Power of the Spirit

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Blowing with the wind

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Blowing with the wind

The wind was blowing right down from the Arctic this week. The Americans said it came from Canada, but the Canadians reported it came from Russia.

And we were experiencing extraordinary variations in the weather. One morning I was driving in to a breakfast appointment in minus 28 degrees Celsius (minus 18 F). It was so cold schools, government offices and many businesses just shut down. The day before, it never got above minus 26 the whole day. We had some frozen pipes at our place, but thankfully jacking the heat up managed to thaw them out.

Fast forward a couple of days, the wind had changed direction, and it was above freezing and sunny. We left our coats in the car when shopping, and turned the heat back down.

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The root of the problem

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The root of the problem

A lady was sharing her woes with my wife in the changing room at the gym. Her problem was simple. She had to keep dying her hair every couple of weeks, or the roots would start to show.

And this is a pretty decent description of how people handle more serious problems in their lives too. We coat our issues with something that makes them disappear, but before too long they all come back. The reason, of course, is that the roots of our problems have never been dealt with.

A frequent mistake in pastoral care is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. An over-the-counter painkiller will deal with an ordinary headache, but it won’t do anything much for a brain tumour.

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All shapes and sizes

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All shapes and sizes

Every time I think I’ve seen everything in church I get surprised. And last Sunday it happened again. 

We were visiting good friends of ours who are leading a brand new church in northern Indiana. It turns out almost every last person in the fellowship grew up in the Amish. Some had barely traded in their horse and buggy.

Even within the Amish, there are lots of differences. You’ll often find a lot of legalism and not much true understanding of the Gospel. Yet, as you can imagine, there is a great sense of community and shared values. Many of these folk left the Amish because they had come to Christ. We heard one moving testimony from a young man, who had experienced the Rumspringa, the rite of passage where teenagers are allowed to run wild for a year and do anything they want (that's why, as we found out living on a rural Michigan highway, you can hear the boomboxes resonating as the buggies go past at 3 am on a Saturday morning).

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The perils of spiritual hoarding

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The perils of spiritual hoarding

Years ago, I went to a house way out in the countryside to perform a wedding. On my arrival, I was astounded to find the living room absolutely full of stacks of old newspapers. Many were piled far too near to a woodstove in the middle of the room. On using the bathroom, I noticed that even the tub was full of piles of stuff. The lady of the house was a cook at the hospital, and I wondered how long it had been since she had washed!

Hoarding is a psychological disorder usually rooted in some form of severe childhood poverty. A well-off professional friend of ours who had experienced a very poor childhood kept hundreds of tubs of empty plastic containers, bags and other things. She just couldn’t throw away stuff that she might need one day.

We can laugh, but most of us are guilty of some kind of hoarding. Clothes, old sets of electronics cables, batteries, pens, even (in the case of one friend) handbags. And we have a perfectly valid reason for keeping them all!

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Challenged by change

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Challenged by change

Youth With A Mission is an amazing movement in which there’s rarely a dull moment. In fact, its motto was once described as constant change is here to stay.

We’ve been in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne this week, working with South African friends planting a great church here. Elaine grew up nearby, and used to work in the city centre. She made the observation that while some things were the same, most things had changed, and some things were unrecognizable. And that’s always a bit of a shock - because we don’t like change.

For the most part, we understand that what we believe does not change. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.