I'm in the belly!

A few weeks ago now (sorry for my slowness!) I wrote a little bit about Jonah (Why why Jonah why?)  and I thought I would share about my main encouragement I got from the weekend learning about Jonah.

"The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head.  To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever" Jonah 2v5-6  

Here Jonah is literally at the lowest of the low - I mean he is saying these words from inside a fishes gut!  He had  been as far from God as he could have been.  Jonah actually tries to flee from God.  

But then Jonah prays to God and says these words:

"When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple." Jonah 2v7

Now I had never really thought about the 'in the belly' bit of Jonah before.  I am so used to seeing children's picture bible story books on it where you see Jonah in slightly ripped clothes sitting in what looks like quite a pleasant warm comfortable pink bouncy castle.  I even remember seeing one image where Jonah was sat on a wooden chair inside the belly!! (All the images to the right are ones I found on google which I thought were the funniest bad ones!)

Thing is that is totally not what the case would have been - Jonah was inside a fish for 3 whole days.  It would have been dark, rank, disgusting and very stinky!  He would have been surrounded by and sat amongst bits of dead fish and sea debris.  Absolutely AWFUL!

Jonah had seriously reached the pits - the lowest of the low!  Things couldn't really have got any worse

Yet what we read next in the bible is surprising (well I found it surprising anyway!) 

"But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you."  Jonah 2v9

Jonah is still in the belly here but he is filled with a deep sense of joy.  That seems crazy - how can you be deeply and genuinely joyful when you are sitting amongst caucuses in a fishes belly, serious?!?  Jonah is so filled with joy that he is shouting grateful praise.

This is pretty hard to understand - how can someone in such a rank situation with what seems like nothing to be thankful for be filled with such joy?  He has joy that can only come from God.  Such a deep and solid joy that is not dependant on circumstances, emotions or us, but on God and what He has done for us.

And to be honest I really feel as though I am in the belly.  My situation feels pretty rank. Life is hard, tough and painful.  And its been a lot longer than 3 days (1302 days on crutches so far!)

Even when Jonah was in the middle of a fish in the depth of the sea and called out to God, God heard him.  God didn't ignore Jonah but God did not make the fish spit Jonah up straight away - He waited 3 days.  I don't know why He waited 3 days, but He did and He was in control the whole time.

Yet it was inside the belly that Jonah was so joyful - he wasn't miserable and then once God had rescued him and taken him out of the nasty situation then joyful and thankful.

It is the same for me - life is so tough and hard and painful yet I am not miserable - I am joyful.  I often feel like giving up and like I want to cry, I often feel sad, but I am still joyful.  Jonah called out to God from the deep and God heard him and listened.  I can cry out to God whilst I am feeling rubbish and he hears me and listens to me and is filling me with His joy day after day.

My Testimony

Two years ago today, on January 9th 2011 I got baptised.  It was a very special day when I was able to reflect back on just how much God has done in my life and just how far He has brought me and I was able to give Him the glory for that.  I thought I would share my testimony on here.

I was very blessed to be born into a loving Christian family who always taught me the wonderful truths of the gospel.  I was also very blessed to be brought up in the Beeston Free church family going to all the kids groups.  They were all fantastic at having the gospel message at the centre of them and so I always knew that Jesus had died on the cross to save my sins but yet I never really bothered to act on it.  I always got taught at Sunday school that coming to church didn’t make you a Christian yet somehow I never really related that to me.  I would always have called myself a Christian and sitting in Sunday school I may have appeared like one on the outside – I always knew the answers and I never doubted that any of it was true, but I suppose that was all Jesus meant to me – a nice story that we could read before bed and hear about on Sundays.

It was before I started the youth group when I was in Discoverers that I realised that actually God needed to mean more to me than just this friendly nice story.  There was a small amount of time when I’d just started secondary school when if someone asked me if I was a Christian my answer would be, well I believe the bible is true and I go to church but I don’t want to call myself a Christian. 

It was when I started the youth group that God really put these things on my heart.  We did some much deeper bible study and that really helped me to start taking God much more seriously.  We did a bible study one evening on Mark 13 and we got to the section about the day and hour unknown.  We were talking about whether or not we would be ready for Jesus’s return.  I distinctly remember one of the leaders looking up and saying, just because Jesus made these promises 2000 years ago does it mean they are old and outdated?  Of course not, it just means that we are 2000 years nearer to it happening.  Something just clicked that night and I realised that even though Jesus had done everything for me and it was all there waiting I hadn’t yet accepted it.  I had gradually realised that I was a sinner but had never really thought about asking for forgiveness and so that night I gave my life to Christ.  God had finally made me realise that He was coming back again and as a judge and when He did I wasn’t ready.

I had learnt that God gave the ultimate sacrifice – His one and only son.  He had given up everything, taken all my sin onto Him.  I didn’t have to do anything. It was all down to God and all by what He had done.  I deserve death but I have a merciful and completely loving heavenly father who is compassionate to me and I wanted to have a personal relationship with Him.

I am very blessed to be able to go to contagious (a Christian camp) every year where we get a week of solid bible teaching which is so helpful, encouraging and uplifting.  Two years ago (well, 4 now...) we had a talk on the lullabies of this world and just how easy as a young Christian it is to give up on it all and to turn our backs on God and to go back to a worldly and sinful  way of living.  God really spoke to me in this talk and I was very moved by it.  It was then that I decided that this is my new life now in Christ and I was not going to let myself slip away from it.  I wanted to make a commitment to God and wanted to show everyone else my commitment to God and my love for Jesus - I love Jesus so much and am striving in my life to serve him but I am still a sinner and still regularly muck up.  This is when I decided I wanted to get baptised.

Unfortunately I had just got on crutches at that time and so decided it would make sense just to wait the few weeks until I was off them... only that never really happened.  Although I do not know when I will be pain free and walking and how long that will be God still continually blesses me so, so, SO much and one thing I can be certain of is that one day I will be dancing with my loving saviour pain free in heaven forever.

Why why Jonah why?

Quite a while ago now (this post has got lost to the back of my drafts and I have only just spotted it...) my youth group went on a weekend away where we looked at Jonah.  It is a book of the bible that I thought I knew everything there was to know about it - its one of those Sunday School stories.  I couldn't have been more wrong though!  There was so much I had never even thought about before and it was brilliant.  I learnt so much and came away feeling challenged, encouraged and uplifted.

The theme of the weekend was God is Gracious, slow to anger and quick in mercy.  What a big and great theme it was!

It was amazing to see how God used Jonah and how God did not let a stubborn, scared man thwart His perfect plan.  It was also amazing to see God's faithfulness even though Jonah had outright turned away and ran away from God, God was still merciful enough to save him from death and God still wanted to not only save him from death but still use Jonah to take His word to the Ninevites.

I found such encouragement in this - the fact that whatever I do, however much I muck up, however far I flee from God I am unable to thwart his plan - what a comfort to have a God with an untwartable plan (might have made that word up!)  What a relief to know that it does not depend on me, but wholly and solely depends on our wonderful creator. Phew!

It was also at this weekend that I first noticed the lines of Amazing Grace - 'When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun.  We've no less days to sing God's praise than the hour we first begun!'  Wow what a great view of Heaven and eternity of Heaven - I want to go there so much - I want to praise God for 10,000 years and have not a single day less left to praise Him.  I actually wrote about this in a different blog post which you can find here.

I am hoping to post very soon about the main encouragement I got from Jonah... Keep your eyes peeled!

Little glimpses of Heaven

I had the joy of being able to go to the big church night in last weekend with some friends, where Rend Collective and Matt Redman were playing and it was brilliant.  We were able to spend an evening in a church packed with people all just wanting to worship God and sing his praises.  At one point Matt said that this was a glimpse of what Heaven is going to be like and I couldn't agree more.... One big difference - I was in agony that evening, and although I loved it I spent most of the evening trying to keep the tears away and I just couldn't ignore the pain.  That will not be the case in Heaven!

Every single day without fail I see little glimpses of Heaven.  Those things bring me so much joy and the fact that I know I will be experiencing them pain free excites me SO so much.  That added to the fact that these are only glimpses and that in Heaven we will see Jesus face to face - mind officially blown!

Even on the insanely tough days where everything hurts and everything seems to go wrong I can still see many glimpses of Heaven and these are what keep me going.  Whether thats praying with a friend, meeting together at church, reading a bible passage I have read so many times before but realising I have always missed an exciting truth from it or just spending some time with God.  All of it (and SO much more) points us towards Heaven and can keep us keeping on, knowing that our home is there ready and waiting for us.

Blessed be your name!

Job says these very famous words “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

What is incredible is that he says these after suffering great calamity.  In one foul swoop his children have died, his land, house and animals have all been destroyed too.  It seems like everything Job once had has been taken away from him yet he can still say the incredible words 'Blessed be the name of the Lord'.

As if that wasn't enough he is then afflicted with agonizing sores from head to toe.  At this point his wife comes along and says "Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9) And I mean can we blame her?  God has taken away everything that Job owned and loved, including his health.  At this point Job must have been feeling awful.  He sits in the ash heap and scrapes himself with a piece of broken pottery he is in that much pain.  He must also have been feeling the sorrow of losing his children.  Plus he was once a rich well respected man but now had nothing left - I don't think insurance existed in bible times.  But Job's response is staggering - “You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)

I can tell you now that that would not be my response.  I think that reading these chapters really highlighted just how self centred I can be.  How easy I found it to presume that God owes me something, that I deserve better.  That is so not the case!  I also think that I am almost lulled into a sense that when 'the world treats you badly' you have every right to be angry back at it.  The thing is that so often we have the idea in our heads that God owes us something, or everything in fact but the truth is God has already given us everything when we were owed nothing.  

I think that we need to start focusing on the thousands of huge blessings we have every minute, rather than searching and trying to point out the few small things that we might want changed.

I'm not saying that means we have to ignore hardships and pretend they are not happening or pretend they are not as hard as they are.  No its just about being able to see that even in those most painful moments we are still being immensely blessed.  I think its about being able to say this is hard, I don't understand it, but even so blessed be the name of the Lord!

Blessed be your name, on the road marked with suffering.  Though there's pain in the offering, blessed be your name!

Romans 8:28

For a long time whenever I talked to people about my pain a lot of the time I got the response of 'Look at Romans 8:28' (And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.)  I cannot count the amount of times I was told this and believe me it was not what I wanted to hear.  I was hurting and struggling and hearing someone say its OK its for your good just made me believe that they had totally missed the point, that they had not just listened to a word I had said.  It was almost as is they were  saying that my pain and struggles were invalid.  Every time I heard this said to me I just wanted to shout 'No, this is NOT good!'  I mean, how can the worst pain of your life 24/7 be a good thing?  Its crazy! I always went away from those conversations discouraged.

It is only recently that I have started to learn and accept what I now think is the true meaning of this verse.  You see this pain and illness does not feel good and I don't think it is good, but that does not mean that God is not working for my ultimate good.  I have been learning more and more that I do not always know what is best for myself.  I often think I know what's best for me and yes it may be the thing that feels better and easier in the short term, but long term I don't have a clue.

It is an incredibly hard thing to accept, that God ultimately knows what is good for me and I don't.  It is an incredibly humbling place to be, and to get there a lot of pride had to be knocked down (and is still in the process of being knocked down.)  God has eternal plans, eternal timings... I am lucky if my plans are for more than a week ahead. 

Slowly, very slowly I am learning that God does work for my good.  That doesn't mean He works in the way I most want Him to; it does not mean He works in the way that is easiest for me, but He is working for my good.

Now it is still hard to read that verse, it is still hard to see that this pain could be good, but instead of reading it with anger, I can now read it with acceptance, excitement and anxiousness of what good God is going to bring out of the situations He places me in.

The crowd vs the cross...

The crowd says follow us, the cross says follow me. The crowd says rely on us, the cross says rely on me.  The crowd says earn your worth, the cross says I am your worth.  The crowd says bear your burdens, the cross says nail them to me.  The crowd says be happy, the cross says be holy.  The crowd says if it feels good do it, the cross says for loves sake endure it.  The crowd says honour yourself, the cross says humble yourself.  The crowd says do, the cross says done.  Which will you choose, the crowd or the cross?

I absolutely love this way of looking at the crowd and the cross (I did not make this up, and am not trying to take credit for it...)  So often we seem so alone trying to go the way of the cross.  So many times it seems like following the crowd is the easiest way - why fight it when you can just join in.  Why bother trying to go against the flow? 

The thing is, what happens to following the crowd when something goes wrong, when you lose something important to you, when things don't go the way you wanted/expected them to? 

This is something pain has taught me.  The crowd says you've got to do, do, do. The crowd says that you have to earn everything yourself, you have to rely on yourself, you have to earn everything, work for it.  That becomes a big problem when life is so painful - I feel so weak, so helpless, so unreliable and unable.  The crowd tells me to carry my own burdens, but so often they feel so big and heavy that I cannot even begin to pick them up.  Where does that leave me if I do what the crowd tells me to do?

Then we bring the glorious cross into the picture.  The cross says everything is already done!  The cross says rely on our unchanging God, cast all your burdens onto Him who sustains all things.  Him who created the Universe and Him who has already bared the entirety of my sin.  The cross says hang everything onto me.

So which will you choose - the crowd or the cross?