And dad's doing backflips!!

Once a quarter, our son, Josiah, goes on a two day soccer course. The local boys have two four-hour sessions of working on skills, plus they play several games in various teams. Josiah has been going for the past few years, and he always enjoys it. There is one thing, however, that has been ever elusive. That is the coveted "Goal of the Week." When Josiah was younger, he talked about it, but never expected to win it. More recently he has been getting close--honourable mention a couple of times, once he and one other boy were the best two goals, but the other boy got the trophy. Josiah never said much about it, but I knew he would be pretty pleased to finally win that one.

Well... yesterday it finally happened! My wife Pippa, our daughter Bethany, and I were there for the little awards ceremony that they always do at the end of the two days. And when it came time to announce the winner of "Goal of the Week", the coach said, "It was close again this time, but after some very good goals, the goal of the week goes to Josiah."

Josiah is a pretty low key guy. He just looked down at the ground and smiled. But that smile was speaking volumes to me. And what about me? I wanted to do backflips! I wanted to hug the coach (wholly inappropriate in most reserved British circles)! I wanted to duet with Louis Armstrong in a rousing chorus of "What a Wonderful World"!

I was probably more pleased about the event than Josiah was. I know how often he had gotten close but had not quite won the prize. And I knew that he didn't make a big fuss or complain about not winning, even when it was between him and one other boy. And I knew that this was a pretty special thing for him. Oh yeah, I was very pleased!!

This morning, while out on my morning dog walk, I was reflecting on this whole event and began to think of how often we forget that God is a loving Father who delights in us, and thoroughly enjoys our victories and achievements--those times when we overcome that major temptation, when we hold our tongue and don't give in to some serious anger, when we show kindness to that person that seems to be ignored most of the time like old wallpaper.

The words that were ringing in my ears were: "If you then, though you are evil... how much more will your Father in heaven?" (Luke 11:13). Does God do backflips over us? I wouldn't like to make a categorical statement on that one. Does he delight in us, his children? Absolutely! I think sometimes we get so caught up with "trying to get it right" that we forget that he is our "Abba, Father" and he loves to see us make good. I found that to be a pretty amazing thought!

The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible

Anybody who has ever heard me speak about the imbalance of Christian literature in the English speaking world as opposed to the rest of the world will know that I am about the last person who would recommend that Christians in the western world buy yet another Bible. However, this is one that I have to mention.

The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible was recently produced by Richard Foster's ministry, Renovare. The editors include Foster, Thomas C. Oden, Gayle Beebe, Lynda L. Graybeal, Dallas Willard, Walter Brueggemann, and Eugene H. Peterson. Each book of the Bible also has a commentary by an eminent scholar on that book.

But the great thing about the Spiritual Formation Bible is its theme of "The With-God Life". Everything about this Bible is designed to lead the reader into a life of continual union with God, learning to practice the presence of God. It offers numerous helps as to how that can be accomplished, and often breaks into the text of Scripture to challenge the reader to reflect on a particular point and how it relates to "my life". There are a number of essays that show how the Scripture develops this theme of "The With-God Life" from Genesis to Revelation.

The commentaries are not academic babble that will lose the average reader. Instead they are notes that point the reader to recognising the way that each particular text relates to their present situation. The comments are wide-ranging. I've seen quotes from Simon and Garfunkel songs, and I've seen recommendations to buy the book In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssavgis, as a starting point for understanding the spiritual discipline of Solitude. There are also excerpts from spiritual classics by writers such as Thomas a Kempis and Julian of Norwich.

One thing that may surprise readers is that the Inter-testamental books, or Apocrypha, is included. If you, like me, grew up in a conservative protestant home, you may think that the Apocrypha is not to be looked at, much less read. However, there is a great deal of valuable writing from that time, and the Renovare Bible, while not counting them as equal to the Scripture, certainly considers the apocryphal books as worthy of at least one reading. For example, I personally found the Greek rendering of the Book of Esther a great help as an additional text to the book by the same name found in the Old Testament.

All in all, this is a Bible I would highly recommend for any Christian who is serious about being transformed into the likeness of Christ. I think it is one of the greatest tools to be provided in a number of years.

When it all goes wrong

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was getting ready to sit down for the afternoon. I had just been to my son Josiah's football (soccer) match, and I was now settling down to prepare myself for the next Sunday morning when I was scheduled to speak at the church that we attend. I was just coming into the house from my office, which is across the back garden, when I noticed what looked like the remains of Josiah's bath water sitting all over the pathway around the down pipe from the upstairs bathroom. Well... we had been experiencing mysterious leaks in various pipes during the past few days, so this confirmed that something was very wrong. I had to acknowledge that we had drain problems. After my father-in-law and I made a couple of futile attempts to clear it, I called a real drain company to come in and fix the problem. The man arrived a couple hours later and quickly set to work on clearing my drains. He began using a very, very long plunging device with great gusto. I could hear all kinds of noise under the ground, and he assured me this was the pipe beginning to clear itself. It looked like he had the problem in hand, so I went inside to fix him a coffee while he was working. To my intense horror, as I walked into the kitchen, I saw that raw sewage was all over the sink area. I opened cupboards and found that the pressure of his plunging had forced this same sewage through every seam in the pipes, and we had the same unpleasant material all over the cupboards under the sink and everywhere in the cupboard where the washing machine sits. I went running out and asked the man if this should be happening. His reply was something along the lines of: "Definitely not. That is 100% wrong. It shouldn't be happening." I was relieved to hear that.

After a quick look over the situation, his conclusion was that something was badly wrong with the way our pipes worked. (I had come to that same conclusion myself.) We began the work of cleaning up the grand mess. He didn't stay as long as I would have liked, and I was left to the task of removing all the sewage from every possible nook and cranny. You see, we are in the process of selling our house, and the idea of people coming to view our house while it smelled like a decaying herd of buffalo didn't seem like a great idea.

The next 48 hours were hugely unpleasant ones for me and my wife, Pippa. We used bleach, pine-scent cleaner, more bleach, dog smell remover, more bleach. You get the idea. Slowly but surely things began to return to normal--apart from the fact that some frying pans were thrown away, since Pippa categorically refused to ever use them again for food that we would consume.

Three days later, the drain company came back and fixed the problem with our kitchen pipes. It needed to be done. We had not been aware of the cause of some minor problems we have had for some time in the kitchen, but when the BIG problem came, it allowed us to find the real problem and FIX it. Now, a couple of weeks later, the smell in the kitchen is pleasant and resembles food cooking rather than animals hibernating. And all the drains in the house, not just the kitchen, are working much better than they were before the catastrophe.

I realise that a few blocked drains is a minor problem in light of world peace or pandemic bird flu. But I can assure that for those 48 hours, we thought it was a pretty big problem. All of us have situations in our lives that sometimes go disastrously wrong--it may be a relationship, our health, a work situation, or any one of a hundred other things. The point is we live in a fallen world, and things often don't work out quite like we plan or hope.

What do we do when it all goes wrong? Sometimes, like in our situation, the big problem is an indication that something needs to be fixed. The little problems were there, but they were small enough that we were able to overlook or ignore them. Many times, maybe most of the time, this is true of the things in our lives. God often allows situations to get to the point where we can't ignore them any longer. Maybe we need to humble ourselves in a way that we haven't before, maybe we need to reconsider our priorities in life, or maybe we need to sit still and listen to God in case he has something that he has been trying to say for some time.

The other side of it is that sometimes there isn't always an easy answer like the "drain man" so quickly gave us. Sometimes we have to say, "I'm not sure, but God is still God." There may not always be a quick and simple answer, but even if mountains are giving way and the earth is shaking, God is still God (Psalm 46). He is faithful all the time.

As our world becomes increasingly unstable, and uncertainty causes a lot of people to live stress-filled lives, it is vital that we keep our minds set on the eternal nature of God and realise that he is indeed working all things to the good. It is entirely possible that things are going to get even more shaky. Those are the times when God is our shelter and rock of safety. He is in the process of conforming us to the likeness of his Son, and whether in good times or bad, his eternal purposes are certain to be fulfilled. That's a comforting thought.