Needlework and the Tailor

I often detect a strange coldness in my heart which prefers to deal with the clothing of Christ's truth rather than His actual person.  Of course, what we know about someone affects how we relate to them and what we think of them.  But when we admire the clothes of shining knowledge more than the person who embodies truth, we are mere idolators of needlework, failing to see the stunning genius of the tailor who made and adorned them.
It's the domestic hazard of 'growing up Christian'. I can tick all the boxes and score high marks on a Bible comprehension exercise, but unless I am in love with the One who is Wisdom then it becomes a knowedge for the conceited.

I guess that's the problem with the Relay programme. It just cuts too much at the heart. If you haven't got the constant chiming of your supervisor ('so how does the gospel speak into that?') then you've got LG imploring you with his recurring 'don't you see?'. And they just won't leave me alone...

But I am glad. I am glad because my sick heart stutters and starts, chokes with rotten knowledge like uneaten food left out on the counter. Knowledge grows a plushy bacterial beard within days, and once it's taken root the fungi is there to stay. Still, knowledge was never meant to be stale, it was always embodied with spirit and truth and then with flesh and blood. A blood to gush away death and replenish us with life. Blood to whip up this old-man knowledge to a reinvigorated youth with strength to follow the drops to that gorey intersection between heaven and earth.

Because what I really need, but don't always want, is the Person not the clothing. Give me the tailor, the maker, the suitor. May I not stop at gold-threaded hems but instead meet His eyes in mine.

My Quinta Extravaganza

2012/13 Relay Workers- can you spot the doctoring?

 

After nearly 2 weeks of conferences, amazing fellowship with Christian brothers and sisters, profoundly convicting teaching on Colossians, 2 Timothy and Luke, I returned on Sunday 9th to what is now my home for the next 10 months, loaded with a rucksack of smelly washing and an expectant heart.

So now that I'm finally settled in it's time to start properly digesting the savouries of sermons and seminars with the sweet of song, experience and fellowship.  What have I learned?

It may take me months to feel the full effects, but perhaps I can share just the tip of the iceberg.  Relay 1 conference was a time for drinking in the power of God's grace.  If there were a motto for the week, it would probably have been 'be rooted in and strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus', or even, 'continue how you started'.  Remembering grace is the heartbeat of 2 Timothy and Colossians.  Since we're prone to forget the basics and definitely prone to believe that there is something more to be had in the Christian life than possessing Christ in all His fulness, it is essential that we bathe in the glory of God's grace revealed to us in Jesus every single day.  It's the only cure for legalism, discontent and Satan's deception.

Robert Murray McCheyne summed it up quite well: 'For every one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ.'
Maybe we girls ought to stick that one to our mirrors.

Leading straight into UCCF's annual student conference, Forum, I swapped my warm abode for the more rustic canvas option.  With over 1000 people (996 students to be exact!) attending, the campsite was so packed that it was difficult to hear anything remotely belonging to nature above the raucous chunnerings of closely pitched campers.  Hearing one CU group rouse their spirits every morning with a war cry of 'ahhhh...WOLFPACK!' and to be assailed by torpedoed water balloons one afternoon meant the week was far from dull.

Above all it just seemed to me to be the most perfect time of fellowship with Warwick CU.  Close quarters and campstove-cooked food drew us together every dew-filled morning.  And as the warmth crept back into our frames through bacon butties and copious cups of steaming-hot tea, we laughed at the foolishness of what we were all doing in the middle of the countryside, humming songs and discussing yesterday's teaching.  Shared experience soon led to shared adoration of our Lord.

And really, what I keep on finding is that the more I try to go it alone, the more God puts me with people I can't escape from!  As we kept on hearing from Mike Reeves, community is in the very nature of God because He is triune.  This perfect conversation, fellowship, submission and faithfulness between the three Persons of the trinity revolutionises how we see community.  If even God is not an island, then what makes us think it is good for us to be alone?  So, both Relay 1 and Forum chipped off pounds of pride from my weary individualism and I hope the Relay year will hack a little more both out of me and out of Warwick CU.

So as I round off this trip through the first two weeks of Relay, as I reflect on the lessons learned, I am once again beginning to realise just how much work God is going to have to do in me this year.  Whether it's my eagerness to be legalistic, my insatiable desire to be utterly autonomous, or my reluctance to simply love those around me, I'm going to need to do more than look at Jesus.  I must gaze.  Ten times for every one look at self.

Warning: graduate in transition.

Time lurches on and I'm just beginning to feel the effects of transition.  No longer a student, I enter the graduate realm of unemployment and sarcastically-framed comments on the use of my degree.  Well, almost.

No, it's 4 days until the first Relay conference and really I'm just kicking back and waiting for this new chapter in my life to get started.  There's the usual practicalities of packing and how I'm going to get my stuff on the train on Tuesday without the aide of a packhorse (or two).  And don't forget the 'study' I haven't quite finished but am weaving -though somewhat feebly- between my hours of looking for a new bicycle, enjoying my parents company and just doing things I've had no creative space to do since academia took over my life.

But really, all's well in the Parsons' land of ee-by-gum and guinea pigs (my Mum's).  Warning--the accent has already taken multiple downward turns for the worse...

For those who know nothing about the Relay discipleship and training scheme, I suggest you look here because UCCF explains it with more brash, gusto and wholeness than I can at this hour.  In short, I'm returning to the Warwick area (after a couple of conferences at the Quinta Christian Centre near Oswestry) to help out the Christian Union at my -sob- old university and to be equipped, through study, personal work and learning new skills, to better share my faith as a Christian with students around campus. 

So, with no academic timetable in hand I'll be skipping the railroad tracks down to the Welsh border for fun and serious stuff with people I've never met before, at a place I've been to more times than I can count on fingers, with only a vague idea of what's actually going on.  Nothing new there then.

Amazingly though, my anxiety levels are low.  This time last year I was coming to the end of my stint in France and contemplating my return to university with utter dread.  I remember that for at least the first six weeks of that first term I was constantly on edge. 
While walking to lectures I couldn't help but feel deeply nervous, I think maybe because I felt incapable of tapping into those academic brain cells after my year abroad, which, in comparison to uni-life, felt like mental vegetation. 
Getting stuck into CU again brushed me back hard against my self-elevated thoughts of being needed.  I clearly wasn't. 
Some of my closest friends had already left, some to other countries, and this made me cling to the friends I did have left.  I am grateful to those who helped me settle back in to Warwick in ways they didn't even themselves perceive.
I came back to a country which spoke my language but where I felt I had no place, or at least one I had yet to discover.

It sounds like doom and gloom but I'm just being honest.  I found it hard and for weeks I was constantly anxious.
But there was one passage of Scripture I had running through my mind daily.
'Do not be anxious about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.  And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.'  Philippians 4:6-7

And it's to that passage that I turn now daily for strength, even though I am relatively calm compared to this time last year.  Reading Jerry Bridges', The Discipline of Grace, has refired those apathetic spiritual nerve-endings to revive the great truth that no day is so good or so bad that I do not need God's grace in my life.  So, anxious or not, coping with stress or going grey with the pressure, I have to turn to Jesus.  Why?  Because whether I perceive it or not, He is sustaining me.
Jesus is Lord.