If a son asks his father for a scorpion, does his father give it to him? How about if he asks for ice cream? What if he asks for ice cream… and then again… and again… and again? There’s a time for ice cream, but there’s also a time for going to bed, no?

There are some things that even repeated asking will not produce, no matter how resolute or plaintive such asking may be. I wish I was so savvy as to apply this logic in my own prayer life.

I am convinced that for each of us, God has a massive long list of things which he is simply longing for us to ask him for. Seriously, I imagine him shaking his head, “Why don’t you ask for this, because this I can actually give you!” I picture his pained expression as I determinedly plow through my laundry list of wants, none of which are even close. I suspect that a great many of the things I spend my prayer time asking for are things of the wrong sort – things that I happen to want but which are, in reality, closer to Ice Cream Before Bed (or even scorpions!) than to the necessities I believe them to be.

Every once in a while, I get brave enough to ask the question – “What if I stopped asking for the things I wanted and decided to seriously discover and pray for the things that God would like me to ask for?”

I have a sneaking suspicion that God answers in power when I pray, but that his exercise of power remains curiously stunted so long as I am committed to praying for things that just ain’t. gonna. happen. Odd, isn’t it? I can pray a very long time for God to change every circumstance and person around me. I’m well practiced at praying from a perspective where I am the center of all things. (“Dear God: Please restructure everything. Scott.”)

Of course, I’m also well practiced at sitting around and wondering where the power in my life is, asking why I am constantly falling short of the Victorious Christian Life (TM).

The answer, of course, is ridiculously simple. What I ought to be doing is finding out the sorts of things that God wants me to pray for, and start praying for those. Bring down the POWER!!! There’s only one wrinkle. I don’t want to pray for those kinds of things. I mean, seriously… I don’t want to. These are the things which are right at the heart of God but which are really really far away from the things that shiny and are distracting me right now.

These kinds of prayer items have a nasty tendency to stray into some pretty touchy areas, like the ugliness of my own sin or the pain of my own hurts. Worse still, into the ugliness of other people’s sins, whom I need to forgive – or the pain of their hurts, for which I need to ask forgiveness. The Holy Spirit came to lead us into all truth – but if the truth is that I need to change, do I really want to hear it?

Let me tell you – I get to thinking about a list of things I could be praying for, and I get rebellious and fearful. It’s a completely different reaction than my reaction to ordinary prayer – of wistfulness, regret, and pettiness. It’s a short trip for me, from “Lord, why are you not bringing The Power?” to “Lord, please not that power!” I’m not afraid of these things because I think they’re bad, I’m afraid of them because of those parts of me that are bad don’t like them. It’s like John says: my darkness doesn’t want to come to the light because the light will reveal it. It’s a scary thought: maybe I ought to be praying for things which I don’t want.

So here’s a list of things that I don’t pray for. I believe that if I ever did start praying for these things, my life would shift – I would start stumbling over opportunities to follow God in testing, challenging ways that would reveal God’s goodness, power, and action in this world. This list will be skewed, because my understanding of God’s heart is skewed, but it is a starting point.

• Show me someone whom you love but whom I am ignoring.
• Is there someone really unappealing whom it would delight you for me to serve?
  • God seems to really care about people who I loathe. The awkward and the socially incompatible and the immigrants and the distant rich. I get scared thinking about how much he loves them and how little I do.
  • Can you imagine how much joy God would feel if I finally started asking him to empower me to help those who he dearly loves and is longing for me to help? You’ve got to believe that if I started praying for this that the Holy Spirit would start stirring in tangible ways.
  • The inescapable irony is that if I ask God for a name of someone I don’t want to help, and he actually gives me a name… I won’t want to help them!
• Who would you like me to confess my unconfessed sin to?
  • A real person? It’s not fair to demand that of me! I mean, that’s in direct conflict with my people-pleasing and my fears of rejection!
• Which of my hopes and dreams do I need to let go? Will you show me which idols I am clinging to, even if they are near and dear to me?
• Please give me an opportunity to witness to ____
• Is there a free-will offering that I can offer which will really delight you?
• Is there a habit that you want me to be free from?

Like I said, I don’t pray for these things. This bothers me. I suspect that this is closely tied to a lack of fear of the LORD – an unwillingness to give him due and proper consideration in prayer, which you gotta figure is pretty near all consideration.

The above list is a negative list, but probably just because I’m a problem oriented thinker and I react instinctively to things that are Wrong and Must Be Fixed. There are positive things that God wants, which I don’t pray for either, for a variety of reasons. Maybe I’m being deceived into an unhealthy focus on the negative list. Here are some more things that I never pray for:

• Is there a way that I’m not being fed but in which you are willing and waiting to feed me?
• Is there a gift or a blessing that I should be seeking after?
• What fruit do you love to see the most when you look at my life?
• Which of my friends has done something special for me that you want me to offer thanksgiving for?
• Will you show me a way that I can strengthen the church this week?
• What relationship would you like to build and strengthen? How can I pray for your consecration and blessing of it? Will you give us a special care and compassion for one another?
• Is there a psalm I can pray (or sing) that will be especially pleasing to you?
• What act of worship will you really delight in right now?

I suspect that, having listed these, I will now have to Man Up, be obedient, and actually pray some of these. After all, doing things I don’t want to is a necessary part of growing up (which I was never particularly good at, but which I’ve always suspected I ought to do). In the meantime…

What don’t you pray for?

I don’t want to lie. Being me has considerable advantages. But it has some  challenges, too – like the way I learn Greek:

The Challenge

1) Sit down to learn Biblical Greek.
2)Wow – Mounce’s BBG has a lot of vocab!
3)Cool! Mounce has audio files for every single vocab word!
4)I should listen to Mounce say all the vocab so I can learn to pronounce them right – it will be easier to do this now, so I don’t make a mental association with incorrect pronunciations…
5)But the vocab is spread throughout all the lessons and it’s so slow clicking through all the web pages…
6)This will surely go quicker if I do things The Right Way…

Finding The Right Way

7)The files are all Quicktime…
8)Install Quicktime.
9)I should cache the audio-files locally… and I can maybe even convert them into .mp3 so I can play them in a playlist!
8)Open terminal ==> ‘man wget‘
9)Hmm… But I need to get the file locations from the links! Is this a job for regex?
10)Save the source for thirty web-pages for link extraction.
11)Oh no! The .html files only link to the individual html pages for each word – there are about 300 of them! Time to ramp it up… oh, IT’S ON.

Getting Ready for Battle

12)Is it finally time to learn BASH scripting or should I brush up on my Ruby? Let’s go with Ruby.
13)Which Ruby screen scraping library should I use to handle the html pages? (Google them) Scrubyt isn’t actively developed, should I use Nokogiri or Anemone? I think Nokogiri…
14) Oh wait… Ruby isn’t installed – what’s the current best practice for install on Ubuntu? It seems to be the Ruby Version Manager, but the Ubuntu packages don’t seem to work right. I should probably install RubyGems manually…
15)RVM install botches horribly.
16)Ok, we’ll just use the old ruby1.8 with Nokogiri then…
17)But I don’t have a good editor installed and I haven’t used one in about a year – I wonder which is top of the hill? (Research Netbeans & Eclipse) Hmm… they’re chunky! (Install Geany and Redcar and jruby)
18)Hey, I’m almost ready to start playing around with editors and finding which one I like better… And after this I can figure out how to use Nokogiri! Isn’t Biblical Greek fun?

Battle is Joined

19)Spend three hours writing program that uses nokogiri
20)Finally! Downloading the .mov files…
21)Discover that running wget through Ruby means the downloaded files are incomplete
22)Change the program to generate command line scripts
23)Think about manually running 30 command line scripts. Oh Goody! I get to brush up on bash scripting after all.
24)Google “Parameter Extensions” and remind myself how a bash “for loop” works.
25)End up using ‘find’ to concatenate all the files into a single script.
26)Download the .mov files.

Cleaning up the Battlefield

27) No, really, that’s about it… All that’s needed now is to write my bash scripts to convert all the .mov to .mp3 (after installing the proper codecs, of course) and to generate the .m3u playlist files so I can play all the vocabulary for a given chapter.
28)But I guess once that’s done, I can fire up Audacity and record myself reciting all the words after Mounce – this way I can make my own .mp3s with my own voice, using correct pronunciation *and* Fwith the definitions – so it will make it easier to memorize! Also I can share those
29)But I don’t know about that… that might be a bit of a distraction from the task at hand…

Isn’t learning Biblical Greek Fun?

Addendum

30)As with anything in our modern scientific world, if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen… Laboratory rule #1. The last step is, obviously, to write the blog post!

UPDATE: It turns out that downloading via manual wget scripts or even single wget commands clips off the ends of some of the QuickTime files. Weird. The same thing happens if you update your Nokogiri scraping program to generate ‘curl’ download scripts as well. Even if you open them in Firefox and ‘Save As’ you will get clipped versions of the files

But they play all right on the website… Maybe I’ll just use that

This morning I’m in Kamloops.

I only have a motel room here for a few hours, so I’m not long in Kamloops, but I’m here for now.

Every time I come here, sailing down through the bald dry hills of Barriere, I think, “What a marvelous place to hide.” To me, it feels distant. Wild, remote… yet comfortable. The kind of place where nothing big or turbulent happens; just an isolated little spot in the interior, buffered from the churn and bustle of Big Places.

I think, “I should work hard and make a lot of money and come here to live. I could marry a nice Barriere girl and work odd jobs and be at peace and comfort, tucked safely away behind the hills. Let life be lazy, let it be slow, and let me rest in it.”

Jesus tells a story about a rich man who did exactly that: he carved out a little niche of comfort for himself and made sure that he had enough to carry him through to the end of his life.

But the end of his life was that very night; God looked down and said, “You fool.”

God will go to necessary lengths to teach us necessary truth. It’s part of his compassion. It’s a necessary truth that we can’t trust in our own control and that we can’t build our own security. For we Canadians, who live comfortably in a wealthy country, the illusion is powerful. But the truth is that we need to find our security elsewhere, wherever we are.

The psalmist writes,
You are my hiding place and my shield; I wait for your word. — Psalm 119:114

I should leave Kamloops soon; the road is not growing shorter while I sit at a motel desk.

Boy oh boy, If putting something on a bookmark could make it real, no Christian would ever be tired! How often have I seen this particular gem on a fridge magnet?

Sadly, what no motivational bookmark ever bothered to point out to me is that this verse is a conditional. It describes a dynamic that exists for those who hope in the Lord. It was only recently when I was thinking about the kinds of things that I hope in, when it occured to me that the “hope in the Lord” bit might actually make a difference.

Actually, what struck me most of all was how incredibly destructive false hopes are. We all have them. You know what yours are. Here are some of mine:

• I hope all the barriers to my project at work will spontaneously vanish.
• I hope the girl of my dreams will walk up to me and pour out her undying love for me.
• I hope my boss will give me a big bonus, “just because”.
• I hope I will pass my second driving road test without having to practice my parking.
• I hope that stupid thing I did will just not have happened so I don’t have to say, “I’m sorry.”

Honestly, wouldn’t all these be fantastic? Hey, they are all fantastic – pure fantasy. (They also all involve no work on my part. Hmmm, I wonder what’s behind that…) Basically there’s a huge part of me that just wants to sit and be showered by love, wealth, comfort, prestige and fortune, without no action required from me.

The only problem is… these hopes are false. They’re not going to happen. As pleasant as it is to sit and dream about how nice things would be if they did happen, they won’t. But they’re more than just fantastic.

They’re draining.

Can I tell you what it does to my gut when my project is weeks past deadline because I was busy hoping that barriers would disappear when I should have been taking action? I don’t think I want to. But it makes me feel tired at the end of the day.

Or how it feels to be at loose ends in a lonely house, eying the telephone and wanting her to call, even though there’s no chance of it happening, because you never broke the ice? Now there’s a mean brand of neurosis not worth sharing. I’ve never seen *that* on a Christian bookmark. It’s not particuarly invigorating.

How about the boundless joys of not apologizing, and the day you realize that people are far away because you’ve been pushing them away with your own pride?

It might be most apt to say that things like these are little pockets of death that creep into my life.

Neil Anderson talks about desires and goals; things we want and things we set out to get. He talks about choosing wisely the things we set out to get, because if ever they are unattainable (“blocked goals”) we get angry, frustrated, disappointed, crushed, worn out, jaded… We shouldn’t bank on things we don’t control, on things which hinge on other people’s choices and actions.

Wanting what we can’t have is a tiring business, and picking our hopes has a massive part to play in how much bounce we keep in our bungee.

I feel a little bad because this post comes entirely from a negative direction – talking about false hopes, things I need to be rid of, little bits of death, things that drain me.

But in some way, highlighting these things is encouraging, like a trudging man looking down and seeing for the first time a ball and chain binding his ankles, and asking “How can I be free of this?”

It’s once we start seriously asking God, “How can I be free of this?” and listening to his response that things become exciting and invigorating.

But this blog unveils a very small piece of the story. The cold stats of my postings testify to an intense, almost manic level of reflection through Lent. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought so much or churned out so much text in so short a period.

Then Easter came. Since my last posting on Maundy Thursday, I have been bombarded with such a flurry of happenings, incidents, and episodes that blogging has been utterly cast aside. I am seeing the hand of God at work in the real world, in my life and in the lives of others. (It’s terrifying! )

This is, I think, a landmark time for me. It is, I pray, a new spring. A fresh spring and the culmination of many seasons of dormancy.

I’m an intensely proud person. I’d rather give a diatribe than hear one. I’d rather write a post than read one. I’d rather speak than listen. And I never, ever, ever ask for help if I can ever help it. So here I’m asking!

Please pray for me. I feel like this is a crucial time. It’s a time when I may come under spiritual attack. It’s a time when I need to humble myself and ask for the prayers of those who know me and love me.

I don’t know what you should pray – can I ask you to ask God? Just pray and ask him, “What should I pray?” and then pay attention to the thought or picture or idea that comes to mind.

Thank you. I’m grateful for every one of you. The fact that anyone has *ever* visited this blog is a source of joy to me. So to my Mom and my Dad and my sister Janet and my brother Tim and my Aunt Lila and my cousin Carla and all my friends – Aliana, Alyssa, Shaun, Brad, Trish, Chris, Corey, Elly, Mark, Joe, John – and everyone else who I can’t name: I love you very much and I thank God for you.

Disclaimers Because I’m Posting Real Personal Stuff On the Internet

If you’re a random internet stranger who browses your way to this post, well, just know that God loves you, and he wants me to love you too, even if I don’t yet . (Yeah, this is a weird post and if you browse the archives of this blog you’ll see that most other posts are totally unlike this. They tend to be uptight and analytical – generalized and abstract and very very… safe)

And if you’re someone who finds this post 25 years in the future (because nothing on the internet ever really goes away) – if you’re one of my kids that I don’t have yet – if I’m a public figure and you’re trying to dig up dirt on me – if I’m ever accidentally famous and you’re a curious internet surfer- please remember that we are made to live in the here and now.  The author of this post is dead and gone. But – there is a man, of the author’s likeness, bearing his memories and living in your world, your time and place. Seek out the living man and not the dead.

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 3

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

For this step, I’m going to examine the assumptions hidden inside – the claims  about who God is, and who we are.

Made a decision

This step means believing:

• We can decide!
• We can choose things!
• We are not animals driven by instinct and urges!

If we have been led to believe that we are a product strictly of our genetics and our culture and our brain chemistry – then taking this step will not deliver us from badness. Genetics and culture and brain chemistry will have to deliver us from badness, because that is all there is. To stop taking a drug, we’ll probably have to start taking another drug. We may struggle to make a cosmic case as to why the one drug is better than the other.

This step demands a belief in something more than a natural world of cause and effect. This step demands a belief in decisions as real things.

Decisions are real things; we can make them; We have the power to make real decisions.

to turn our will and our lives over

• We have a will!
• We have lives!

Our will is that thing we have which enables us to make real decisions. Our decision making center, it is above and beyond natural cause and effect. The Step 3 universe is not built out of a complex web of fated dominoes sprinkled with random chance.

Another belief - we can turn it over. I’ll admit, I’m not sure of all the implications of saying “I can turn my will over to… “. At the very least it means there is a thing outside myself which is able to receive my will. And another hidden belief - I won’t die if I turn my will over!

(It’s valid to say this is an assumption of any of the steps – “Following this step will not cause you to die.” Just as it’s fair to say that another assumption of any of the steps is “Following this step will help you escape from the badness.”)

over to the care of God

More claims about the nature of God!

• God is able(powerful and willing) to receive my will and my life (without me dying).
• God is greater than my will. (else how could he receive it?)
• God is greater than my life. (else how could he care for them?)
• God is willing to care for my will and life – he will not refuse my turning over.

The use of the word care is special. We can’t use the word care about everything. Rocks don’t care. Gravity doesn’t care. This is an emotional word. And God cares. God takes care.

In order to take care of our lives and wills, God must be able to prevent certain bad things from happening (e.g we die) and ensure that certain good things keep happening (e.g. we keep living).

So to follow this step, we accept that God has the concept of good things and of bad things. (Otherwise how could he know which stuff to stop and which stuff to perpetuate?)

Mind you, we already knew that back in step 2, because if God is restoring us to goodness, he must necessarily have the concept of goodness. The assumption in Step 2 is that sanity is good, otherwise we wouldn’t be taking the step.

as we understood him

Now here is a controversial statement. This is what is most likely to make someone look at the 12 steps and say, “Look, they’re not Christian.”

But this far into the steps, “God as we understood him” is not a completely open concept.

If we have walked to Step 3, we have already accepted these things about God:

• He is greater than we are
• He is greater than our life
• He is greater than our will
• He is sane
• He is external to us
• He is powerful enough to restore us to goodness
• His nature does not preclude us from restoring us to goodness – he is, in some case, willing
• He can receive control of our will and our life
• He cares
• He has a concept of good and bad
• It matters that we believe in his existence
• He does not change his nature (at least in the time it takes to restore us to goodness)

Wow!

Given the picture the steps present of God and of us, it’s clear that a faithful follower of the steps is bound to certain views. I am not a God (I am powerless; I must turn over to God). I am not a meatsack (I have a will). I’m sure there are more worldview premises that can be dragged out from the steps thus far, but I think these are a good starting point.

There is another massive belief in the clause, “as we understood him”. It assumes we can hold an understanding of God that is serviceable enough to deliver us (practically, tangibly, presently- not just abstractly) from badness.

Not a perfect understanding of God… But an understanding of God that is at least powerful enough to turn our lives completely around.

Perhaps the greatest gem of this step is that we don’t have to understand God perfectly in order to trust him with our lives and wills. But it’s terribly important that we believe.

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 2

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

I love the 12 steps because they’re so terse; every word adds a critical stone to their foundation. Let’s look at the phrases in this step.

Step one left us mired in a badness we were powerless against, by our very nature. Step two outlines a way out.

Came to believe

Why came to believe? Why not, “Believed”, full stop? There’s big wisdom here because there is a journey in believing. Although we can profess anything, we can’t just flip a switch and change our belief.

And why believe? Why should believing have anything to do with addiction or powerlessness?

If a Power exists, it exists. If it doesn’t,  it doesn’t.  What does our believing matter? What does it say about “a Power” that we are required to believe in it if we want to stop drinking?

a Power greater than ourselves

Greater means better. It means more good – in this case, more powerful.

could

What are the implications of could? The first implication is that the Power is powerful enough to restore sanity. This means a lot!

Does an insane power restore sanity, or does a sane one? When we say a Power could restore sanity, we are saying that the Power is sane; that we choose to believe in a sane Power.

Saying, “could” also implies there is nothing in the nature of the Power that prevents it from restoring. Conditions may apply, but it is possible. It is able to. There’s a distinction here.

Picture in your mind an Olympic swimmer who wakes up one morning, and finds that he is suddenly terrified of water. He is powerful enough to win the race – he has trained hard enough, has enough strength – but he cannot. He stands at the side of the pool, bone dry yet shivering, because something in his nature is holding him back. He is powerful enough, but he is unable.

Saying could means that circumstances exist in which the Power is willing (if it has a will) to restore.

restore us to sanity

There is a potent claim here - I am insane. It means that I, in the life I am living now, do not perceive the world as it really is. Insanity means interacting with the world in a way that is not based on the truth of things.

This is an admission that I hold to and live in a false reality.

There is another claim, hidden in the word restore.  The assumption is that there was a time when I was not this way. It means that before the badness caught me, I was sane. I was truly well and I can again be so.

This means there is a goodness. There is a good life, to which we can be restored. If you do not believe in a previous goodness, restoration has no meaning for you. We don’t restore things to rubble, corrosion and chaos. We restore things back to the beautiful things they once were.  The opposite of restoration is destruction and vandalism.

As with the first step, we don’t need to be saved from abstract insanity or generic insanity or from someone else’s insanity.

I need to be restored from my insanity, the badness that I suffer from.

Came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

It should not be surprising that when we look at the language of the step, it’s presuppositions and assumptions all carve out the nature of “a Power” that is the nature of God as the Bible describes him.

This step is talking about the Christian God; it is Biblically derived. These are not my opinions – these are historical facts. The AA program grew out of the Oxford Group, which based its principles on the Bible.

This step has stripped its language about the Christian God down to the most general, most concise statement needed to fight alcoholism.  Yet the Christian God he remains.

The “Christian God” is the God that Jesus Christ believed in. The picture of “a Power” described in this step – a sane, willing, capable power that has control over the goodness of life – is exactly the picture that Jesus had of his Father.

And the picture of the world – the badness, the insanity, the unmanageability and the powerlessness – is exactly the picture that Jesus had of the world.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. — Matthew 9:36 (NIV)

The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach  good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” — Luke 4: 17-21

They form a remarkably practical, powerful presentation of the Christian Gospel which is gloriously free from Church language and culture. They are simple to understand, difficult to follow and they hold a massive treasure. The greatest testimony to their worth is that they have proven themselves in the lives of many.

Step 1 – “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

The first step starts with an assumption – there is such a thing as badness and we are caught in it.

There are two bold claims in this Step that point to the source of our suffering.

1. We are powerless.
2. Our lives have become unmanageable.

These two claims seem to fly in the face of most everything we are taught growing up. We’re taught to work hard (a good thing), achieve much (another good thing), and be as powerful as we can be. We are taught to be in control; to be the kings of our own world.

This step counters:  ”We are caught in badness and we cannot get out.”

The Bible says we are slaves to sin and death: caught, enslaved, and powerless. The Biblical picture is not that we have merely failed to be hardworking, diligent and upstanding. It is not that we’ve just doing a bad job of upholding our childhood teaching.

We have failed and we are doing a bad job, but the Biblical message, and the supposition of this step,  is that our failure is innate, inevitable and chronic, because it comes from who we are. This is our  powerlessness.

The first step is to STOP. Stop denying these forces exist. Stop trying to cope; stop trying to manage. Stop holding on to a false image of power that keeps us from receiving a true understanding of what power is, how it works, and where it comes from.

We shouldn’t think abstractly about this. This is not a theological premise but the very present reality of our own situation. The step does not say, “I am subject to an abstract master.” No. I am subject to alcohol. Specific. Tangible.

If we’re interested in mind games, this step will not help.

If we are serious about changing our real lives,  we must looking at what is causing us misery.  We won’t address alcohol problems by talking about general problems of sin and suffering.  We must address our problems with alcohol.

There is a massive assumption in this step. This step assumes, in life, there is goodness and it assumes there is badness. It assumes that goodness and badness are knowable.  In order to take this step, we have to first know that those things which alcohol is bringing into are lives are bad. They are a problem.

We have a problem. That we can’t solve.

A leaky roof is always leaky; its real state (the truth of it) never changes. But the experience changes on a daily basis and is entirely dependent on the weather.

God’s purpose for us is that we be made whole. Unfortunately I often have that leaky roof relationship with God – when I feel fine I don’t have a problem, do I? The difficulty with running on feeling is that it flops up and down. It suffers delays; often it takes a long pattern of behaviour before the full force of feeling follows. Often it takes a long pattern of behaviour reversal before feelings are finally reversed.

One of the things that confounds me and trips me up on a daily basis is that it’s easy to know how I feel in a given moment (it’s a simple gut check :- ) but truth is not necessarily so apparent. One of the daily struggles of the Christian faith for me is to constantly remind myself that I have to seek the truth.

Of course, this is in no way an exclusively Christian dilemma – how many parents have told their children,

“You don’t feel like it? Do it anyway.”