by tashmcgill | Jun 15, 2005 | Uncategorized

Sex and the City

I’m working 3 days a week 8am-5pm for the next five weeks. Above is the building I’m working in, the delightful Phillips Fox Tower. Even the bathrooms have views. Today is a clear winter day and I am absolutely struck down with love for this city again. I’m such a strange girl. I love Paremoremo and the bush, water, dirt, peace and earthiness of it all. And I adore the rush and bush of the city, the old sweatiness of the concrete, marble, granite skyscrapers. The mad rush of pedestrians carrying takeaway coffees, talking on their cellphones. Black and charcoal suits, briefcases and laptop bags brushing past student satchels, carry-alls and sneakers. Fine italian leather shoes shining up from the ashen, dank asphalt.

I took lunch and just soaked it in. The sense of speed and power, movement and momentum. For a moment I just breathed in and remembered that people do find meaning and peace in the rhythm of a city life. In arriving at work, juggling carparks, gym memberships, Starbucks, banking. Jewellery stores, CD stores and any kind of ethnic food I like all in walking distance, all in the space of a half hour lunch. Bookstores, galleries and just a hint of Albert Park in the distance. This is the city.

I stepped inside Whitcoulls on the corner of Queen & Victoria, opposite my tower. Walking through the sections well laid out and displayed, I found a surreal little world by the poetry shelves. I was looking for something obscure and native, preferably Te Reo poetry translated. Instead I found insipid love poems from every ear and unpleasant covers. The delightful thing about poetry books, is that they normally escape the pop-culture, supermarket read cartoon cover art. Or the softly focussed, overly made up cover model shots that grace Danielle Steel, Penny Vincenzi and so on. No, as much as I enjoy Marian Keyes and Jane Green.. they are a world of fictional merriment and their cartoons suit them. I like my poetry to feel dark and real, bold and intimate from the moment I look at the cover, feel the weight and texture of the paper in my hands. Then the words and timbre can capture me and take me an sacred place.

Today, the surrealism wasn’t helped by a poor selection of ‘contemporary’and ‘classic’poetry. But the moment was saved. I was engulfed in a double pitched clunking rhythm overhead and all around. The internal escalators in that building must be near on ancient now, and sure enough.. the droning bass clunk and the doubletime treble clack clack made a rhythm enclave for me to dive into. The vibrations through the floor travelled to the very end of my fingertips and made even the dullest of offerings seem a little alive. It made me want to record the sounds and play them over and over, maybe even as a loop on some anthemic lovesong to the city.

It’s less than a day spent in her clutches and I am utterly swept away again. The pulse and rhythm, life of it all takes me back to New York and brings me home again. I need to live with a camera on my arm, capturing every moment of these days. In the darkest of spaces, my city reinvigorates me.

I remember now.. the love affair I have with this place. I’m going to prescribe myself more city time, remembering my culture from out in the sometime desert of the North Shore.

Hmm.

by tashmcgill | Jun 13, 2005 | Uncategorized

© Tash McGill

Paradigm Shifting
Sometimes you have these moments in life when you realise the sands are shifting beneath you, and you have limited time to choose your response. I sense this process is beginning in me. And this time I’m wiser and softer than I was before. Hindsight offers the choice to engage in the process and be shifted along as I need to be, or to simply dig in. But the choice is not really mine.

As I’m writing this, I’m also viewing pictures from Luke and Katie’s wedding and admiring the love that they have grown for one another. It’s beautiful to see how they have grown together and to believe in something precious for a moment.

I see now, how in all of my career movement and development, right alongside it, has been this deep drive and need to build a home life. I’m reminded of that John Mayer song actually. The deep longing for a place and community of belonging, that owns me and loves me and keeps me and desires me. A community of people who are friends not parishoners, family not colleagues. A place to celebrate and be celebrated in. And so here in what could be the twilight of my time at Windsor Park, I am seeing signs of this little haven coming into being. Not altogether as I would imagined it, but slowly in small and quiet places. I love my house and my connect points, special friends that are growing deeply into my heart. I love seeing progress and development with some of the things I have been doing here finally taking fruit. And there are of course other things not going as well, that I want to see through and fix. Or at least learn from.

So .. with some dreams having been put to bed by recent developments; I’m looking around and asking God what next, and where to. It seems that age and gender and experience will ultimately prevent for the foreseeable future my ongoing growth or development into the ministry role I feel so called to.

Edited on Advice

I am looking at the reality of accepting a minimal token payment job here next year, with increased ministry workload, albeit some of the very dreams and ideas I had wanted to run with in my internship period; but having to combine that with a role with Eastercamp that I’ve been told won’t be developed beyond what it already is. That would still leave me financially crippled for another year and also in the very kind of volunteer position that my would-be employer has disregarded as ‘countable experience’.

Or I look to be employed somewhere else, and put down my responsibilities with Eastercamp, the passion and call there. I could go full time or partime and continue to study and pursue some things. The optio of staying in Auckland in a position like that is at least one that would allow the songwriting to continue and not remove me entirely from the homelife I have built.

Or, I take my mother’s advice and move overseas. Looking at a position maybe in NSW where I have some contacts and opportunities are available. There are positive things about this. The whole ‘prophet without honor in his own land’ would be easily removed for a season, an opportunity to explore and develop and build. If leadership is not empowering, then it’s either managing you for it’s own benefit or.. it’s disenpowering you altogether.

So there are some smart decisions, and extremely painful ones in my future.

Pray for me, that God’s will be done, and not my own unless the two correlate. Pray for my fears to be held in check.

Song Of The Moment : Home Life
John Mayer

Home life
You keep the home life
You take the home life
I’ll come back for the home life
I promise

by tashmcgill | Jun 9, 2005 | Uncategorized

© tashmcgill

Coming Undone Again
I spent the weekend in Roto-vegas for the annual Queens BDay BYM Training weekend. It was all good quality stuff, a few special moments in seminars talking about the cycle of barrenness, preparation, conception, birth and new life. It has sparked some good thinking for me in terms of preparing for whatever happens next.

Brian Krum polarised me yesterday with the realisation that vocation choices I make now are going to affect the next ten years. It’s a crucial time to look for the opportunities that will allow the right people to see me in the right light at the right time, and a time to be cautious of becoming too crucial to someone else’s gameplan.

When I was working at Mitre 10 there was a sign on the wall saying, ‘don’t be irreplaceable. it means you can’t be promoted.’ I’m thinking that way now.

So… resuming normal life?

by tashmcgill | Jun 2, 2005 | Uncategorized

Out Here in the Wild
I got a phonecall from Steve. He used the words detached .. and some others. He was calling to see if I was okay. I need to call him back, but I’ve put his number somewhere I can’t remember.

I was at a music team retreat for the weekend, trying to inspire and regroup courage into this little band and allow them to see the Image of God in each other for a short while. Simon came along to help out. It was a good and strange time. So many hopes and dreams that I have for this motley bunch, so I guess there is a pastoral heart in me after all. I have a deep and abiding love for these ones.

I’m thinking about the next steps and the where-to’s a little bit. By now, the story’s becoming obvious. I loved a boy, he didn’t love me back. I lost hope and now I’m regaining ground on a slippery slope. See, the love of the boy doesn’t matter so much as how it reminds of the love of the father. I couldn’t figure out how to win his love either. So the doorway of grief was opened up and God has been restored to me in new ways because I’m processing and leaving some of what I need to at His door. It’s all happening in quiet moments, in dark spaces, late at night, early in the morning when I can’t sleep.

I feel foolish when grief grabs me suddenly in the middle of the day. Feel like I’ve been stolen away from myself when words and dreams and hopes of a year ago present themselves again.

I’m not afraid of not being loved by people, I’m afraid that the love of God won’t satisfy me. I know that He will respond as I trust in him.. and the RLP’s dissertation on this clarifies me..some of his other writings are making me think as well.., and but I know and recognize the ache for humanity inside me.

It’s making me think that it’s the Image of God in me, crying out for intimate relationship with the humanity around me. In thinking this way, I’m not making myself more divine. If anything, in this haze I am most sinful in my self-centredness.

Carrying On

I will carry on, Lord. I will seek You out.
Not because your plans are great, or wiser, or more trustworthy.
I can’t say any of those things honestly.
I hope that they might be, but I realise I don’t want to be dishonest with You
by claiming a promise I do not hold, a faith I cannot hold up.
I will carry on, and seek You out
because You are the beginning of satisfaction.
You are the beginning of Comfort, the beginning of Love.
I am too human, and analyse too much the end of things.
So I will look to the beginning.

You make all things new in Your presence.
I still wish that I understood these things though.

by tashmcgill | May 23, 2005 | Uncategorized

Leading Me On

tonight at 1am i’m still alive
i can feel it pulsing through my fingertips
a life being breathed in and out of my body
this hope being stirred deep within

tonight at 1am
the moon is a wonderful compass of love
so bright and full and shining down
lighting up the darkness like daylight

tonight we met to write songs, except none of them came easy tonight. The chords were right but the words didn’t sit easy, my melodies were boring and too old, there was too much noise in the room. And in the admitting of the disease of it, I had the opportunity to be lead tonight, which doesn’t happen very often.

I sat back and was lead through a confessing, adoring, sacrifical, honest, deep and heartfelt prayer. It spoke to my spirit and life in deeper ways than the pray-er will ever know. In the depths of the quiet and stillness, with one soft, deep voice uttering the deepest and most precious parts of my whole self, I was taken to the foot of Christ. He confessed for me, our shared dalliance from seeking the kingdom first, renewed my vows of Christ before all else. Commitment to risktaking and living wide was restored. I sat in stillness and quietness and I did not wish to be anywhere else, or with anyone else, or about anything else in that moment, than the pure unadulterated joy of being in the Presence of God. Not just in His Presence, but at His feet, and in His arms all at once. There has been no finer moment of worship in my life for some weeks.

It wasn’t until driving home under the light of the full, bright moon that things started to settle in my belly, heavy and soft. Like something had been birthed there once again. Things are starting to be made new again.

by tashmcgill | May 19, 2005 | Uncategorized

In The Morning We Will Rise
All night tonight I have been waiting for the inspiration to come to me. I thought it would have arrived by now, but I’m still here sitting, and I need to sleep. I’ve been playing over the same 6 chords on my guitar, strumming to the same rhythm; trying to finish off a verse, to a chorus that’s just about perfect. It’s been too long since we sat down to finish a song.

Danielle is finally coming Down Under and I just today really got excited. I had a day off classes, and nothing too urgent but some assignments. I took the day off basically, to read in the morning and then some research in the Library in the afternoon.

Truth be told I was a little bit relating-deficient today, so I pursued some cross-town friendship at the Atomic. I rang Stu to see what he was up to, and he suggested Atomic vs. spending $$ on cellphone bills. I’m going to let him continue to think that coffee was his idea.

Coffee was good. It always is, but it was especially nice to spend time with Stu who has some of the same gentleness as Wendy does, and yet they are so different. We talked about Easter and life, ministry, grief, lots of things. It helped me to feel more connected to reality again. Finding my way back to life again in the midst of all this personal discovery is quite important.

I still haven’t really answered any of my questions about how this subconscious and now public grieveing processed may or may not have affected my ministry. Stu seemed unconvinced, which would be good honestly. I am reminded, or rather, have been reminded, that the wounds I walk with may be the very thing that defines and personalizes a program of relatively ordinary youth ministry.

We also talked about misconceptions briefly, and laughed quietly and almost shamefully at some unfortunate ones. Needless to say, sometimes it is good to be reminded of the humanity all around me, that I am simply included in the mass of people who sometimes take things the wrong way.

Later On, Inspired By The Short & Too Brief Coffee With Courage
I wrote some emails responding to some of the ‘feedback’ circuits we have been doing with the music team of late. I tried to speak to the personalities of the readers, and not out of my own mamma bear tendency, when it comes to my team. It was well-received and I am relieved about that.

I spoke about in the nature of Christian competition, mostly to do with the pursuit of excellent when working with creative types, that humility does not always present itself as equality, and so there may be times where one group appears better at something than the other, and inevitably those ‘positions’ will move and shift all the time as we grow and experiment, develop our own styles.

I think that there is strong argument for the presence of healthy competition.. the sense with which another athlete training in the same circuit as you, will push harder and ultimately improve your game. But.. I have to ask, is there a Spiritual Competitive-ness that sneaks into some of the wider discussions about church?

It is probably a very simplistic thought but after a discussion on Friday, coming back from Janelle’s funeral, I was again left thinking, so much of the ideology of Emerging Church, is just that… Ideology. It’s not a new theology of Church, it’s just a new group making stylistic overtures towards the way things ought to be done.

By this I mean, there are simply so many people jumping on a bandwagon of emerging church, who really have done very little discussion or reading or conversation with either or both or many sides of this ‘progression’. It will be interesting to see what some fairly solid, mainstream, modern practitioners come back with from the extremely exclusive and elitest Hui in Wellington.

Small Pout
I’m taking issue with the fact, that even though I am normally extremely current with Christendom activities like the aforementioned hui, I haven’t seen any publicity, conversation, or discussion that makes me think or feel remotely welcome, invited, established or deconstructed enough, well-known or ‘up&coming’ enough to attend. Hence, I am already skeptical about what shape any feedback out of it will take. This is not because of the quality of people sharing, I respect almost all of them very much, except for a couple I do not know. However something about the nature of people attending, a number of seemingly innocent but potentially dangerous demographical trends just makes me think… well…. is this a step in discussion and journey, or simply another way in which people damage their own creditibility, or worse… create strategies for development, integration and practice within communities that are not yet even aware the kind of ’emerging journey’ they might be about to find themselves on. Put out, that no one is suggesting or requesting my attendance? Absolutely.. I’m sure I’m going to miss some good times, however I also believe that there is another group of ’emerging practioners’ out there that’s maybe a little left-field even for the emergents. So left-field that we’re right back in the mainstream.