Celtic Daily Prayer

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Twists and Turns of Life…

Posted by David Ward on 15/03/2024
Posted in: Bible, discipleship, Personal thoughts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

We’ve recently had to leave our home of 14 years in the Scottish Borders and after a period of “spare room surfing” with friends and family we’ve moved 60-odd miles south, back into England. We’ve been homeless before, back in the early days of our marriage. Following the collapse of a couple of jobs we simply couldn’t afford to pay the bills anymore, and for a while lived with another family from our church, while we recovered financially and were able to get back to more stable work and income.

Both experiences carried with them a significant sense of loss and uncertainty as we went through those times of transition.

I guess you may be thinking “that’s just how life plays out sometimes”, we all have our ups and downs, and even for those of us who follow Jesus, life often twists and turns in unexpected ways.

I was thinking about all this recently, and smiled when I remembered an incident that happened many years ago, when I was a young teenager. I was at a youth group meeting where we were asked to share a favourite verse from the Bible, something that meant a lot to us. For some reason I didn’t have a verse to share, so I’m ashamed to say I opened my Bible randomly and read the first verse my eyes focussed on. I hasten to say that I do not recommend this method of choosing a significant verse, let alone employing this ‘open and point’ method to get some guidance from God. The verse I had randomly chosen was:

“You have allowed me to suffer much hardship, but you will restore me to life again and lift me up from the depths of the earth. You will restore me to even greater honour and comfort me once again.

Psalm 71:20-21 NLT

Could be the story of my life! As I reflected on my past, I thought about the hardships I have suffered (although they pale into insignificance compared to the things that many people have to suffer). Betrayals in work, in church and in relationships all leave nasty scars. Two lots of homelessness, divorce…actually make that three lots of homelessness…being separated from my children…the list goes on.

And as I was reminded recently when reading John Mark Comer’s excellent book “Practicing the Way”, all these events have a part to play in our formation, in making us the kind of people we are. As John Mark says, “Spiritual formation isn’t a Christian thing; it’s a human thing”.

He goes on to say:

“Spiritual formation is not optional. Every thought you think, every emotion you let shape your behaviour, every attitude you let rest in your body, every decision you make, each word you speak, every relationship you enter into, the habits that make up your days, whether or not you have social media (if you do, how you use it),how you respond to pain and suffering, how you handle failure or success-all these things and more are forming us into a particular shape…We are being either transformed into the love and beauty of Jesus or malformed by the entropy of sin and death.”

John Mark Comer, “Practicing the Way”

Wow! If we thought spiritual formation was all about adopting some ancient spiritual disciplines (good as that is!) we need to think again.

Which brings me back to that verse from Psalm 71. The psalmist has confidence that God has a major part to play in his “spiritual formation”, a God who is faithful, a God who will lift him up, comfort him and restore his life, the life he thought he had lost.

And I want to echo that. However tough these times of ‘hardship’ and change have been, we have always come through them transformed and restored. At least, we have when we’ve chosen not to dwell on the pain from the past and co-operate with God’s Spirit in the renewing process. I can’t pretend that I’ve always got it right, but when I have, God is faithful. And sometimes, even when I’ve got it wrong God has changed things for our good, because God is also full of grace! Some time ago a friend who has witnessed some of these life events commented that she’d always been impressed by the way I “re-invented” myself…I know what she means although I might prefer to say that I went along with God in his process of changing me.

The Northumbria Community has a wonderful liturgy dedicated to St Brendan, a saint who followed the prompting of God and ventured into the unknown. Towards the end, we find these words:

“I choose to live beyond regret, and let You recreate my life.
I believe You will make a way for me and provide for me,
if only I trust You and obey.
I will trust in the darkness and know that my times are still in Your hand.
I will believe You for my future, chapter by chapter, until all the story is written.”

Brendan – in exploration of a vision from Celtic Daily Prayer Book One

I hear echoes of those verses from Psalm 71 in these words, but they take it a bit further. God’s promises should not induce in us some kind of passive belief. Faith is about action born out of trusting what God says. It’s about moving forward hopefully. It’s about focussing our eyes on the possibilities and stepping through opening doors. It’s about being changed to be more like Jesus.


Joel part 4 – “DECISION DAY”

Posted by David Ward on 05/02/2021
Posted in: Bible, Celtic Christianity, Personal thoughts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
Joel – announcing the Day of the Lord

One of the constant themes in the Old and New Testaments is the invitation from God to make a simple choice.

Read: Joel 3: 14-16

In his book about the Minor Prophets, Phil Moore writes that the key to understanding their message is going back to the Covenant God made with the Hebrew people in Deuteronomy 28, which he summarises as, “Blessing or curse…you decide”.

From the very beginning, from the creation story of Adam and Eve and right through the Old Testament God makes it clear that we all have a choice…to live his way in relationship with him, the way we are designed to live or to choose to live ignoring or disbelieving him, making our own decisions and facing the consequences of trying to live a life designed to be lived in friendship with God.

When we come to the New Testament, Jesus, who is God in human form, comes to show us what God is like and to bring a once-and-for-all solution to the problem of how sinful human beings can have a close relationship with a living God. His life also gives us an insight into what our life could look like if lived in perfect relationship with God.

In Joel 2 we see that choice at work again; Jesus lived, died and rose again for all of humanity, but each of us is responsible for choosing whether to accept and benefit from what Jesus did. As Peter the friend of Jesus says in his Pentecost sermon…it’s “everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord” who will be saved.

All of humanity in the valley of decision. The ultimate question is, will you choose to follow Jesus or choose not to? It’s not, as some would have you think, just a decision that affects your destination at the end of life here. It affects the quality of life lived everyday in the here and now, as you live the way you were designed to live, in the company and with the help of the one who designed you in the first place.

When Aidan, one of the early missionaries to the Kingdom of Northumbria, left Holy Island and visited people in the hill country of Northumberland, the historian Bede tells us that he asked a simple question of everyone he met. These extracts from a modern poem by Andy Raine and Neil Arnold captures the spirit of that question, and Aidan’s response.

“Do you know Christ, King Jesus, is he yours?”

If they answered, “Yes!”, then Aidan replied,

“Then love God more,
And burn with love:
Hold fast the light he gives.
Live thou for Him.
Believer, hold Him high,
That all may see the light of Jesus
In a son of man.”

If they said, “No!”, then Aidan had a different reply:

“God knows the emptiness:
Deep cries to deep.
Receive the life he gives:
Live now for him.
Believe and be baptised,
Then all will see
 the life of Jesus in a son of man.”

Celtic Daily Prayer, book 1, page 411-412

How would you answer the question, and how would you act on Aidan’s reply?

Embracing the silence

Posted by David Ward on 26/04/2020
Posted in: discipleship, In the Media, Monastic spirituality, Solitude and silence, Spirituality. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

[15] This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved.
In quietness and confidence is your strength.
But you would have none of it.
Isaiah 30:15 (NLT)

A friend recently invited me to join a group of friends who he has arranged to meet up for evening prayer online, once a week. I wasn’t able to join, but after several weeks of invitation I sent my apologies. I explained that since ‘church’ has gone online because of the restrictions imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I was receiving more invitations to join in with online meetings than I was capable of attending and absorbing.

Taking church online in response to Coronavirus has been an amazing and creative thing. Many of us have been forced to learn tech skills that we would not otherwise have considered, and in times when younger people in Generations X and Y comfortable dwell in two worlds…the physical world and the virtual, online world…this can hardly be a bad thing for those of us who are older and maybe less technically savvy.

We’ve also had to hone our teaching and preaching skills to make what we say shorter and more precise (for people like me, a very good discipline!).

However, as a recent article by Alice Whalley in the Church Times reminds us, “YouTube sermons will not feed the hungry” https://tinyurl.com/y9rp9rj9

It does not make comfortable reading, particularly things like:

“The way that the C of E has responded to that advice, however, utterly betrays how middle-class its interests have become. Staying at home is wonderful — when you have a home, with electricity, and food, and a job, and access to the internet, and are computer-literate, and, ideally, have a landline to avoid some hefty mobile call charges. I flicked with dismay through the C of E Twitter feed to see how every post backed this view up — the assumption that everybody is in a safe and comfortable home setting, and, therefore, the only need to be met is a spiritual one.”

However, to return to the incident with which I introduced this post, another concern has been growing progressively as the weeks of ‘lockdown’ continue.

Towards the beginning of the Government’s measures to combat the spread of Coronavirus I had a conversation with my pastor, subsequently repeated in conversations with many friends. The gist of the conversation was that we felt God was saying that we should treat this time as an opportunity to be still and silent with him, an opportunity to really listen for his voice and, perhaps, to be prepared for new things to come. After all, our diaries are emptier than I can ever remember!

So, what have we done?

We’ve filled our time with online meetings, with putting up regular messages to encourage and motivate our churches during this time, with ‘playing’ with new technology, not to mention filling our time with box sets and movies we were saving up for a time like this, new hobbies and other leisure activities.

Now obviously it is important to keep in touch, to encourage one another to spend time with our households and to look after our own well-being, but…

…if we truly believe that God has told us to be still and silent and wait before him, why have we not done that with as much enthusiasm as recording our latest online message (or writing posts like this…)? Apparently ancient Israel had the same problem (Isaiah 30: 15).

I do believe that some of the stuff we’re turning out is as a direct result of having more time to spend in stillness with God, and hearing what he’s saying. After all, the world and the church may look very different the other side of lockdown, and we need to be ready for it. Our online messages have attracted more and more people to view and listen, many more than would ever normally be in our churches, and that is surely a hint that we need to listen carefully to God about what comes next lest our churches become every bit as overwhelmed as it was feared the NHS might have been.

While I was thinking about this, I was struck by the memory of a scene from one of the early Star Wars films, “The Empire Strikes Back”. Luke is being trained in his (considerable) Jedi powers by Yoda. He goes into a cave on Dagobah to investigate. He asks Yoda, “What’s in there?”, to which Yoda replies, “Only what you take with you.”. Luke confronts his foe, Darth Vader, only to find that Vader has his face…clearly Luke has all the potential to be as evil as Darth Vader unless he learns to master his own dark side.

Perhaps we fear to spend time alone with God because we fear what he might show us about ourselves, he might dent the illusions we have about ourselves and the life we have created. Perhaps the ministries we have spent our lives building have more to do with our own egos than with God’s Kingdom. Perhaps we don’t really have it all together and are not as ‘mature’ as we think.

Equally, we may fear that God will ask us to do new things in new ways. We may be afraid at the implications and feel that we are inadequate to the task.

Perhaps we have allowed certain sins to become OK over a long period of time, until they have become part of our ‘normal’, and deep down we know it. God cares fiercely about his reputation…he doesn’t want our less-than-holy lives to be a stumbling block for others as they search for him. He will use the silence to show us who we really are.

But he is a loving father, who truly wants the best for us. He never tests us without providing a way of escape, without generously giving us the resources we need.

[11] So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.
Matthew 7:11 (NLT)

God invites us into the silence so that he can make us more aware of his grace, his good gifts and the positive plans he has for us. After all he has invested so much into helping us to become more and more like Jesus.

The place of stillness and silence provides us with a choice: as we become aware of our faults and failings, and of God’s plans for us, will it cause us to fear and back away, or will the insights we receive be embraced and cause us to co-operate with the Holy Spirit as he changes us.

And Jesus himself promises to walk with us in these times of silence, stillness and learning…he’s right there in the cave with us…

[28] “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. [29] Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. [30] Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
Matthew 11:28 (MSG)

I am, by nature, an introvert with contemplative tendencies. I realise all this talk of stillness and silence may present a real hurdle to those of you who are of a more extrovert personality. I do, however, believe that every follower of Jesus has a deep desire to spend more time away with him:

“There is a contemplative
in all of us,
almost strangled
but still alive,
who craves quiet
enjoyment of the Now,
and longs to touch
the seamless
garment of silence
which
makes whole.”
Alan P Tory, Meditation for Day 2, Celtic Daily Prayer

If we listen to the prompting of God’s Spirit at this time, perhaps all of us, regardless of whether we are introvert or extrovert, will experience, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, that:

“Life rushes back into the void
richer
more vivid,
fuller than before!”
Meditation for Day 1 from Celtic Daily Prayer