Have not been here for a long time. A lot has happened. Difficult to put into words. So I am just going to pick up where I am now. I have been using some tools that I have known about for a while and some I discovered recently, to work with my stuff. The first is a new technique called EFT which is amazing. It seems to good to be true but it really works. I am not sure it would work without the other tool called Theophostics, which relies on God taking you to memories where lies about yourslef have become implanted, where he then imparts truth to replace the lie. EFT is a simple method to “tap” on acupuncture points while focusing on issue that you are struggling with. This morning I was struggling with an issue of defensiveness regarding belonging to a worship team. I was really struggling with letting go of my resistance to 2 members of the team. I tapped on the resistance and the feelings of aloneness and being an outsider, as well as being “defective”, where the resitance/stubbornness originates, came up. The Lord took me to the time in my childhood where it came from, as a cover to deal with my sense of abandonment at the time. I wept and tapped, scaled my relief on a level from 1-10 and tapped again. Then the Lord gave me the truth about myself, as a person that is crusty and unyielding only as a denfence agains my feeling alone when I was a little boy. He told me who I really am: a compassionate, soft, caring person, the way he made me. He told me that it was ok to not be hard anymore. I will never be alone again. It is so real. Of course it is not over until it is over. I will chronicle the journey here

I have felt myself drifting slowly further and further from the mind-set which has prevailed in me for the last 15 years that I have been a Christian. I have accepted holus bolus what I have heard and not questioned at all. Now I find myself uncomfortable with what I hear in church. Make no mistake, I love the Jesus, and trust Yahweh completely, o I believe I am still technically a Christian, but the mindset has problems for me and I have decided to try and find what it is that alienates me by looking at the Bible. This will no doubt be a long journey. I hope that it will be a thorough one but knowing myself I am unsure of this. Nonetheless I want to try and do it justice for my own sake and the sake of my family and friends.

So I will start at Matthew 3.1 because what goes before is the Christmas story and a whole lot of generational stuff.

John the Baptist appears. In his appearance there is already a whole lot of prophecy and mystery, as his mother allegedly prophesied over Mary when they met and Elizabeth was already pregnant. He was prophetic even in the womb since he “jumped in his mother’s womb” when she saw Mary.

Of course this is all hearsay. It has been retold by others before we even hear it from Matthew, but we either believe it or not based on whether we buy the Bible story. I do believe it. That is what faith is. You believe something when it is said to you. No amount of evidence will convince you if you do not have faith. Or said another way, to come to faith through evidence is a contradiction in term because faith is not based on evidence it is based on an inner conviction

So I conclude i believe that John the baptiser was a prophet. He felt an inner prompting to speak out that things were not right. Whether he knew that from being around people or not, is an open question. He was apparently from the desert where he practised some form of asceticism or withheld himself from worldly pleasures. So he would have been inclined to be quite extreme by ordinary standards. Yet he didn’t fall into the same category as the orthodox Jews because he called them a brood of vipers. So he wasn’t just an ordinary prude. We feel that because he lived in the desert and the desert is often a symbol in the Bible for purity (people go there to fast) that he has some sort of inside track on holiness. So he has credentials.

his is again where faith comes in. I feel it in my bones that he knew what he was talking about.  Here is a man who s everything that I am not. I indulge my passions. I drink too much, I get angry with everything and everybody and let my mind wander. But he is a man who has a different focus. My instinct is to believe him, to listen to what he has to say. and what does he say?

REPENT FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. Things have gone along like this for too long. There is a change coming. God is reinstating his rule. If you have bought into the rule of the previous king (who the Hell could that have been?)then your time is up. So make your choice. If you want to be part of the previous reign then you should know that you are being served notice.

The Problem is that we don’t see much of the new reign or ruler around us. Things have gone on like this for so long and there are lots of nice explanations for the fact. The evidence is scanty that there has been a change of rule. So what is the reason? I suppose that is one of the things that I will try to clear up for myself. It’s like a dash of lukewarm water after the cold water of the announcement that John came to make. The kingdom line makes me excited and the other one makes me depressed. Let’s hope that I can work through this in a way that will resolve my doubts or at least leave me invigorated for what I come to believe is the truth. Maybe the answer is not clearcut but rather what allows conviction to arise from within me. Only God knows

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I realise that when I make suggestive statements about leaders that obviously I implicate people that have been part of my journey even if I don’t mention their names. The writer of the proverbs says that God hates arrogance and back-biting. I am in danger of doing exactly what I say others have been guilty of: incarnating my brokenness in what I do in the church, and I repent of that…I want to turn away from it. I have been hurt and so I bleed over everybody. There is no excuse for that, in Biblical terms. It is right that I apportion guilt where it is deserved, so that I can forgive and move on, but to make vague statements is not cool, and is even sin!

I don’t know if I will ever have the moral courage to sort out my differences with others. Who knows they may prove to me that my hurt was subjective and take away the basis for my accusations! Of course that doesn’t take away the fact that my hurt, though subjective, is real and that is how these tings happen: we sustain hurt because of vulnerabilities from previous wounding and so it is compounded again and again. People act towards each other in good faith and still we get hurt. It is the way of th world. What the church is about is trying to grow to the place where we are healed up enough by Jesus’ love and spiritual transformation to not be quite so vulnerable and thin-skinned any more, to work out our stuff with one another and show a better model to the world, and to spread the model. And that is what I want to be part of: it is discipleship, and it is the path I choose. So I apologize to those nameless people for accusing them where they cannot defend themselves, and I resolve to continue to process my stuff and be discipled by Jesus until I die…

Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!

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Dallas Willard says the following:in his book “Renovation of the heart”:

“We must clearly understand that there is a rigorous consistency in the human self and its actions. This is one of the things we are most likely to deceive ourselves about. If I do evil, I am the kind of person who does evil; if I do good, I am the kind of person who does good (1 John 3:7-10) Actions are expression of who we are. They come out of the heart.

One of the most common rationalizations of sin or folly today is ‘Oh, I just blew it.’ While there is some point to such a remark, it is not the one those who use it hope for. It does not exonerate them. While it may be true that there are circumstances in which I would not have done the foolish or sinful thing I did, and while what I did may not represent me fully, ‘Blowing it’ does represent me fully. I am the kind of person who ‘blows it’. “Blowing it’ shows who I am as a person. I am, through and through, the kind of person who ‘blows it’ — hardly a lovely and promising thing to be.”

What do you think of this? Is it uncompromising? Is it unfair? Is it true? After all, Jesus says that a good tree cannot bring forth bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit. (Matt 7.17) What does this “truth” do to your soul? Does it make you angry, feel guilty, hopeless? Hopeful? Since, surely if Jesus said that, he had to have some hope that it could be possible that we could be people that don’t ‘blow it’!

I find this quite challenging! I am angry when I hear it. I am rebellious. Where is the grace? where is the hope. How could I possibly be such a person? Everybody that I know that doesn’t occasionally ‘blow it’ is an unbearable and infuriating PAIN! All my life I have been a person who blows it. I would like to be a person who doesn’t, not because it would be a notch in my belt, but because somebody who doesn’t blow it would be like Jesus: and most likely I wouldn’t be a person who hurts others.

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I have always been a leader simply because people are prepared to follow somebody who sounds like they know what the are talking about and who acts with conviction. I am now in a quandary. I am discovering depths of distrust in leaders that I only suspected are there. Did Jesus ever mean for us to give away our lives to church leaders and leaders of nations etc in the way that we do? I suspect not. He says to call nobody father because there is only one Father and he is in heaven. In his Lord’s prayer he teaches us to pray that his Kingdom would come on earth as it does in heaven. I don’t think that this means that we are to follow blindly leaders’ vision of what that means and join organizations which are reflections of each particular leader’s own wounding. I don’t even think that  teams are necessarily a guarantee against that because men gather other men around them that have similar brokenness, so what is likely to come out of their mouths will probably bear out what the “leaders” think in any case.

What is the answer? Communities of like minded adults who take mutual responsibility for each others’ lives and spur each other on to maturity in Christ. He will fulfill the work he has started in us, and he uses people, but church leaders cannot, in more than a peripheral way, be part of that, since, unless they have relationship, they will hardly ever be in a position to dispense justice and discipline redemptively.

I am going to start praying for people to be church with.

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Leaders have such a hard job shame.
I don’t want to be led by anybody but Jesus anymore. I will be led by him as example and as Father and brother. It is much too easy to be wrong and think that you have covered all the bases. Relationship is the answer. Leadership is a cop out both for the leader and the led. It seldom produces real disciples. I want t be a self-led person. I want others to be self-led too. I would rather be a friend and example. It is much harder and genuine. There is no inherent acclaim and credibility.

I am getting to the “{not going to church” place again… I fear…

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a cold fear
hedged my heart in
harsh words
of running away
i set my jaw
losing you is here again
like so many times
somebody says they’ll leave
but this time i’ll not
protect my heart
i’ll take it on the chin
 and me a man
i’ll take it on the chin
pain cries in many voices
not l of them mine
we’ll pick up the pieces
because we love

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This blog will now be linked to my Face Book account. I was wondering whether to mix the two world or not, but why not. Most people who know me anyway know my story and whether I try to hide it or not, my life goes up and down like waves in a storm.

But generally the trend is upwards. I have been unearthing stuff from my past and how it influenced me. I always thought that the things that had happened to me were so insignificant that they couldn’t possibly have influenced me so negatively as it seemed I have been hurt. But they did and even if there is nothing more that I can’t remember, there is enough for me to be pretty screwed up. Also it seems that I am a particularly sensitive soul and needed more affirmation than most and received less.

The main issue it seems was caretaker betrayal. When people should have cared for and protected me they punished and abandoned me. The second main issue is humiliation which has left me feeling like a “charity case”, where I could never receive stuff that people do for me as good, since it always injured me further as I experienced as a further humiliating blow my my heart. Interesting that the Lord has shown me the flipside: How do I feel when I am extending charity to others? I am feeling his love, tenderness and compassion for them and it is not demeaning to them, but rather an expression of his love and affirmation, grace and care. It is an eye-opener!

I am learning to love and appreciate myself.

Last week Friday I glimpsed the anger that whirls in my soul. I could only look at it and hear it faintly but could not access it. When I get to the feeling place, I will be getting somewhere. Pray for me!

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Everything goes in cycles.I am back and different from myself previously. In a better place, having received more healing. Having gotten to some of the cores issues that have wounded me.

A theme in my life is caretaker betrayal. Instead of having been protected at crucial moments in my life, I have either been punished or alienated. And its amazing how it works: when you have a theme like that, it can become like something that people hone in on like a shark after blood in the water. Children who have been abusd sexually or who are vulnerable to abuse have the same thing: people hone in on that and continue the abuse. Of course it is demonic. The Enemy knocks a wedge into your achiles heel and eventually that becomes either infested or oppressed.

I have been abandoned and punished and marginalised consistently in one way or another my whole life, even as late as last year.

But I have been healed a bit from that and it is showing. I am turning to the Lord again. (not that I turned away, just that I was unable to lift my head much!) I am reading some books that are reigning me in from the wild, out of control place I have been in for more than a year. I am thinking about the church again, and can’t help thinking that I want to find my place of belonging. I want to be part of something different and if I can;t find it I will most porbably start it!

Anyway…God is good and and that is good!

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It is nice when people who you have not seen or hard from contact you after a long time. I am always somehow in the position that I keep track of people or would like to keep track of them but somehow they don’t seem to have the same need. Then I perceive their attitude as rejection.I am trying to get over that now. I have just yesterday heard from friends who have been in the USA for sometime now and whom I have struggled to hear from! It makes me happy. Friends are too few and far between to let go so easily. It is a risk because they may/may not respond, but it is worth it because it is so easy to stay in touch! Nice to hear from you Sumi and I hope your husband responds now that he has my details! You can see Sumi’s blog here

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