Living on a Prayer

To be honest with you, I just don't get prayer. It makes no sense to me that when Moses pleaded with God he changed his mind. It makes no sense why God wouldn't just heal anyone who was sick rather than waiting for people to pray. It makes no sense how I could pray for something and it happened even though it seems to violate other people's free will and other people's desires. It makes no sense why he would heal my heart and let millions starve to death every day. It makes no sense.

But I can't deny that God answers my prayers. Three months ago I was so unhappy. I was waiting to go back to University after the end of a long relationship, I had exams to get back to and I didn't really feel any good at my degree, I had to start applying for jobs I didn't want to get. And if I'm honest; I was sceptical that my Church would be as good as it used to be when I got back. I pretty much had no reason or desire to go back to York. So I got on my knees, and I prayed. I prayed with nothing to lose, I pretty much said "I don't really care any more God, whatever you want". If you'd have told me where I'd be on 8th December I wouldn't have believed you. But God answers prayers. He changes things. As much as it confuses me, I can't deny it.

This three months has just taken my breath away how much God has worked in my life. He has totally healed my broken heart; I've been left with this overwhelming sense of joy. God is doing a 'new thing in me'. I'm doing really well in my degree and enjoying it. God is shaping something in me for this next year which is just exciting me so much even though I'm not 100% what it will look like. My Church is just brilliant; it is growing, it is bringing hope to people, even when I couldn't see past an inconvenient afternoon start in a school hall- God had different ideas. God feels closer to me now than he has been, maybe ever. I'm praying like a total nutter. I'm just pretty happy with who I am, where I am and what God is doing in me. That seemed impossible three months ago.

This pretty much sums up my last three months: "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland" God didn't ignore my prayer for help, he sent streams into the wasteland- he sent hope and life where there was none.

Why am I writing this? Just to gloat about how happy I am? Not really. But because I want you to know that God answers prayer. I see it in my life. I can't explain it, but I can see it. The best way I can understand prayer is that prayer changes my heart. It is an eye opener not a magic trick. I pray for God to deal with poverty in my city and then I start to notice the homeless guy at the end of my street. I pray that God would grow my Church and I start to learn how to be a better leader. I pray that God would win battles for me and he makes me stronger. That's the best way I can understand it; prayer is me getting in step with God, it is me learning to notice what he notices, see what he sees. It is being the answers to my own prayers. And I know that God has really changed my heart the more I've prayed.

I think prayer does work like that. But I still don't fully understand prayer. What about when I pray and stuff happens? What about when I pray for a friend who is ill and she is healed? That isn't just my heart that's changing; there's something changing in the physical world. Yet, I've prayed for people who have been healed by God. To be honest with you I struggle to really understand it. But I know that when I pray I increase in faith, I increase in trust and God starts to change my heart. So why wouldn't I pray?

I dare you to pray right now. Don't try and understand it or explain it. Just pray.

Sinnerman

A lot of the time I don’t want to stop sinning. Sometimes it seems to me a bit like there’s a bit of an arbitrary list of rules which I have to follow. And I enjoy sin; it’s much easier than living ‘the good life’. People tell me Jesus offers freedom from the law and freedom from sin. But I don’t really know what that means for me today. I can sympathise with the person that says “if Christ offers forgiveness for sin to anyone and everyone, since I quite enjoying sinning it would be much easier just to repent on my death bed than trying to not sin for my whole life”. Paul says that “the wages of sin are death”, but I’m ok, grace will cover me, I’m not planning to die for a while yet, so why should I stop sinning?

Unless I get the right perspective, this can be my response to sin. I don’t think this is really taking sin very seriously. I hear people talk about sin all the time, but I don’t always understand what they mean. What is sin? Why is it so serious? I’ve heard it defined as ‘selfishness’ or ‘turning away from God’. But why should I avoid it?

I used to think of sin a little bit like this: God made humanity with a list of rights and wrongs which he gave to them. If they chose the right ones they got to live with him forever, if they chose the wrong ones he had to judge them and find them guilty because he is a just God. It went for a long time that man tried to choose the good option, but always ended up choosing the bad one because it was easier, and felt better. Then God decided to sort this out by sending Jesus so that when we choose the bad option, Jesus takes our punishment if we accept it and now we can live with him forever. You might have heard it summarised like this: God loves you, you have sinned, Jesus died for you, what next?

But I’m not convinced that the gospel can be neatly summarised into four points, I don’t think this fully encapsulates what Jesus came to do and I’m not sure it takes sin seriously enough. It makes “the wages of sin are death” seem like an arbitrary choice that God decided to hold certain things against me, I find it difficult to really take sin seriously if this is all it is.

I’m not saying that I don’t think this is all true, but just that I don’t think that is a full enough definition of sin. It captures an important aspect of the seriousness of sin for our eternal destiny. The problem with this definition is not that it isn’t true, but that it focuses only on the eternal significance of sin and not on the seriousness of sin in the present; what difference it makes to my now. And the consequences of this are that if this is my account of sin, then my only account of the gospel is forgiveness of sins and life eternal. My perspective is all on eternity, all that really matters is that I ‘become a Christian’, that I make sure I say sorry when I ‘sin’ and then try and make others do the same. It is a faith focused only on the life to come and very little on the present. It makes sin quite difficult to grasp.

How do we make this kind of Christianity relevant to a generation of people who increasingly don’t believe in life after death? It’s not like we can scare people into Christianity just because they want to avoid hell when most people think that all that will happen after death is that they will rot into the earth. Why would people live by a set of “outdated and arbitrary rules” because a man with the placard tells them they will be judged and punished if they don’t? In order to really take sin seriously people need to see what difference it makes not only to their eternal destiny but to their life on earth. The wages of sin are death in the next life yes, but in this life also. Sin destroys families and relationships, it corrupts hearts. Sin is serious, but if we just ignore the seriousness of it in this life, we aren’t really taking it very seriously at all.

The reason that God tells us to avoid certain actions is because he knows that the consequences of them will be worse for us now. It will harm my character to sin; if I seek after lust I’ll struggle to love appropriately, if I seek after pride I’ll end up falling. The things that the bible talks about as sin are the things that are in my interest not to do. Sin damages us today. The problem is that this isn’t always obvious to us. We can’t ever understand the full consequences of what we do; we can’t see how our actions are destructive immediately. The difference is: God can. The reason it hurts God so much when we sin I don’t think is just because he decided what would be right or wrong and wants us to follow the rules, but that he knows what is best for us, what will make us complete.

The reason that sin is so destructive is because it destroys you. It’s not just that sins stops us from being close to God, but that it stops us being who we really are. Jesus offers real freedom in the present. Not just so we can do the right thing and ‘go to heaven’ but because we were made to live a certain way. Sinning is like using a coffee machine to make toast- it just wasn’t made for that, and it’s going to end up pretty messy if you keep trying. Sin is serious but taking sin seriously is being able to see the dangers of living the wrong way for our lives and for the people our actions effect.

If we start to get more of a perspective on sin we can see real change and real freedom today. This isn’t a list of arbitrary rules; these are the things that lead to death, that lead to destruction that will damage us. When we get this perspective the gospel isn’t just about the change to come but it’s also about the change available now- there’s another way to live and its better. Jesus can transform your character; he can bring freedom where there is entrapment, addiction, and obsession. If we look at sin not as a ‘rule’ which we ought to obey but as a divine foresight in your best interest then we can start to take sin more seriously. And when I get this perspective on it, I want to avoid sin, I want to live in the fullness that God has designed for me, I want to take him seriously.

Shine a Light

I think often we have this idea as Christians that people look at us and see in us something they want. That just being around us is enough to make them realise that we’re ‘distinctive’, that there’s something different about us that they want for their lives and then they become Christians. I’ve heard this idea preached about and talked about so many times. But honestly, I’m not sure how true it is. Firstly, it doesn’t obviously work; if it did then there wouldn’t be as many people that were close to us that weren’t Christians. Surely they would have ‘seen the light’ by now. But as far as I can see, I’ve got plenty of non-Christian friends who are quite happy with their lives, and don’t particularly want what I’ve got. They’re quite happy for me to believe what I believe but they don’t want it. Should my job be to convince them that they need to change?

Jesus says that we’re called to be ‘light of the world’, that we should be distinctive and shine goodness where there is darkness, to show people the glory of the kingdom of God. My worry is that we’ve not got something the world wants anymore. What does the world see in Christian living that it wants? Often I think it sees only frigid, self denying, uptight, sexually frustrated hypocrites. That’s not to say that this is always the case, I think that there are genuine ‘lights’ out there. But I’m not one of them. It’s a little ignorant of us to assume that if our friends were all a little more like us and believed what we did that they would be better off. I think if we have the idea that just by being a Christian we’re a ‘light’ into their lives, we’re mistaken. Of course it could be that the world just can’t realise how much it needs what we’ve got. I’ve often heard the idea that we’re somehow ‘deep down’ happier and more content in a way that a non-Christian can never be. But I know plenty of miserable, grumpy Christians and plenty of genuine contented non-Christians. So what is it that I’ve got that makes me so ‘distinctive’; that makes me ‘light in the darkness’?

God’s promise to Abraham and his descendents was:

“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

I think this still is the promise God makes to us today. That because of the blessings he pours on us, that we can be a blessing to this world. The Jews had something that everyone wanted; victory assured in battle, security from their enemies. Today I think the perception of Christianity is that it’s all about moderation and abstinence. We become Christians and believe in God so that we can ‘go to heaven’ when we die, then we live our lives not having sex until we’re married, not getting drunk, not swearing and living by a bunch of out dated moral rules. Basically having less fun than everyone else but not being much different other than that. I think it’s summed up quite well in a Laura Marling lyric: “I sold my soul to Jesus and since then I’ve had no fun”. Rather than looking at Christians and thinking that they’re missing out on something I think most people think that it’s us that are somehow missing out.

If we’re no different to our friends who don’t know Jesus, then this isn’t really surprising. If the difference is that I go to Church on a Sunday, read my bible every day, drink a little less and don’t have sex then I don’t think we really understand ‘distinctiveness’. This isn’t something that the world wants to pursue. And to be honest, I don’t really blame them. If this is the only difference, then how am I in a position to tell someone they should live differently? When Jesus is talking about Salt & Light, I don’t think this is what he meant. The light of the world is not watered down, easy comfortable Christian living. It isn’t living like everyone else with a ‘secret guide’ telling us how to do it better than everyone else. Sometimes we have the tendency to think that Christian living is about living how others live but with our own built in sat-nav telling us what to do next.

If we don’t start seeking real kingdom transformation in our lives then we’re in danger of losing all relevance to this generation of people who are happy with what they’ve got. How can we expect people to change, how can we expect that we will be a blessing if we’ve got nothing to give? The kingdom of God is not an ‘ad-on’ to our lives, an enhancement to what we’re already doing, it is radical transformation. It is denying yourself to seek God's kingdom. Until I can see transformation in my life, I don’t expect anyone to notice what I’ve got, and why should they?

I think the imagery of ‘light’ is quite significant in what Jesus says. If we spend all of our time in comfortable Christianity it’s no wonder we’re not particularly distinctive. Try lighting a candle and putting it outside in the middle of summer. That’s not distinctive. Being ‘light’ requires us to shine in darkness. If we don’t seek darkness, it’s pretty difficult to know how light we’re shining. The whole idea of ‘blessed to be a blessing’ is that we become real change seekers. Not waiting for people notice what we’ve got, but taking light to the darkness. We should become the people that say ‘it’s not right that there are people are sleeping on our streets while we’re sleeping in beds’, ‘it’s not right that people are being trafficked in our cities’, ‘it’s not right that people die of curable diseases every day’. I long to be more radical in my living, to really seek kingdom change, but at the moment I live shining comfortably in the light.

Think of the darkest place you know. The place where there is a real absence of God, where people are just longing for change but can’t get it. Be light there. That’s distinctive. I long to live like this, but honestly most of the time I’m either crippled by doubt or fear. But this is what I think distinctive living really looks like. I want the world to look at me and see a change seeker, a justice seeker, a blessing, a light. At the moment I don’t think it’s any wonder that people don’t want what I’ve got.

The idea that people see something in me that they want can be a real catalyst to laziness, a motivation to stop seeking kingdom change, and just living comfortably among people hoping that they will notice. This is not what I want for my life.

The man who knew too much

There’s always a bit of an awkward momentum when someone asks me what I do. There’s usually one of two responses to telling someone that you’re studying philosophy. Either people don’t really know what philosophy is; maybe they’ve heard of it, perhaps it rings a bell thanks to a famous duet from a singing meerkat and warthog: “it’s our problem free....philosophy”. And even when you explain to them that philosophy is all about studying ideas and asking difficult questions, or perhaps more pretentiously “the pursuit of truth and wisdom”, they still don’t really get it. Or, even more commonly they think it’s a bit of a pointless exercise. My brother for instance tells me that I’m doing a degree in ‘bull***t’. The other group of people understand what philosophy is, find philosophy really interesting, perhaps they’ve dabbled in a little part time philosophy and generally like to take the opportunity to have an interesting conversation with me. It’s fair to say I like meeting the second group of people a little more.

I remember once talking to a woman in my Church back home before I left to go to university. She asked me what I was going to be studying, so I told her. She told me that I should be careful; she’d known someone who went off to study philosophy and ended up coming back without believing in God. “Philosophy is dangerous”, she told me. Apparently there was a chance that I might suffer the same fate if I wasn’t careful. I found this quite amusing; as I saw it, Philosophy was the quest for the truth and if it turned out that Jesus wasn’t really the truth then I didn’t really want to believe in him.

I spent a lot of time in my first year trying to ‘seek the truth’, to get to the bottom of my belief. I doubted a lot and went through a similar process to Descartes of starting at the foundations of my beliefs and working out was actually ‘true’. I’ve got a lot of scraps of paper stashed away into my draw with flow charts of beliefs, I’ve got files on my computer titled “why I believe in God” and “can I really be a Christian?”. Honestly, its great fun, you should try it some time. But it’s not an easy ride. As I wrote in my blog last week, I would really struggle to believe anything very well at all if I hadn’t confronted my doubts, sought answers to my questions.

Needless to say, I’m now more than two years through my philosophy degree and it hasn’t really destroyed what I believe, the woman at my Church wasn’t completely right. But I am a very different Christian today than I was this time two years ago. I think about things very differently, I like to think that my faith is more reasonable than it was.

In a sense the woman was right; philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Before I came to university I was very much a Christian who ‘experienced’ God. I was the guy that would shake ferociously when people prayed for him, when I was meant to be playing keyboard in the worship band I would be so ‘lost in worship’ that my hands spent more time in the air than they did on the keyboard. I had ‘words’ and ‘pictures’ for people all the time, I spoke in tongues. I felt very ‘close’ to God. Some of the time, I’m still that person, but not very often. I’ve lost some of that experiential side of my faith since I’ve questioned it more. Instead of closing myself off and flailing my hands around when they play worship songs at Church, I find myself screening the songs for decent theology. Whenever someone gives me a ‘word’ from God, I am very doubtful that it didn’t come from their own head. It’s fair to say philosophy has changed me and my relationship with God.

It leaves me with two options. If philosophy is the seeking of the truth and some of my beliefs and my behaviour won’t stand up to the scrutiny of investigation then they’re irrational and I should abandon them. Or the other option is that my beliefs are the firm truth and philosophy is somehow defective in getting to the ‘real truth’. Honestly, I think there’s a bit of both going on.

I find it useful to think of a “pendulum of faith". There are two extremes of faith; we can be like I was pre-Philosopher; experiential, swayed by impulses and experiences. Our beliefs are built solely on experience and ‘closeness’ with God. The problem with this is, when our experiences fade, when we fail to be able to experience God like we used to, what is left is just a set of ungrounded, shallow beliefs. If we never take the time to investigate, to know what we believe intellectually, when experience fades (which it usually does), our faith goes with it. I think it’s also really difficult to know the difference between God speaking to us and what is just human ideas if we never take time to question. If every ‘word from God’ that I’ve ever heard is from God, if every spiritual instinct I’ve ever had was God talking to me, then I think God is probably in the business of contradicting himself an awful lot. And when the atheist philosopher comes knocking and tells you that your experiences can be explained psychologically, you are in trouble if you don’t know your faith very well. Like I said, philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Experiential faith is passionate, it feels ‘close’ to God, it can be exciting but ultimately it is without foundation, and often irrational. Because of this it pretty flimsy.

The other end of the pendulum is pure intellectualism. This is the kind of faith that any philosopher would be proud of, the kind of faith I was looking for when I started hacking away at my beliefs when I came to University. This kind of faith has a set of coherent beliefs; it questions everything and doesn’t believe until there are good reasons for belief. There are problems with this as well though. I think ultimately it is a failed project; we cannot ever have proof or certainty in God, we can’t ever have faith without doubting. We will never get to the kind of firm foundation I was looking for by purely intellectual investigation. Even if we do get to a place where we have some kind of ‘rational’ beliefs, God just becomes a ‘concept’, he is nothing more than a set of ideas. Intellectual faith can lack the passion, the drive, the closeness that experiential faith does. No one ever dies for a ‘concept’. I really don’t think that the philosophical concept of God is really in the business of changing the world. It can often just be a selfish pursuit for reasonableness.

I got to a point this summer where I knew that philosophy fell short of truth in some way. I cannot live my life for a ‘concept’ of God; I need to live my life in relationship with God in some way. Sometimes this involves believing things which don’t quite live up to the scrutiny of philosophical investigation. I think perhaps this is where philosophy falls short of truth. I can’t live my life for reason or intellectualism ultimately because I don’t really think it can change the world. But then I find that pure experientialism is blind and dangerous and I can never justify it from a philosophical perspective. So I’m seeking to find a happy medium in my life; to root out irrational false beliefs, to have a reasonable belief, but to seek God every day, to experience him intimately, to be in a relationship with him. It’s a very hard balance to strike.

If I lived for philosophy, for proofs and rationality then the woman from my Church would probably be right, I might stop believing in God. But ultimately I can’t live for philosophy, I think as much as I love to study it; it falls short of real meaning. I think philosophy seeks truth, and it has helped me to get rid of irrationality and falsity in my beliefs. At times it has stopped me worshipping God, stopped me being close to God. But ultimately I want to live for the truth, not for experience. At the same time I don’t think philosophy can really get me the whole way; it can tell me what the phenomenon of love is in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it can’t really explain why I feel it. It can explain away my experiences of the Holy Spirit in terms of psychology and social pressure, but it can’t explain how and why these experiences have shaped my life. Philosophy is limited to the facts, to the intellect of faith; and if this is the only grounds on which I believe, then the faith that I now have is irrational and wrong.

However, I do really believe that God exists, that Jesus is bringing about kingdom transformation today, but I cannot believe this by pure intellect alone. Reason falls short of real meaning and ultimately I cannot live for it. My life has meaning in Christ but I need much more than philosophy to achieve this. To me faith is all about finding the balance between believing with my mind; doubting and questioning but still seeking relationship with God in my heart, trying to be obedient to him even when I can’t explain everything. But then again there's always the chance that I'm just wrong....

I’d be interested to know if anyone else struggles with this, how you find the balance between intellect and experience. Looking forward to reading your comments.

No Doubt?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only Christian that ever doubts. Either, most Christians go along in life believing everything they say and never doubt, or they just don’t talk about it; they have their doubts but instead of voicing them, they just go on pretending. I felt very guilty for doubting my faith for a long time; I knew what I was supposed to believe, what words I was supposed to be singing, what the Bible teaches, but often I just didn’t believe it deep down. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in God and his plans for this earth, but this doesn’t mean I never doubt. Maybe I’m the only person that feels like this, or maybe there are people all around me struggling in doubt and feeling like they just can’t talk about it. I reckon doubt is something which is pretty important for our faith, but at the same time something which people are being very damaged by, because there doesn’t seem to be much room for it in ‘Christianity’. I just wish we talked about it more.

I’ve got a mate who lost his finger in an incident featuring a year eight music class and a very heavy door. When I first met him, I never really noticed he was a digit down but after getting to know the guy he became one of my close friends and eventually I noticed. We had a lot of late night chats about Jesus in our first year at university and one night we both agreed that we wanted to see more miracles happen. We found it really hard to believe the crazy stories about eyes growing back and blind people getting their sight back. So we decided if we could just see a few more miracles it would build our faith and we would doubt a lot less. So we started to pray for his finger. I remember a few times putting my hand over his slightly deformed stump and praying “in the name of Jesus, grow back finger!” For a while I would plead with God- “if you could just grow that finger back, I won’t ever be able to doubt you’re real”. But what do you know, it never happened; to this day I have a mate with a missing finger. After a few weeks, we stopped praying. I often wonder whether his finger growing back would really have made that much difference to my doubt.

I can see a lot of myself in the disciple Thomas. Thomas was one of Jesus’ best mates- a guy who watched him perform countless miracles; he had seen blind men healed, lame men walk, seen men come back from the dead. He might have even seen a mangled finger stump grow back. Thomas got to see more miracles in a few years than I could ever imagine seeing- I like to think that I would never doubt Jesus again if I was in Thomas’ position, but I’m not so sure.

After Jesus had been crucified, three days later he appeared risen from the dead to a woman called Mary, then later he visited some of the disciples. Thomas found out by word of mouth that Jesus had come back from the dead. I suspect that like me, Thomas really wanted to believe that this was true but he just couldn’t believe it- Thomas says in John 20:15 “unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were...I will not believe it”.

The philosopher in me really sympathises with Thomas; what he wants is reasonable evidence. He can’t force himself to believe something is true, without actually seeing it. I reckon I would have acted pretty similarly in the situation. Thomas’ request is a reasonable one, despite all the miracles he’s seen, he can’t make himself believe this remarkable thing, he can’t just ignore his doubts. It makes me wonder if seeing my mate’s finger grow back would really have kept doubt away for very long.

What I find interesting about this story is not so much Thomas’ doubt, but more Jesus’ response. I think often people see being a Christian as having blind faith- believing without really having much evidence. At least that’s the way the ‘new breed of atheism’ paints faith. But Jesus doesn’t refuse to meet Thomas until he believes, he doesn’t wait until Thomas’ doubt is fulfilled; he meets him where he’s at. He fulfils his desire for evidence. Jesus comes to see Thomas, scars and all and tells him to “stop doubting and believe”. Jesus really wants Thomas to believe but crucially he shows him the evidence first then he tells him to believe after.

I think that doubt is a really important part of believing. Jesus doesn’t want Thomas to have blind faith and I don’t think he wants us to have blind faith. If we don’t question what we believe, how do we ever know that we have the truth? If we aren’t open minded enough to doubt things then we end up believing things because we’ve been told them, rather than because there are any good reasons for believing them. That’s not the sort of faith I want to have, and I don’t think it’s the sort of faith that God asks of us.

It is only because I have doubted that God exists that I can really say that he exists, it is only because I doubted Jesus rose from the dead that I can honestly stand up and say that I believe he did. Doubt is shaping what I believe, for me doubt is what makes my faith active and it is what makes it real and if I couldn’t question what I believed I would just be pretending. I really believe that Jesus doesn’t want us to ignore our doubts- he wants us to engage with them, he wants to meet us where we’re at. Doubt is a healthy part of a living faith. But how can we ever do this if we never talk about doubt?

Even though Jesus satisfies Thomas’ doubt he also tells him to stop doubting and start believing. Ultimately, we can never have certainty in anything- not that the world we live in exists, that our friends actually have minds like ours, not that God exists. No amount of questioning or doubting will get us to certainty. If we end up just wrestling with doubt forever, and never accepting anything we can end up in a really difficult place. It’s pretty lonely, it feels miles away from God and it’s not very healthy. The best piece of advice I ever got about this was from an awesome German guy on a Church men’s weekend away. I was struggling to really experience God like I used to, my mind was just on overdrive being sceptical about other people meeting with God and at the same time longing for God to convince me to believe in him. So, during the worship time I just sat there pretty annoyed with God when this guy came up to me and told me quite abruptly: “don’t let your mind **** you”. You might have issues with that, and it might not have been the best way of wording it, but honestly it was exactly what I needed to hear, and I honestly think that God used his words to speak to me. He was right, I was at a place where my mind was destroying me, and doubt was destructive. Even though I know doubt can be healthy, it can equally be incredibly destroying. We really need to find this balance.

The real question is- why don’t we talk about doubt more? Why do we pretend we all believe with certainty all the time, when we don’t? Jesus doesn’t want us to hide our doubt away, to let it destroy us, he wants to meet us, he wants to satisfy our doubt and then he wants us to believe. I really think that he can do this if we let him. But then again maybe it’s just me; maybe I’m the only Christian that ever doubts anything.

Sometimes I've Been Sitting on Trains...

I spent a large part of my summer travelling round Europe on trains; it was a pretty brilliant thing to do. We would spend all day looking round some amazing places: the Collosseum, the canals of Venice, stunning lakes in Slovenia, the Berlin Wall, Prague Castle... And then after a couple of days we would just get on a train and make our way to the next city. But we probably spent as much time waiting as we did sightseeing. We waited for trains to arrive, got on them, waited hours for them to get into the next place, waited for the bus to the hostel and by the time we arrived we were so tired of waiting that we had to wait until the next morning to really see the city.

It’s easy enough to wait for a train when you know you’re going to be arriving at the Collosseum by the end of the day. But when the outcome is uncertain, it’s much harder just to wait. Going into my third year this term is a huge time of waiting for me, the end of my student days are in sight, and I don’t have a clue what the future holds; jobs, relationships, what city I will be living in, whether I’ll ever pay off my student loan. I just don’t know. It’s is a bit like waiting for a train and not knowing where I’m going to be getting off.

Jesus tells us: “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks the door will be opened. Which of you if his son asks for bread will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

We know that God won’t always give us what we want, but he is a generous Father; he will always give us what is best for us. Believing this and living this are two very different things; I am asking God to be in control of my future, but waiting for this is hard; it can be painful, and frustrating but we know that God will only give us good gifts if we ask him. And we often come out of this time of waiting more patient, more trusting and with great gifts from him- so if Jesus is right and God will give us good gifts when we ask him, then this is surely a train worth waiting for regardless of where it’s going. But part of waiting is all about trusting- we have to trust that God has it in his hands; Jesus says that he’s not just going to ignore your requests when you ask him, so if we really believe this, we need not just to wait but to trust.

What things are you waiting for? Are you asking God to be in control of that situation? I pray that God would make us more patient, more trusting and better waiters. Imagine the blessings when we get off the waiting train and see the gifts God wants to give to us! I know it will be worth it.