seek

The Christian life and faith is a never-ending quest in search for God, and the heart of God.

There is never a point in faith that is the ultimate, with God there is more.

Always more.

I want to live my life continually seeking God's face, and everything about Him.

I want to turn every corner and find something new.

The beauty of this journey is that it never ends, there is always more.

God is always more than I thought.

This past Easter weekend taught me so much.

I was amazingly blessed to lead an amazing small group of year nine and ten girls. At one point in the weekend I took a step back and could see every single one of them moving forward and wanting more of God. Question after question proved to me how searching they were for God.

They reminded me that I needed to keep on searching too.

Because in this search I will always find God.

I will always find God because just as I am seeking Him, He is seeking me.

"The Son of Man came to seek and to save" - Luke 19:10

God became a man. And this man, Jesus, came to seek me.

Through my faith Jesus has found me and I have found Him.

My favourite part of Easter Camp is the Catacoombs. The time of worship and quiet surrounded by God's amazing creation.

In this moment He reminded me that his quest isn't over. And neither is mine.

As long as God continues to seek me, I will seek Him.

suffering

Some people have a passion for shoes or food, others are passionately in love.

The word 'passion' is almost always used as a synonym for the words 'love'.

Passion actually derives from the Greek word πάσχω (paskho), which means 'to suffer'.

Yes, one may suffer in love, and that is passionate, but the ultimate poster boy for being passionate was, and is, Jesus.

He suffered so much for us:

"he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so we could be whole.

He was whipped so we could be healed."

Isaiah 53:5*

This suffering is huge, imagine being beaten or whipped for someone you don't even know? I know that there has been times I’ve seen people punished (just simple ones like a detention or a speeding ticket), and I have just stood there, posing as an innocent bystander, it never crossed my mind to take their suffering upon myself. Most of the time I’m just glad it wasn’t me who was caught.

But Jesus took the blame for everything, everything we have ever done.

In His death and His suffering, we are forgiven. He was perfect, but took it all.

That is passion.

But it doesn’t stop there.

As followers of Christ it is not going to be easy, because true followers of Him are passionate about Him. This means that we will have to suffer.

Life isn’t easy; we will be mocked, ridiculed and persecuted for being Christians.

All of that will be worth it, because if we continue to love Him through everything, we will receive His glory. It is his love and acceptance that truly matters. That is what is everlasting, not the acceptance of this world that will end in a few decades.

One cannot say they have a passion for the Lord if they are not willing to suffer for what they believe in, to suffer for the eternal love He has to offer.

“together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.”

Romans 8:17

*How rad is it that Jesus' redemption for our sins is prophesied in Isaiah - hundreds of years before he was even born?

Go.

As a literature student, most would think that my favorite genre of book may be classic, the gothic, or perhaps comedy.

But I love adventure stories. The epic narrative.

Stories that have a hero, a task, a dragon, there is testing and endurance and fighting.

In adventure there is love, loss and learning.

Adventure speaks to me. It is the dreams of children, these dreams seem to be stifled somewhere on the journey to adulthood, and adventure is soon only present flickering in the nostalgic memories, and within black ink printed upon a page.

I want it to parallel my life, I cannot go on living a life that I plan for myself, because life is unexpected, and the unexpected happens within the narrative of adventure. I have to let go of the life that I have planned for myself in order to embark on the journey that is waiting for me, the adventure that God created.

This is my life.

And life is scary and daunting and sometimes it is so tempting to just remain where I am comfortable. You can go through life just watching the action, but there will be a sense within you that you are missing out on something huge, you will get restless.

A life of safety and comfort does not make a good story.

There is a kind of life and elation in doing something that scares me.

Unreal things happen when you do something that scares you.

It is in these epiphanic moments that God is present.*

To push through the scariest thing that I can imagine: This makes me the hero in my own adventure.

I will conquer my own limitations, I will fight the bad guys, I will achieve my task. I will do this with the guidance and by the strength of God.

May you always do what you are afraid to do.

*epiphany |iˈpifənē|

noun ( pl. -nies) (also Epiphany)

the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12).

• a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.

• a moment of sudden revelation or insight.

And thank you to the lovely Francine Chapman for taking the photo.

That is me, at the pinnacle of the pinnacles.

Blessings in disguise.

One thing that God taught me when I was away was about blessings in disguise.

Two weeks before I was due to leave and finally come home a volcano in Chile erupted. In those last two weeks I was constantly scared that I wouldn’t be able to get home. By this time I was really missing home and the thought of not being able to get home made me feel sick. One week before I was due to leave, no flights at all were landing or taking off in New Zealand. Over the whole of New Zealand was a giant ash cloud.

I was supposed to be flying Trujillo to Lima, Lima to Santiago (in Chile) and then Santiago to Auckland.

My flight from Santiago to New Zealand was cancelled.

After trying to find a flight – any flight, the only thing that could be done was to just go to Santiago and figure it out from there.

I was supposed to have a visa to get into Chile which I didn’t have, but somehow they let me into the country. I spent about three or four hours at Santiago airport desperately trying to get home. Finally, the girl at the desk told me the next flight I could get on was in a week and it flew straight to New Zealand. I told her to put me on it; I just really wanted to get home! She looked on her computer and then told me that the last seat had been taken just two minutes before.

It was really hard not to just break down and cry at this point.

So instead, I was put on a flight that also left in a week, but flew Santiago to Tahiti, Tahiti to Sydney, and finally Sydney to Auckland. All up it was 27 hours on a plane. I really wanted to be on the flight directly to New Zealand, but I had to settle with this one.

It was so frustrating.
But it was God taking care of me, he knew so much more than I did.

The next day, the flight directly to New Zealand, the flight I was supposed to be on, was cancelled.

In those moments at the airport I thought God wasn’t listening to my prayers, when really He knew the bigger picture.

That was the first blessing in disguise.

The second blessing in disguise was my week in Santiago. In Peru I was so busy and going crazy with worry about getting home. When I got home, it was so overwhelming, and my days were filled with catching up with everyone. Santiago was God’s gift of rest. It was a week where I could just sleep, spend time with God and see the city. It was a really good week, and Santiago is a really cool city, now it’s one of my favourite cities. I am now really thankful that God blessed me with that week.

In the Narnia book The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, the protagonist Shasta seems to come across a lot of misfortune. It is not until Shasta meets Aslan does he see that Aslan has been working in his life in so many different ways.

Aslan says “tell me your sorrows”
Shasta was a little reassured by the breath: so he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. and then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the Tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had anything to eat.
“I do not call you unfortunate,” said the Large Voice.
“Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?” said Shasta.
“There was only one lion.” said the Voice.
“What on earth do you mean? I’ve just told you there were at least two lions the first night, and -”
“There was only one, but he was swift of foot.”
“How do you know?”
“I was the lion.”
And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. “I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you as you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”

Aslan had looked after and protected Shasta the whole way, and Shasta didn’t even know.

Like Shasta, so many things which I saw as problems or inconveniences happened when I was overseas, but it was God taking care of me, He saw further than I did.

I made it home finally.

God gave me a huge adventure, and it was amazing. I saw so much, I learnt so much, I did so much. But the best part was that God was in every moment of that adventure.

Look.

Sometimes I doubt.

I begin to lose my sureness and I lose sight of God working in my life. 
I think I've lost sight.
Really, I have just closed my eyes.

And I need to reopen them. 
I need to open them and look around me.

I open my eyes and I see:

Golden light radiating so bright and so warm, giving life to everything it kisses.
Leaves that have internal pathways for water and life to reach it's very tips.
Stars that wink at me, full of mischief and mystery.
Blue eyes shifting to green overnight.
Pure white snow, glowing in the moonlight. 

I see all of these things, and so much more.

"for ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities - His eternal power and divine nature." - Romans 1:20

One only has to open their eyes and see that nature, all of God's creation, is bursting with life and beauty. So perfectly and amazingly created, one cannot help but sense, feel that there must be more, must be a greater power.

My doubt is diminished every time I hear a heartbeat.

I know that He is the creator and the divine lifegiver of me.

Just take a moment to stop and look. To see the miraculous in the mundane things you pass by daily. To see the intricate design and beauty of them.

And soon you will realize that things will cease to be mundane. You will see the amazing, brilliant creation that God had moulded and shaped for us.
Notice more.

Just look.
And believe.

The moon.

The inanimate object, the dead chunk of rock that is suspended above our earth - the moon is a truly beautiful thing. 

I love seeing the Cheshire cat smile sliver of the waning moon. Smiling down at me.
The nights of the full moon that show it's brilliance.

The nights when the moon is not there, concealed by cloud, or still yet to rise, cause the immense blackness, the dark, the night, to be so vast.

The black of the night sky is unending. 

The moon is somewhat a comfort when it is there.

The nearness rids the sky of danger and installs a sense of safety within me. 

When the moon is above me, near in the sky, everything is okay.
When the Lord is near, everything is okay.


Scientifically speaking, the moon is a lifeless object, cold and grey. 

But, the light of the sun is reflected by the moon. And by reflecting that light, the moon sheds light on an otherwise dark world.

Without the sun, the moon is nothing.

One could say that we need to be like the moon. 
Psalm 34:5 reads "look to Him and be radiant."

Reflect the light of God, the light of the Son. He is the giver of the light, the radiance.

The world, the earth is a dark place, and like the earth to the moon, a force like gravity pulls us towards it. 

The pull of the world.
Gravity.

Constantly the world is pulling us in, tempting us with things that seem so great, so fun, so easy.

But so empty. 
So dark.
So lifeless.

Is there life in selfishness? 

Give in to gravity, or resist it. 
There are only two options. 

We can choose to be out of the world, as the moon is. And we can reflect the light of the Son onto the darkness of the world.

He provides the light, gives it to us.
Now, reflect it.

Without the sun, the moon is nothing.
Without the Son, I am nothing.

A name

“They say Aslan is on the move - perhaps has already landed.”
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning - either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer. - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

The thought of God, and to hear His name can have a different affect on me at different times in my life.
So many different feelings, moods. Never static, ever-changing.

Sometimes, I long to hear that name, when He feels so distant, I will go frantically searching to find out everything and anything about Him.
But, other times, I shy from that name. The name will conjure a sense of shame in me, as past and current sins begin to surface in the front of my mind.

On rare occasions that the name of God overwhelms me and fills me up with such an astounding happiness and lightness within me.
It is at times like these that I wish upon the clocks to stop moving, upon the earth to cease spinning.
The far and few times I have felt like this have been so brilliantly lit in my memory have helped me to endure, and push through the times when I feel the darkness is overwhelming me, drowning me.

It is these moments of perfection that I hope for every day.
And the remembrance of the moments cause me to continue to strive towards Him.
I want to be closer and closer.

His name does make me feel differently at different times; scared, unsure, ashamed, happy, sad, lonely, crazy, numb.
I want the sound of His name to make me feel endlessly happy and the thought of Him to be perfect. I want this, so I endeavour to alter something in my life, and the sound of God's name changes upon hearing it, and I want to be at a time where His name is all that I want to hear.

To change the feeling I receive when I hear His name, I have to change something within my life.


How does the name of God make you feel?