The Long Walk Home

Really. Look. Do you think she needs professional help?

Having MSN conversations with friends about how free we are to fail and how brilliant it is that Jesus expects nothing more, and has dealt with our sin and failures once and for all of the times we do them. A brilliant fact which reminds me of my old boss, who asked in his job interview whether the church he was going to work for was a place where he could fail. I guess we all need to be free to fail and to expect it from each other, because the reality is, we will fail. We are stupid sinners, but that’s all God ever expected us to be. We expect to produce great things, never let anyone down and not hurt others, ourselves or God. He knows the Truth and wants us to learn it too. So that we can be honest with each other, quick to say sorry, quick to forgive, quick to display the same mercy that we have been shown, and quick to get into the redeeming and restoring business that our Dad is SO good at.

Community together will always be this process of hurt, repentance and reconciliation with grace being involved every step along the way. We need to expect less from each other and more of the depths of grace and mercy that the cross has bought us. This world desperately needs these kind of deep overwhelmingly loving relationships. We need the cross to seep into every area of our lives with each other. We need to listen to God the Father, Son and Spirit teaching us how to love one another well, to see them do it perfectly and abundantly, bringing glory to each other, loving each other and delighting in each other. We have so much to express of our amazing God’s character in our relationships with each other.

Lets get on with it and be free to fail, free to come back again and again to the old rugged cross, and by his grace, power and energy, put to death the clinging rubbish that drags us down. The Spirit is at work within us, our failure is never the end of the story. We get on up, bloody and bruised from the fight, breathing hard and we take a deep breath in. The Spirit is at work with us, the Father will never let us go and Jesus is NOT ashamed to call us brothers and sisters. We walk on. We walk on.

Top ways to stifle the boredom and drown out the fuzzy noise in the brain:

1. Go drumming. Bang it out of your brain.
2. Sit on a freshers stall and work out what your team would be if they were sweets.
3. Write to them to tell them their sweet category.
4. Invent new permutations of “paper, scissors, stone” with your Relay Worker- wavy fingers for fire (which burns paper), river like motions with your hands for water (rusts scissors, soaks up paper and kills fire), act out a bucket in the air (contains water and so defeats it) and then act a pushing motion with your hands (pushes the bucket over and kills the water again). You have to understand, we were on the freshers stall for 5 hours.
5. Eat nothing but cake and drink nothing but tea.
6. Make models out of blue tac and text a picture to a friend for comment. Jess made a particularly good desert island with a ship on the horizon. This was Steph’s comment: “You have created a visual comment on the spiritual status of many of your students. There is a powerful juxtaposition between this stark reality and the rescuing ship of the gospel. Moving. Very moving.”
7. Sit in a cafe on campus writing gibberish into a notebook whilst waiting for a student.
8. Drum some more.
9. Have MSN conversations about how to rule the world, where to escape to and dream of deserted islands and compulsory days of eating cake and dancing. (separate days of course, to combine the two would be madness, sheer madness.)
10. Other…. (please fill in as appropriate)