I haven't posted a blog for ages. I want to write on the theme of hope. Not hope as the world knows it but as God knows it and which he breathes into us through his Spirit.

My recent feelings of displacement are I guess probably a wider reflection of where I am currently, feeling detached from certain things. It's a funny old time that I am going through - good in a way because I feel God more than ever and feel His love so strongly but also aware that I have very little to rely on as an absolute apart from God and very little to dive into that can offer any sort of instantaneous relief.

I am currently living in Oxford for work and am flirting between starting to go to church here (at St Aldates) and continuing at St Marks Tollington and this displacement, having feet in both cities, has caused me to feel unsettled. Because for years living in town, I was able to call upon a plethora of friends and always had things to do, based around the church/pastorate/home group triumvirate that included parties, BBQs and countless weekends away. Those times, whenever I look back now, seem to be a riot of laughter, community, sharing and growth that merge together into a haze of joyfulness, fostering as they did a real sense of love between a close-knit band of brothers and sisters in Christ.

The HTB pastorate system at its best acts as a life-support system within a city of screaming secularism and the pastorate that I was in was just that, living waters to so many of us, led by a man who knew precisely what to do and say at any given moment in order to give us all the nourishment and encouragement that we needed.

But in Oxford, I have been stripped of a lot of my natural outer exuberance and confidence and forced to go deeper with Jesus. It's been an enforced deepening but a time of real growth, spending more time on my own than I have ever had before in my adult life. A desert period then but with real water on offer that is quenching my lifelong thirst to be loved, affirmed and told that I am needed. At the end of the day, only Jesus can fully quench this need and I have cried out to him and he has come and met me.

You see, for many years, I had this desire to know that I could contribute in some way. But until this spring, this desire drove me to much of what I did and said, ‘mind-talk' operating that never allowed me to fully rest in Jesus.

And although I have always been a realistic dreamer who never fails to see the possibility in anything and everything (if I am being honest, there is nothing, NOTHING, that we cannot achieve if we put our mind to it - nine times out of ten, if you go for something with both your heart and soul, you will get it - and life is there to be grasped and to be cherished, every single moment of it) the need to be affirmed was also very much a driving force and which I never fully acknowledged until this year.

But largely through my life coach and chatting to one or two buddies who know me perhaps better than I know myself, I realise just how debilitating it was. This had to change and it has done so. I wrote this prayer for whenever I felt this but also to speak out at the start and end of everyday:

‘Jesus, let me go deeper with you, let me see your face more and more every waking moment of my day, let me feel, touch and hear you and let me grow in you.

‘Daddy, give me a peace whenever I get anxious, give me complete rest whenever I am tired, give me space and solitude whenever the business of the world threatens to overwhelm me and give me your Spirit. Flood my heart, mind and body with you, all you and just you.

‘Let me see you as my alpha and omega, let me always run to you firstly when I am lonely and let your dreams, desires and wishes be my dreams, desires and wishes.'

That was my prayer earlier this year and it is still my main prayer.

I know just how incredible it is to be born. To be on this planet, to have life, a body, a mind, so much that so many don't have as well in other parts of the world - laughter, food, warm beds, friends, families, books, films, music, opportunities, all given to us by God. He is amazing, he wants the very best for us, and everything in our life is a perfect gift from him. But while these things are gifts from God as tokens of his love for us, they are mere trifles compared with the greatest prize on offer, a relationship with God, and for a while I had got the order the wrong way round.

My friends are a huge part of my life. Still. They bless me inordinately in so many ways. But in my solitude, I am slowly discovering a newfound freedom that has allowed me to fly like an eagle and with the knowledge that God is in me and that I am safe.

Hope, Part Two to follow…