100 Days: Transformation

100 Days: Transformation

I’m coming to the end of the #100days project, which began on August 1, 2016 and will finish on November 8th, 2016. People have been asking, what this project has been about. You’ve seen glimpses.

Here’s an explanation and a question of sorts.

How long does it take to grow? The answer is: forever, like the largest, oldest tree that grows inch by inch into tomorrow.

Live long enough and you will learn there are different ways to grow. Some might grow tall, straight and true towards the sun, unstoppable and with unchanging trajectory. Some still straight but with no idea which way their roots go beneath the soil. Some grow wild and unruly. Some will grow entirely shaped by the elements they face, windswept by westerlies until their canopy echoes the curve of the ridge top. Some will drag life out of stony rockface and make a rambling home there.

But if you have the desire, you can choose the way you grow. You can learn how to learn and how to transform. It’s a strange paradox that transformation is how we get from back to our truest selves after the world has demanded how it wants us to be.

How long does it take to grow? The answer is: no time at all, if you know what you are measuring. I count seasons and especially springtimes, moon cycles and sleepless nights. I know the time it takes to let resilience do its work on the way back from disappointment, I measure the slow creep of desire and how it unravels the truth from us.

How long does it take to grow? The answer is as long as it takes to tell the truth; about yourself to yourself and for yourself.

A gardener can take a bonsai tree and determine the final form it will take. Working with organic growth and guiding it with an artistic eye.

A designer will take elements of shape, weight, colour and purpose and bring these otherwise unrelated ideas together into a single, sometimes multiplying form.

We grow by design, taking lessons intentionally and unintentionally. All growth is transformation but not all transformation takes us back to truth; that finicky balance of awareness and self-awareness. Knowing how the world is around us and how we are in the world.

I began #100days because I was seeking transformation. Having encountered within myself some deep knowledge, an awareness of something underneath the surface of my skin longing to find the light – I had to find a way to guide it out.

So for #100days, I have simply paid attention, observed and written down what I have seen, what I have learned, how I have changed. I have been intentionally focused not on what is outside of me, but what is within me that ought to come out.

It has not been one hundred days of a single activity or focus, like an extended Lent. It has been an exercise in letting my inner self tell a story to my outer self – my soul compelling my mind to listen. Because we must learn how to learn and keep learning even when we are in the midst of a repeating machine. There is something in our souls that longs to reach up to the sun and something in our roots that calls for deeper earth.

The heart can be deceitful in many things and your mind will overwhelm you with anxiety if you let it run free. But if I let my soul speak, that which searches out meaning in the world and listens to both heart and mind – I find my way to transformation.

It is Day Ninety. Today I am noticing how much changes in a year, just by opening your life to new experiences. What new bravery I have discovered within myself and what a beautiful new nuance to my voice, even if I alone appreciate it.

The hardest parts of labour are the moments immediately before birth. The last few days have been hard. These snippets of storytelling have encountered moments of joy, hope, sadness, journey, gratitude and mystery – I have measured my growth in the ability to notice and pay attention to the greater story being told around me.

I wanted to share it, because I wanted to see if I could observe and learn something inspiring or hopeful or useful every day. Here’s to your companionship on the journey with me and to whatever is growing and transforming within you.

 

An Exchange of Words

An Exchange of Words

The Writer
I would write you a letter, with ink and pen on thick paper that feels good in your hands. I’d like to leave the weight of my words with you, a deep impression on the page. I’d like to know you received it, took it into your hands, ran your fingers over the postage and came to understand I’m telling you the story so far, as far as I know it.

These words would be fragile and soft but in reading them, you’d forget being lost and make your way home. I’d make a roadmap of words from here to tomorrow, to guide us til we arrive. You homeward bound and me, reaching for you. Laid out in lines on a page full of humour, sorrow and life.

Each story we know, every secret and joke written in ink for keeping. I’ve come to believe life is a series of chapters you can read out of order because nothing will make sense until the end. As I’m sitting out in the moonlight and waiting for you to come home now, I’m waiting for the right words too.

I know some things will be fine by the end of the book. But some won’t and I’m searching for words to tell you in advance how sorry I am for the small things I’ve ruined by asking too much or when I couldn’t give you enough. I’m grieving for what is lost, what is left in my hands, what we counted on and what I’ve kept to myself when I could’ve opened my heart.

The Beloved
In the beginning there are words. Words that in their being brought earth, stars and all creation into being with them. Words shaped land and ocean, sky and heavens, placed stars into atmosphere and drew water out of springs in the earth to water the ground. The ground that would bloom into life, and the walking, breathing life that lived upon the earth to eat from the blossoming of the earth. All this came from words.

At the end there are always words. They are heavy with sadness and loss, trying to bring meaning to repeated breath and motion that make what we call life. Words that make small triumphs from failures and can change the purpose of a life from smallness to greatness in death.

Words are powerful here too. When the silence becomes an ache, the ache an emptiness and the emptiness cannot be filled, words anchor, restore, comfort and sustain until the last word of farewell is spoken. Hope remains and life endures in the breath and phrases we use to define the ones we lose.

You, I do not intend to lose. My words are constant and true. Trust in their steady and enduring light. I will write you a map home, your words like fire dust in my sight. I hear you calling.

The Writer Lost
Don’t ask for my body without my mind. Ask me for a kiss of syllables, consonants and round, deep vowels. I will slowly form phrases from the infinite depth of my heart which cannot find sharper or truer gift to give you. Words are less fleeting than feeling and hold their shape in the invisible ether. You cannot make dull mean sharp no matter whether you write it on paper or say it aloud.

My words contain everything of myself. Why do I find a deep sense of home in listening to words that roll from your tongue in apathy to my need of them? Our words together seem like a dance where one is never certain of the other. The orchestra slips ahead, like salmon darting upstream, always dragging us behind, always lost in thinking of a lyric for the bars that we pass by.

My words speak my heart aloud and fly up into the air, resting on shadows and clouds, sliding down raindrops back into puddles at my feet. Sometimes I do not recognise my heart as it comes broken back to me, yet drawn to these fragments I piece together a strange jigsaw puzzle of a poem.

Some words hesitate me for hours, fixing me in place until proven true or untrue. ‘Beautiful’ can trip me up for hours, words like ‘father’ bog me in delay. Others are deep, sapphire pools of the ocean and entice me to play. I am playing, waiting, delaying but really now – I have become lost and have need of a new map.

I will send out my words like the breath of the wind and even lighter, in every atom of the air. They sit like art upon the page, they will fly soaring when spoken. Can you hear me calling to you now? I fear forgetting the timbre of your voice cutting shapes into the night with your words.

Mine are arrows that fly from my heart to yours, along an invisible string that binds itself tightly to you. Yours are cool water when thirsty and lamplight in the desert. Hard to find when travelling.

This is a conversation in stilted exchanges – the way we used to communicate in letters, telegraphs, postcards and emails, between one who is lost and searching for the other and one who is calling the other home. Allegory is a powerful way of using story to illustrate ideas about true things and there are many true things in this exchange. At times, I find myself the Writer, at other times I relate to the Beloved. 

 

Speaking – The Beatitudes Series, Edge Kingsland.

Speaking – The Beatitudes Series, Edge Kingsland.

Here’s some audio from my recent message at Edge Kingsland, in Auckland NZ on October 16th, 2016.

I’ve included some slides that I used, that may be helpful visual aids. Listen to the end and you’ll get to hear a rough snippet of a beautiful song called Come to the Water. I did double-duty on Sunday and it was beautiful to sing this after sharing my thoughts.

 

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The Beatitudes are found in Matthew 5, where Jesus is sharing what becomes known as his Sermon on the Mount.

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This beatitude stands out because of the verbs. The others talk about states of being but in this verse, it’s our action of hungering and thirsting that brings about satisfaction or fulfilment. Thinking this verse is simply about pursuing justice or righteous living is a shallow reading of the Scripture and forgets the broader context: Jesus is reframing the way the Israelites see and understand the Law as a way of living.

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We are left with questions and I believe, this verse is about what we do with questions. Questions like what is it to hunger or to thirst. Most importantly, what is justice? What is the right way to live?

Why does this matter? Because we are people who were ripped from the Garden, where we used to have the freedom to ask God any question we had. The Beatitudes are a garden moment for us – momentarily we are returned to communion with God.

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We began in the garden, our birth and creation story. Before our way of living in the world was defined by the morality we encountered eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our understanding of right and wrong became the system that gets in the way of our intimacy and communion with God. When we had questions, we used to ask God. Now when we have questions, we look to the Law.

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As human beings we are drawn to systems. We love structure and how easy systems make it to navigate through the vast amount of data we live with in the world. So we classify and categorise. We define things as good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or not beautiful. Worthy or unworthy.

This is ok, this isn’t. You’re that kind of person, we’re this kind of church, we are those kind of people. On and on it goes. But the more the world changes the more classification is required to understand which categories fit what.

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The Israelites had a way of dealing with this – they created laws around the law so there was no risking of not getting it right. But when we live in this way, it’s easy to see how quickly our categorisation gets in the way of our intimacy with God. And this is shallow living because the system of categorisation and classification is doing the work. We end up trusting our system of right and wrong instead of trusting God with the big questions we have.

And they are big questions about a world that is changing faster and more dramatically than what we can imagine. It’s no longer safe to ask some of the questions we’re facing because our system won’t cope.

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As a youth worker and minister, people have frequently told me how far they feel from God. I am often asked what I think about a situation and what I think God thinks. And my response is that I have only one job: to get out of the way and gently push you back into deep waters. In deep waters, there is no constraint on the questions you might ask. You can swim deeply and learn again the ease and trust of intimacy with God. The fulfilment and satisfaction is found in being able to ask the questions.

If you find yourself holding on the answers more than embracing the questions, it’s time to turn around and head back out to deep waters.

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It’s important we become people who are brave enough to ask questions and a place that is safe enough to ask questions in. We are defined by the questions we ask and the manner in which we ask them.

Have thoughts or want to talk? Reach out.