AboutLife

This must be the most over quoted interview on Christian blogs but I found bashing around my head as I was walking away from a conversation with a student just now. She was inches away from recomitting her life to God but just couldn't get the idea of Grace... She knew God was real and that he was to be obeyed and she knew that God cared that her life was not as it should be. "I have to get my life back on track" she said. A really noble sentiment.

Today is the 11th day of the 11th month... for the past 90 years this day has been a day when British people remember those who fell in the World Wars. I never find this a paticularly straightforward thing and this year is paticularly complex working in a very multi-cultural college.

I know I've blogged on this before but I keep coming back to this article.

It's an exegesis on 1 Peter about Christian interaction with the rest of the world and it's totally changed my view of mission. Trying to live this out in the college where I'm chaplain has been one of the most exilarating experiences of my life. Here's a short extract from the paper that's well worth reading the whole of...

The events of the Christian year "function as a sequence of well-aimed hammerblows which knock at the clay jars of the gods we want, the gods who reinforce our own pride and prejudice, until they fall away and reveal instead a very different god, a dangerous god, a subversive god, a god who comes to us like a blind beggar with wounds in his hands, a god who comes to us in wind and fire, in br

It doesn't happen much now but very occasionally I still get someone saying "So why do we need a chaplain in this day and age?"

To be honnest I think it's a good question. Oxford College Chaplains are part of the ruins of Christendom, a bygone age when everyone went to church every week and you could take it for granted that everyone wanted (or should want) to grow in their Christian Faith. Christianity was as essential as vitamins. The importance of maintianing Christian morality was talked about in the same sort of terms that practicing "safe-sex" is talked about to today's undergraduates: though I'm sure there are some who deviate, everyone sees the value of it, if only to avoid the potential doom that could befall those who don't.

I'm currently working in a college that is litterally across the road, metres, from the upper room where the Wesleys set up their Holiness Club... I'm even toying with the idea of reviving it as I have so little discipline myself and I'd love to have some more motivation to care about the poor. I'm paticularly struck by the 22 questions they used to ask themselves each day. I've paraphrased them below.

"I don't mind his music" the famous actress said last night about Daniel Beddingfield "I'm sure he's a very nice person, it's just that I can't help thinking that anyone whose a Christian and under 50 must be a tw*t"
It wasn't a comedy point - it was totally deadpan. She meant it. And I can't believe the TV companies put that stuff out. You'd never get away with it for anyother religion. So what should we do about it? Christians unite? Picket ITV and OFCOM and anyone else who'll listen? Well I don't know... but I'd like to throw something else into the pot, something we don't normally think about in relation to those outside the church: Meekness.

In packing up my books I found a scrap of paper I wrote years ago when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life… I knew I wanted to do something within the church. I had closed doors on a career in the civil service, but now there wasn’t an obvious way forward. It was the most difficult of all situations for me: when I didn’t have a plan to put my hope in. I found expression in a friend’s similar experience. It's not very profound but I like the energy and earthy realness (if you're not a charismatic please excuse the language!) 

“Later she [his wife] asked me what God had said to me, and I replied “Nothing”. God said nothing, and that’s OK because I’m starting to wrestle [to be conscious of] his presence again and I’m prepared to wait. And I feel like God is waiting to see if I am waiting. If he just flooded in with answers and guidance right now, I would not change; I would not learn to wait and trust him without the answers, and without a roadmap for the future. So I’m kind of glad that God is silent, because I actually want to wait; I want to prove my metal to God. I don’t necessarily want ease and an instant anything anymore.
I want to be different before I do anything different. So I’m waiting for God, and God is waiting for me, maybe to see if I’m really waiting for him and not just wanting things from him. And as God and I eyeball each other in this way, I feel good. I feel alive and engaged with what really matters… and I’m going to win this waiting game with God.”[1]

I learned today that the guy who played Hawk Eye in MASH is also a physicist. He was having a conversation with some other physics guy on radio 4. The other guy says “We’ve been demoted over history. We thought we were the centre of the universe, then we found out we were just a planet going around a star, then we thought our star was the centre of the universe. Then we found our star was just part of a galaxy so if we finally learn that our universe is just one of many other universes in the great bubble bath of universes then that would again show us that we’re just one tiny part of a grand landscape.”