It was puzzle, I was sure I had planted cute little flowers in that plot. Spread seeds all over the place I thought from those little foil packets. Should have yielded flights of floral fancy, not an overcrowded cluster of carrot seedlings and radishes! The fertile soil yielded a great crop; it just wasn’t I had hoped for. What the heck?! How did that happen?
Apart from me not having labelled the little packets, a lesson in itself, it was a matter of what you sow, is what you reap - now who said that I wonder?
In the Letter we’re studying, the apostle John’s first, he talks about how God has planted extravagant love in us and so expects that to yield a harvest of loving action in our lives. If He has planted love in us He expects and looks for us to plant love into the lives of others by virtue of our actions that demonstrate our love for God. In this way we cultivate and even harvest love for our brothers and sisters and for those among the Lord has sent us in order to witness to His unquenchable love.
What’s going on if we find ourselves being hateful? It means we have allowed something other than God to be planted and growing in our hearts and minds. However it gets there, it is the work of the anti-Christ about whom John writes more later in the Letter.
The only useful response to that potentially disastrous situation is to bring that failure to God, understanding He already sees it, and allow Him to forgive and cleanse the invasive, life-choking weeds that have come to dominate as only He can. It’s a total weed-out - no trace, no evidence left that we have erred. Thus we’re free again to receive His planting of sacrificial love and begin again producing the harvest of loving action expected.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Not jumping at shadows
Loved - forever! part the first
I suppose it was my own fault; I really shouldn’t have been watching a grisly episode of Criminal Minds so close to bed-time. Not that I dreamed about the strange-but-effective team of individuals, or the seriously-distorted pieces of humanity they were trying to catch and apprehend. But something nasty from that show crept into my sleeping consciousness and produced a very unpleasant and unsettling nightmare - of sorts. So I woke up, rattled and unnerved and needing a “little walk down the passage”.
That’s when the trouble started. I was in the halfway world between dream and reality when I entered the darkened hallway, and nearly leapt clean out of my skin when I “saw” something lurking next to the mirror near the kitchen!!! Whoa! After a severe attack of knee-trembling, and deep-breathing, I snapped on the light to find it was a pile of instruments that had been brought in and deposited just there. The light removed the spectre of my fevered imagination, and revealed not just the reality of the situation in the hallway, but also my silly suggestible fear for what it was - a jumping at shadows.
In our Christian lives we do quite a lot of jumping at shadows - which pleases the enemy no end - and yet we should know better. God will not allow that kind of thing invade our space, or terrify us. God is about light and love and intends such good for us that it is almost beyond our understanding; and when we habitually hang around in His presence, in prayer, worship, thoughtful reflection and study (and in the loving embrace of fellowship) we find His wisdom and compassion often enlightening our world of shadowy fears and looming apparitions and reminding us that love conquers all and His light shows the wonder of His enduring Presence.
I suppose it was my own fault; I really shouldn’t have been watching a grisly episode of Criminal Minds so close to bed-time. Not that I dreamed about the strange-but-effective team of individuals, or the seriously-distorted pieces of humanity they were trying to catch and apprehend. But something nasty from that show crept into my sleeping consciousness and produced a very unpleasant and unsettling nightmare - of sorts. So I woke up, rattled and unnerved and needing a “little walk down the passage”.
That’s when the trouble started. I was in the halfway world between dream and reality when I entered the darkened hallway, and nearly leapt clean out of my skin when I “saw” something lurking next to the mirror near the kitchen!!! Whoa! After a severe attack of knee-trembling, and deep-breathing, I snapped on the light to find it was a pile of instruments that had been brought in and deposited just there. The light removed the spectre of my fevered imagination, and revealed not just the reality of the situation in the hallway, but also my silly suggestible fear for what it was - a jumping at shadows.
In our Christian lives we do quite a lot of jumping at shadows - which pleases the enemy no end - and yet we should know better. God will not allow that kind of thing invade our space, or terrify us. God is about light and love and intends such good for us that it is almost beyond our understanding; and when we habitually hang around in His presence, in prayer, worship, thoughtful reflection and study (and in the loving embrace of fellowship) we find His wisdom and compassion often enlightening our world of shadowy fears and looming apparitions and reminding us that love conquers all and His light shows the wonder of His enduring Presence.
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