Tag: church

Gentleness

2 Comments

The Surrender Experiment

This book was a timely read and recommended from a guy I trust a lot. It landed in the middle of a season when I was fit to be tied. Life had kinda thrown a curve ball and like always, I wasn’t expecting it. Like all these moments- we don’t create them, they happen, and our response (I’ve realised) is what truly matters.

The challenge to this ‘surrender experiment’ is simple. Instead of resisting these events, what if they are destined to teach us something about ourselves. What if our reaction is a negative one that reveals more about where our heart is at and is supposed its to push into growth? Hands up – this is exactly what this series of events in my life helped me focus on. Me. I couldn’t control the circumstance but I could work on me.

In truth this has become a fun way to do life, especially in the moments that feel like bad ones. It redefines them in a beautiful way and labels them as moments where God is doing his beautiful character work in our story.

So with my ears tuned into this word surrender for the last 6 months, my ears perked up during our current Women’s bible study. Beth Moore is a content legend. To live is Christ had a week on the fruit of the Spirit; and as she explained the word gentleness in its original context – lo and behold we have the word surrender.

Gentleness isn’t only soft, mild and all the other thoughts that come into our head when we hear it. It means surrender, to lean into the will of God.

I was intrigued as our Pastor taught a recent series and the key text was Matthew 11.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30

With gentleness fresh in my head from bible study, and life lessons teaching me to surrender to whatever comes my way, this verse took on a different meaning. Check out the root meaning of ‘gentleness’ ⬇️

This concept of living lightly (what our series was called) is wrapped up in surrender. Leaning into life. Trusting. Accepting his dealings with us as good, even when the curve balls come – do we trust the process?

Some things are just simply out of our control. I have been guilty of overthinking the circumstance, trying to rework it or manipulate in some way to make sense of it all. But what if instead of trying to land a better outcome, what if the better outcome is what that event did in me as opposed to around me? The surrender experiment is about accepting life and trusting that ALL things, good and bad, are training and designed to bring something good out of everything. Whilst the book isn’t necessarily Christian based, I couldn’t help but think that everything about it sounded like Jesus and his kingdom way of life.

Do we trust the process of inner work when our outer world is going crazy? Having tried this for the last 6 months I can definitely say it’s a simpler way to do life and dare I say lighter one.

So in light of surrender meaning to give up – I give up trying to sort it all out and I give in once again to the author of it all. He’s convinced me that He can make good out of anything.

So here’s to letting go, leaning into life, living surrendered, living gently just like Jesus.

I challenge you to give it a go!

Fascinated

Leave a comment

Last week at our church youth programme for older teens, we had a look at this whole idea of being fascinated.  The whole purpose and big idea was to set a challenge, to begin to ask ourselves if we are really fascinated with God.

  • Fascinated: to be engrossed, captivated, strongly interested, fully engaged, transfixed on something

Fascination is a funny thing and as I prepped for youth, my mind was working overtime trying to understand why we become fascinated with anything,

I’ve been there, fascinated and captivated by the wrong thing, maybe wrong is too strong a word to use, but certainly I could have been fascinated with something better. You’ve been there too no doubt, the TV series that you can’t stop watching and the demon of  box sets that rob you of sleep as you keep saying “one more” before we go to bed, and awful cliff hanger moments that make it virtually impossible.  We become fascinated, obsessed, can’t switch off, because we want to know what happens next.

When it comes to our journey with God, are we fascinated enough?

God is not looking for people who are mildly interested in Him

Fascination is strongly linked to discovery.
We discover something, learn something new and seek to discover more. We want to know more, like what happens next. The incredible thing about God, is that His box set never really ends – there’s always more, and just when we think we have him figured out, we learn and discover even more and that’s were fascination is birthed.  And incredible adventure lies waiting.

This adventure has to start with an encounter.

There is that part of me that wants to shake the “mildly interested” crowd.  This following Jesus is more than an added extra, it’s the main thing.   I can’t stop thinking about how we transition from interested to obsessed through this whole idea of discovery.

I found my mind wandering today thinking about all of this.

Do we play it too safe?  Do we make God fit in a nice little box that we can control and present to the masses as something nice, polished and shiny? In doing so, have we made God predictable?

If anything I’ve learned over the years, it’s that predictable does not fascinate, in fact it often gets boring when we know what will happen right?

Are we as his church presenting our father in such a way that the world wants to know more, or are we boring the masses with our predictable programme?

At youth last week, we played it simple.

We stripped back on all the ‘stuff’ and activity and we worshipped, waited and watched….

It honestly was a beautiful sight. Young people  brave enough to share a word to encourage us, worshipping unashamed, some of them ‘feeling’ something different, but good.  We can attempt to create a lot of cool in youth ministry but the thing that captivates, is when our young people engage with God through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Without His presence we are just another random bunch of people hanging out.

As youth leaders we get to facilitate these beautiful moments – let’s not be afraid to leave space, wait and lean into these moments. It’s those encounter that’s fascinate a generation. They will never forget and will never be the same.

Let’s open the nice shiny box we’ve put God in and let the wild adventure begin.

It’s what’s in the box that counts anyway.