! God pulled through! It felt amazing to be trusting in a God that does pull through. Constantly. Anyway, i'm rambling on a bit so i'm just going to summarise the rest. We did the open air there and souls came to the Lord. We got back into our combi and decided that we weren't done. We wanted more. We felt a little bit cheeky asking God for another sound system. Hadn't already pulled through once? So off we went praying that God would lead and provide. We turned up at a shopping centre place that was having a HUGE social with about 200 people drinking and braaing. The centrepoint of activity was a shebeen called the 'african pot'... By heart skipped a beat when i heard soundwaves coming from the shebeen. But it was a shebeen and we were missionaries. Surely not?! Turns out they had hired a DJ to come and spin some tunes and from what i could gather it seemed that this DJ owned the biggest rig in Botswana. Flip, but this thing was loud. So there I went... the hesitant requester.... to ask if we could do i dance using their system. I got more than i bargained for. He gave me the mic and allowed me to say some stuff about why we do what we do and that we do it for Jesus because we believe he is alive and that it matters. I got to share the gospel! Anyways, we did our dance and stayed there for about an hour and a half speaking with people and having the most amazing conversations. I remember one man saying that this was the first time he had ever seen people bring Jesus to the bar and that he was so grateful because he really needed to hear what we had to say.

So that was God blowing our brains out with his provision and faithfulness. Could only be.

But I had a scary realisation through all this. For the first time in months maybe years of 'christian' living, my life and my day was requiring faith. I was needy. If God didn't lead I would not know where to go. If God did not speak I would not know what to say. And it was abnormal. It felt totally foreign but it felt so good. And then I thought about how I live normally. I do not need faith to get through a single day. I get by fine without it.

And that got me thinking.... the Bible says that without faith it is impossible to please God. Have I just been thinking that God is pleased with my little stupid attempts to be 'christian' when in fact he is not really pleased at all because my life is requiring no faith?

hectic question that we all need to answer. What about today do you need God for? What are you depending on him for? What need can you not meet with your own resources?

We shouldn't have to rise to the occasion when it's a mission trip. Our life should be an occasion that we should have to rise to.