Month: June 2015

Doing a Bon Jovi: Livin’ On A Prayer…

Doing a Bon Jovi: Livin’ On A Prayer…

Phil Lowe

The truly miraculous bit about a faith walk with Jesus and God is how personal it gets. This incredibly specific, custom-made, loving relationship. My lesson, as I attempted to explain during my testimony last November, is keeping all my second guessing, flawed, ego self out of the way to actually trust the process.

This year I committed to vulnerability. To opening up ‘me’ to Him. Handing ‘me’ over and saying, “Ok, then, Your will.” Was it easy? Oh no. I’d had an overwhelm of ‘thought creates‘ new age thinking prior to recovering from my Christian hangover. Our society pushes self. The difference between God’s will and my own, before Christianity, is stamped with action and impatience. Door not opening? Well, let me just kick it in.

Waiting on the will of heaven is an art. Of gently nudging on doors and, if they do not open fully, remaining still – rather than running around the side of the building and climbing through the window. It’s like living on a prayer. Doing a Bon Jovi. God either says “Yes” or “Not Yet.”  images

What Jesus has delivered is a relationship that allows me to wait at the door. To cease striving because he has already done the work. Supported by Jesus’ grace it’s easier for me to wait on the will of heaven without feeling frustration at the lack of momentum. I am not defined by my achievements. I am His achievement. His. No matter all that second-guessing, flawed, cage fighting, impatient self. His.

ColdPlay has a lyric about being in the gap between the trapezes that sums up where I am with G&J right now. As I trust, stay planted and grow in Jesus sacrifice, pray and give thanks, the next trapeze handle appears steady under my palms. I often don’t know which direction that trapeze may be swinging from or to, but God is gracious with any wobbly moments. The insistent shoving in my head up levels to a knowing ‘zap’ that signals strongly He is at work. “Draw closer. Trust. I’ve got this,” He tells me.

There is an absolute delight in that. The closer I draw, the better it gets.

As for doubters who would ascribe it to my over-active imagination, I have to say: my imagination isn’t that good. Take this recent unfurling, as I repeated my regular question/prayer to God:

“Why did you hunt me down at forty something years old? I have a range of communication skills. I love leading a team. I know I can build up a business and serve clients. But, really, is that all? I can keep blogging and try to keep writing about all that is lost in translation when it comes to You, but it seems a little limited,” I prayed.

(This is where I am very glad God knows me so intimately and understands His wiring me to think bigger and at a million miles an hour, because did I just tell Him this is a little limited?!?)

I continued: “Blogging is great (5000 readers and counting so far this year, thank you) but wouldn’t it be great to reach further? Like when I worked in radio. Although that’s been over 20 years so I’m probably a bit out of the career space of radio. Plus, you know, the kids are still at school. So if You do have any plans for me, I’d love to stay close to home. But your will not mine. Over to you. But, please, can you make it really clear? You know I need flashing neon signs. Sorry about that. Thank you. Amen.”

The very next morning a job advert landed in my inbox. A global Christian charity was advertising for a leader, to manage a team, work with the CEO and raise the organisation’s profile. Reach further? It radio broadcasts to over 3 billion listeners across the globe. Oh, and local?  Its head office is less than 9km from my home. Hang on, didn’t I just pray about all of this? Really?

I downloaded the job description, read it and, inelegant as is sounds, almost vomited with the adrenalin surge. God zapped into my head: ‘If you apply, Phil, you will get it.”

I wish I could say I smiled and calmly accepted God’s will. Whilst I didn’t descend into the cage fight limbic fight or flight that accompanied my decision-making over getting Lipton’d (yay, growth!) the absolute certainty that God was pressing on me was just as astounding. Help!

I quickly sent the smart-alec pastor (SAP) the job description, accompanied by the sentence, “Please read this. Freakin’ out. Don’t ask me what I prayed over yesterday.”

The reply: “Looks like someone wrote a job description for you, Phil. Of course I have to ask, what was it you prayed for?!”

Remember I also asked God to be really clear. The ‘up in lights’ neon joke I regularly request? As the SAP’s line about it being a job description written for me appeared in the instant messaging window….every light bulb in my office flashed, popped and flared. I kid you not. It was like something out of Poltergeist. I had to step outside and check the electrical safety board. Nothing had tripped.

Seriously, my imagination is not that good. God was more than at work. He was inviting me on a new journey. To trust the air between trapezes. To live on a prayer.

Bile and Bibles: turning the other cheek for my duct tape.

Bile and Bibles: turning the other cheek for my duct tape.

Phil Lowe

I have a interesting relationship with the Bible. By interesting I mean aggravating. It mostly comes from my own inability to devour it in a day and tick it off the list (have I mentioned the virtue of patience is one I am not especially blessed with?) So at the start of this journey I would happily read anything else related to Christian research in a vain attempt to somehow circumvent the need.

Part of the frustration stemmed from my being a speed reader blessed with ease of comprehension. The gift means I can gobble up most books and analyse their contents at speed. The Bible, however, is another matter. It defies devouring. A passage you read one day can impact only slightly, whilst a month later it smacks you around the back of the head with blinding insight.polls_duct_tape_3113_370440_poll

Yet I have had to get to grips because the Bible turns out to be a rather useful ‘back-stop’. The catcher. For those days when I wonder if the shoving in my head is God or simply my over-active imagination. As my footsteps grow stronger on this faith walk, I’ve developed relationship and faith enough to sense the difference – but on the days when my God-frequency goes on the fritz, or I suffer from personal maudlin terror (PMT), and I can do little but mutter the Lord’s Prayer in a slanging sort of way, throwing open the Bible and seeing what my eyes are drawn to helps.

I ought to write to the developers of The Bible app with a suggested upgrade: shake device to shuffle random Bible verses.

I do take a slightly more methodical approach to scripture than ‘flip n flurry’ – I could not make head or tail of this past year if I didn’t. This is where the internet is both curse and blessing. Blessing because technology has delivered Bible apps with beautifully-voiced narrators that make listening to it a joy. Curse because it’s way too easy to type into Reverend Google: ‘Bible verse about xyz’ and get a fast answer. Read all the Bible? Between google and my eidetic memory for snippets, it’s tempting to skim.

Pass the duct tape

Yet skimming for sound-bytes gives rise to much that is lost in translation when it comes to G&J today. Clobber verses taken out of context are not useful. Like recently, when an atheist reader of an earlier blog suggested I keep my female faith opinions to myself. He posted to me thisUnknown image of a bound and gagged woman, referring to a scriptural passage about women needing to be quiet.

Thank you. Let me turn the other cheek so you may stretch that duct tape across my mouth more easily.

1 Timothy 2:11-12 is a useful clobber verse for anyone who wants to punch Christianity for being behind the times on gender equality. Yet with a better reading of The Bible, and perhaps accompanying it with something like John Dickson’s Hearing Her Voice, my critic may have recognised the difference between apostolic teaching from the early church and today, given apostolic teaching has been preserved in the canon of New Testament scripture. So Dickson writes that while the first generation of Christian women were prohibited from laying down foundational, apostolic teaching which would become doctrine, tradition, and, finally, scripture,  once this doctrine had been preserved in Scripture, women may teach it.

Dickson also quotes a Bible verse where Paul does not specify gender, a verse that shows that the opportunity to minister in the Corinthian church was open to whomever was gifted. “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson [or teaching: didachē], a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” (1 Corinthians 14:26) 

Seems I can ignore the duct tape for another day. And keep on digging into that pesky, Holy text.

Jaysus. There’s three of them?

Jaysus. There’s three of them?

Phil Lowe

Watching the British BBC series, Rev. recently, a scene between the local Imam, Yussef Hasan (played by Kayvan Novak) and the Reverend Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander), Anglican priest, made me chuckle. As the pair walk around inner-city London, the Imam comments about Rev. Adam’s, “three Gods.” 2illt93

The script is cleverly referring to the Christian trinity: God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit (G, J & HS). Three, yes. But one. The Holy Trinity. Which can be sort of confusing, even to someone who thinks they may have a slight inkling about Christianity.

Before I’d ever met the long-suffering SAP, I was firing him inquisitive emails about what I thought I knew about the Trinity from school, compared to the overlay of eastern philosophies and research into religious teachers that had formed in the intervening years. Like this one, drawing on my years of yoga and striving for non-attachment:

Do all the religious teachers get together at the end and say, “oops, you picked the wrong one?” Or do you say, so long as you make a choice, choose a way of life following ONE religious teaching, then it’s OK? That there’s a kind of traffic control at the final light, with all the Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists etc shunted off in different directions?

The SAP’s reply:

All religions really aren’t the same…Morally, there are certain similarities here and there between some aspects of Buddhism and Christianity – as in basically be nice to each other.  But the essential claim of Buddhism is that you can make it to ‘Nirvana’ on your own – and when you get there you are unconscious and unaware of anything or anyone around you because you’ve let go of all the attachments you have with people and places and experiences.

Jesus offers us something completely different.  Sure, He says basically be nice to people.  But…there are some massive claims Jesus makes that no one else makes.  He keeps saying He’s God – that’s why they killed Him in the end.  He keeps saying that He can forgive sin – no other ‘religious’ figure in history said that. 

I recall the paragraph above striking me hard. I’d either forgotten or had never made the connection. I’d spent years happily justifying my position by saying Jesus was just another religious teacher. But He isn’t.

This is why I call Jesus the lightening rod. He is not simply another religious teacher who delivers a message from God. He is God. Made flesh. Who fulfils prophecy after Old Testament prophecy. Who performed miracles.

CS Lewis, atheist/agnostic turned theologian, whose book Mere Christianity was adapted from his series of BBC radio talks made between 1942 and 1944, while Lewis was at Oxford University, describes it well:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Which brings us to…spirit.

So God is Jesus. Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is their unique brand of….umm…aftershave? Not the most elegant of metaphors. One image used in the Bible comes from nature. The word often translated “spirit” from Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Bible, also means “breath” or “wind.”

Another image is advocate or helper. When Jesus was teaching his disciples, he said, “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” (John 14: 23-26)

An advocate is a person who stands beside you, works with you, and supports your cause. Christians believe the Holy Spirit can live within, filling hearts and minds with freedom, joy, purpose, and grace. In this way, the Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus in our lives. Or, as I seem to experience it, smoothing out my rough edges.

My personal experience of the Holy Spirit hasn’t been as explicit as that of the disciples in Acts 2:3-4: They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

No disrespect to Pentecostal Christians, but I suspect God is clever enough to know if He tried anything like that with me I’d be reaching for a few shots of flaming Sambuca. Shoving me awake at 3am with repetitive song lines? That’s enough.