Choosing truth

Sometimes I read something, or think about something, and know that I really want - occasionally even need - to blog it. Why this is blogged rather than journalled I think isn't because I think that my own little thoughts should be instructing and leading others, but more because there's something stake in the groundly about committing something that's true to six billion people (give or take those tribal languages which my blog hasn't quite been translated into yet..) It makes me a. think something through and b. holds me accountable for having believed it rather than being able to shove it out of my head when more it's more convenient.

So firstly, this is some truth:

15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,
16 for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
17 He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.

This truth is brought to you from Colossians 1. I recognise if anyone happens to read this you will fall into one of two categories. One group of people are people who believe this kind of stuff and therefore possibly saw the first line and scrolled straight down to here as they already know it. The other are people who don't believe it and scrolled down to hear because they think it's poppycock. Whichever side of the fence you fall I would recommend going back over it - cos it's either true or false and nothing can be the same again either way. Anyway, I happen to believe it's true and am one of the people who perhaps just skim read it for this reason. However, what happens next really struck me....

21 This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. 22 Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.

23 But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it.

This last bit is the point of this post and bless you for getting here. I think this is an astonishingly important thing for all people regardless of the fence issue - sometimes we need to continue believing truth. I am someone who responds well to affirmation and am fortunate to be in many situations where I continue to be affirmed. Yet it's not a very sustainable way of living. To be dependent on other people's feedback can make day to day life quite up and down.

I equally love and am challenged by the fact though that some things can remain true regardless of how I feel about them. We don't continually look for proof about gravity - we (well, "we") did our research, worked out it was a thing and then got on with doing life around around this principle. But these verses shove this stuff about God under the same umbrella that we'd use for science and whatnot. It's an unchanging, non-dependent, always and forever, Truth. It says that I, as a Christian, don't need to keep being assured by anecdotal or analytic evidence of how God views me. The end results of what he achieved by properly dying and properly coming back to life don't vary. What he did was objectively once and objectively for all - I am always included in the "everything" that he has made peace with. However I'm feeling and whatever my mood this will never change - in exactly the same way that I'm not suddenly going to float up to my ceiling just because I question the basic principles of physics.

I find "standing firm" really quite hard - maybe because I can be so changeable it is difficult to accept the same isn't true of all other things. Yet I'm struck today by the importance of telling myself truth and then living in light of that truth, regardless of feeling and regardless of what others might be or might not be telling me. If more frequently my knees stopped shaking and my mind stopped wavering, I think I might just realise quite how solid the ground beneath me really is.

Clegg and Coxon

Hello, hello, helloooooo....

I haven't been around these parts recently because I have got Very Into another blog project (ohmydays, how pretentious does that sound?!) Anyway it's called frantakingpictures and, well, it's about me taking pictures. Light relief some might say. Lots of pictures, not many words...the complete antithesis of this! If I were you I would take a quick scroll of how long this post is and if it looks longer than you care for, follow the link. For titillation. *Snigger*

Oooh, I'm in quite a yarning mood. Three quarters of Parklife (Parkli?) went to the Impey for us tea and a beer which were lovely. However JD Weatherspoon spends more money heating his house than we do ours, so the warmest things I can do right now is carry on drinking my rudeboy in the dive-bomb (i.e. knees tucked up under my chin) position at my desk and tap away. Ooh I think I might talk about two things. The election and a brilliant new Blur track. They both excite me, although in quite different ways...

The election: how are we ever going to choose?!

It's almost here! I know some people are, like, enough already and other people are all election smellection, but, SERIOUSLY. We literally don't know who will be our leaders on Friday. There are only three days left of normalness! I know there's the whole thing of "it doesn't matter who wins, the Government will still be in charge..." but genuinely, massive great faults in the electoral system aside: this is our moment. Regardless of how centred the main three (THREE!) might be around the middle, it is us, you and me and my nan and your year eight history teach, who grant legitimacy to one or two (TWO!) of them to take the helm. A frighteningly exciting opportunity. NathanDogg and I went to Geneva over Easter and I was told by some people there that in certain areas they are really in to participatory democracy and every few months they have a referenda on a whole bunch of policies. Apparently it gets boring and people either don't bother or just put random, uninformed crosses in certain boxes but I am fairly certain that I would be a very diligent, if slightly overbearing, participant. The sort of excitement civic duty ignites in me is best contained in five yearly events, I fear. That said if anyone gets jury service and wants to trade....

So in relation to this I have some things to link:

1. Voteforpolicies is brilliant and I would well recommend it if you haven't already been collared into it by some other corner of the Internet. It's a way of assessing your political persuasion based on policy rather than personality. I think I came out 60% Green which was interesting/uninfluential on my decision making. However it was a good way of actually getting informed rather than just riding on the limited knowledge stored up from my first year British Government module.

2. I think how much most of our minds are shaped by the media is really interesting. Cos, ultimately, a lot of the stuff the politicians say doesn't make lots of sense to regular people, so newspapers and television shows and nextdoor neighbours are really good at decoding that and making applicable to us. But, you know, the lost in translation thing means that we're getting a cloaked view of The Truth (which, btw, is why the above link is useful). Two things caught my eye in the last few days....

- One is this Facebook group challenging people not to be reeled in by Rupert Murdoch in the next few days. Obviously mainly a load of hippy students who wouldn't be voting Tory anyway, but a good point made none the less.

- The other is this coming out by the Guardian for the first time. And yeah, it's very easy for me to say I won't be following Murdoch but it's massively more difficult to say the same about this trendy, left wing paper who basically I want to be (albeit apart from being made of paper and being squeezed through one of those printing machines.)

How everyone isn't a floating voter still is beyond me.

Blur are back (back again, Blur's back, tell a friend...)

All together. With Graham! Making all of those beautiful organny bits that have we have been bereft of whilst they made stupid albums like Think Tank. Anyway, there was a thing called Record Store Day apparently and a load of bands made a track just to be purchased in record stores and not on the Evil Interweb. So this is the first song back togeva and I consider it a thing of great beauty. Yes life can be mundane, yes often one day follows a similar pattern to the last, yes Woolworths is no more, but actually: there is something innately beautiful which makes it all have a point. Now I think we might differ on what that is, but heck. It is a really, really good song.


Gwon. You've wasted this much time.

The trouble with bikes..

My back hurts. The bottom bit. Not the bottom, bottom bit, but the bit just up from the bottom bit. Let's call it my lower back. It's not eyewateringly painful, or intakeofbreathingly hurty, it's just a bit grumbly. You know how if someone tells you that they have hung out your washing this isn't for information sharing purposes? Cos, you know, it's normally quite apparent without the announcement. However, they tell you just so you know that you've been a little bit annoying. Well, it's sort of like that. I don't normally need my back to tell me it's there. I know this from such things as bending and also my head being about five feet away from my toes. But right now it is choosing to make me slightly more aware of it's presence because it's a little bit cross with me.

"Why pray tell?" I hear you ask. ("Does that point need a paragraph of build up?" I hear you mutter..)

This week I have been cycling. Lots. Mainly downhill, but lots. To college I race, to Alex's I wizz, to church I dash, to Prison View I fly. It's been great. Life is a lot quicker on Esther's wheels and I can be here, there and just about everywhere (so long as it's mainly downhill) in minutes. However, it not being my bicycle and me being a bit of a scaredy cat mean that several things are true:

One. I do not have a helmet.
Two. I do not have lights.

and therefore...

Three. To compensate for this I sometimes ride on the pavement.

But other than being shouted at by both people I know and people I don't know, but do annoy, this has been fine. I was loving my new found freedom and speed. I even managed to balance a bottle of wine on my handlebars on Saturday night. This was surely the good life?

Until my back started to hurt.

You see the damage would seem to have been done not by my lack of accessories but the fact that me and the bike aren't quite the right fit. His seat is a bit low, his handlebars are questionable. I can't work gears. And so whilst we've been getting the job done, actually we've probably been shortening both of our lifespans quite considerably.

I'm about to meet Billie and Jake to go to a student Question Time with Ben Bradshaw et al. so I don't really have time to think this through, but I do find it interesting. I've enjoyed riding the bike. I haven't had any accidents, I haven't run into any trouble. I've been wanting to jump on and do it again and again, thinking that I had found the silver bullet to my troubles.

And yet actually it's been doing me quite a lot of damage that I couldn't see to start with. On the surface it's been solving one problem (lateness) but under the surface it's been creating a much bigger one (potential cripple). It would be interesting to map out how many more of Esther's bikes there are in my life that I'm not noticing the impact of at the minute.

Right, Ben. You're going to vote, yeah? Good.

Sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

It is March and there are crocuses(/croci/crocus) and the sun is shining in the morning and the other day I didn't wear a coat one time. Fit as.

A mixture of consumerism and biology means humans aren't given the option of flying south or rolling into a ball for those five cold, dark months between November and March. Life trudges on and so we must too. We go out in the dark and come back in the dark, as they say. I feel less certain in these weeks that my spring has been wound enough to get me through til tea. I think living for sleep is almost exactly the opposite of the life we were intended for and yet in December and January that becomes the goal more often than I would like. We go on, because we're British and that's what we do, but we moan (because we're British and that's what we do.) It can just all be a bit of a hard s l o g.


And then March comes. We regain our synchronicity with the created world and everyone and thing is waking up at the same time. Yes it's chilly but we say "it's bright". Yes it rains but we call them "showers". Everything is just a little bit more cheery. It's like we hadn't realised that we'd had our knuckles clenched during the cold and as we walk outside in Spring they seem to slowly release. Tension we didn't know we were storing is being released back into the ether. It feels a little bit like we are being made new with the flowers and the leaves. Everything is fresh, everything is clear. Everything, as I said, is bright.

I'm not sure if this will quite make sense, but in my head there is quite a beautiful likeness that can be drawn between what's happening under the ground and what's happening above the ground about now. Because under the ground there are bulbs and seeds that are waiting to shoot. They've been planted in anticipation and now they're waiting for their moment. Whilst the gardner who set them knows exactly what is to come, most of the rest of us haven't a clue. And yet despite not knowing where they are or what exactly they will look like we still trust in the good things to come and that there are sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

Which is a little bit like us who tread the soil. My hope is renewed in the sunshine that there is a great big God who knows what will happen and when. He knows the times and the places, He knows where we're going and also how we get there. I don't. Not the foggiest. All I can know is where I am now and from where I have come. Yet, because of this big gardner in the sky, I still have absolute confidence that there are sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

Tueswahey

So I think we have established that I blog for my benefit and not any greater good. I have had 67 days of not caring less about this online expression of self and now, just because I feel Convicted, all 6 people who Follow me will be told "Ooh, ooh, ooh, Fran has written something!!"..or similar. Like Colin Firth's character in Love Actually. Sod everyone else whilst he's off falling in love with some Spanish chica and jumping in lakes and stuff but then December rolls around and he feels some tug of obligation to go and do the family thing. Yet he turns up at token imposing central London home on leafy street, has a quick once over the faces of his long lost nieces and nephews and realises he actually quite prefers the Spanish chica. So off he sods again. Bad Uncle Jamie, bad Uncle Jamie. You can see how that's like my relationship with The Universal, yes? No? Hmm, moving on....

I love Tuesday. Wednesday morning to Monday tea time is generally filled with Having To Be In Other Places Decided By Other People. And largely this is a wonderful thing. On the whole I love getting to be a teacher, I heart my church and everything I get to be a part of there, in all the gaps between these things I get to hang out with brilliant people...these are all great and wonderful. But sometimes, just occassionally, it's really great to. Stop.

Maybe what makes Tuesday all the more satisfying is that it is predated by Monday night. A little tradition has started in Parklife which has gained the name Monday Night Review. Monday Night Review is probably our best opportunity of the week to catch up on news and activities, discuss the issues of today, put the world to rights, patch up any wrongs, do an online shop and watch Glee. It's a great thing to do when you live with busy people. The other day Jo and I calculated that we had seen each other for approximately 45 minutes in 4 days. Monday is important to remedy that.

But what this means is that Tuesday gives me the space, I have been thinking, to unfurl. To steal back some time and to make a head start on the week's achievement whilst being able to unpack my head and see if I can fit it back together in a smaller space. When trying to work out if I was an introvert or extrovert the other day, Nathan asked the question (which Esther takes credit for), of whether I get my energy from other people or being alone. I still haven't worked it out. I thrive on busyness but am sustained by stillness. I don't imagine that to be of interest to any other human, but, you know, we have already established that this if this blog was a high street store it's more Primark than Oxfam.

Anyway.

These are the things I think are important right now:

* Toasties. Today's was cheese, tuna and mango chutney. It could have gone either way but it ended up being a WINNER. If anyone did ever read this post and has any other suggestions they are always very gratefully received.

* You should probably try and name Nathan's bicycle whilst the window of opportunity is open to the fresh breeze of creative inspiration.

* The size of our footprints. Like, not the carbon ones (although, you know, important). This is something I have been considering whilst washing up (cough*Esther,Ireallydid*cough). So...I am training to be a teacher. Most days I don't feel very good at this. But I plan and I action and I have reams and reams of paper detailing exactly how I am trying to impart a passion for well placed commas. Yet time and again the 150 minutes is up and I am not sure whether there has been any osmosis whatsoever. In these moments I can feel not so much weightless as faceless. I can believe, for a few seconds I am having zero influance on the world around me. Yet...In other situations I can be completely oblivious as to where my feet are treading and whether or not the people beneath them actually want my brown suede Schuh own brand boots all over them. I can assume I am an island despite the fact that every single lecturer who has ever marked one of my essays will know, no man is. And equally vice versa. Like every potentailly mental person I have a mentor who I meet up with periodically to check in with and she has been a huge source of encouragement and wisdom. Yet in a recent conversation she said she wouldn't consider herself a leader at all and was completely surprised by my appreciation of her. Being a Bible believer I am fully signed up to the potter and clay image of how God shapes us, but I am increasingly aware of his use of third parties in this process. Maybe right now I am simply grateful for the fingerprints and footprints at work in shaping me and want to make sure I am striving for similar good.

* It's almost not winter.

This was good for me. I am little bit too embarrassed, however, to ask you the same :)

Catch up soon. x

Mad props to Joseph

Hello. This blog post will be surprising for three reasons;

1. It is a blog post that I am writing. That's very August 2009.
2. It doesn't massively involve me. That's very March 1986 (I don't think I was as self analytic then).
3. It is a little bit Christmassy. That's very December 25th (on a rolling basis).

So. To kind of immediately counter statement number two, I feel like I should give you some context. The context is I am not very good at reading the Bible in a structured way. I have tried many different strategies (as an unstructured person would) but in recent days I have committed to a new approach. I am going to attempt one of those guides which gives you a couple of chapters each day and hopefully you should make your way through the WHOLE THING in one or two or seventeen years. This genuinely excites me a bit right now. It also overwhelms me too, but I'll save that for another day.

Anyway...

Hence being at the beginning of four different stories currently, one of which is the birth of Christ. Really brilliant stuff, you've probably heard a bit about it before. Anyway this morning I was reading chapter two of Matthew which is the bit where the wise men are following the star and King Herod catches drift of some new king in town and isn't best pleased. So annoyed in fact is he that he decides to go on a mad bout of infanticide. Not cool.

So the wise men/royal astrologers continue with their star tracking until they find it above this 'ere stable and the Bible says they "fell down and worshipped him". I think I love the idea that they are deeply exhausted and slightly emotional and probably more than slightly overwhelmed by being guided by a star in the sky to the Messiah. And just all their dignity is completely stripped of them in that moment when they realise they have been taken by God to God; albeit God with skin and hair and tiny finger nails. Anyway, that isn't even why I wanted to write but it is a pretty amazing thing in itself.

So yeah, Joseph. To be honest he's not my best Joseph; the one with the colourful coat I think takes first place in my head. But today I have just been completely impressed by the one with sandpaper and spirit level.

Right. His missus-to-be is chosen by God to bear the saviour of the world. To begin with he doesn't realise this and it's all a bit awkward for a bit where he thinks he's gonna have to quietly give her the elbow and find a wife with slightly more sexual integrity. This however was cleared up when an angel of the Lord appeared to him and gave him the lowdown on not ditching Mary, it all coming about by the spirit, the fact that he should call him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins etc. etc. The Bible then says that when Jospeh wakes up he did what the angel commanded. So going against all logic and rationale Joseph takes God at his word and obeys him.

But that's not even all....

Chapter two is what I was reading today and I just thought what a man. By this point the wise men have gone on their way and Jospeh has another message from an angel in his dream. This time he said "Get up and flee to Egypt with the child and his mother...stay there until I tell you to return because Herod is going to try to kill the child." And then, and I'll paraphrase what happens now, we're told that Jospeh took them both to Egypt that night. So, firstly, Joseph was properly listening to God, secondly, he was entirely obedient and thirdly he just got on and did it. I struggle with all three of these but even if I managed the first two, having the conviction and the trust to go and do it just like that is pretty amazing. And then, finally...

"When Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and told him, "Get up and take the child and his mother back to the land of Israel, because those who are trying to kill the child are dead." So Joseph returned immediately to Israel with Jesus and his mother". (Matt 2:19-22)

This is 2009 years ago roughly. There's no mass media. Joseph can't have this truth verified by another source. He's in flipping Egypt. But he heard God and trusted God and obeyed God. End of.

Thanks for reading. Joseph has challenged me this morning. Yet also he encourages me too. He was a carpenter who kind of assumed the worst on hearing Mary's news first off. And yet that didn't count against him and God placed him at the centre of the Jesus' immediate sphere of impact. I think I might sometimes sideline Joseph as being a supporting cast member rather than one of the main players but it's a relief to know God didn't do the same.

Much Ablog About Nuffing

Ooh, the 28th of August. Where has the time gone, eh? I can't be entirely sure (without standing up and checking our journal) but I think this time a year ago I was on a plane travelling home from Delhi. My memory of this is based purely on the fact that I think that we read a Saturday paper on the train travelling back to my Mum's house. A year ago. Mental. That was a busy time. If my memory serves me correctly then we landed on the Saturday, went back to mine, slept, woke up on the Sunday and washed clothes and ate and stuff and then moved into Parklife on the Monday and started Contact on the Tuesday. (On the Wednesday we went kayaking and on the Thursday we did a First Aid course. I can't work out what I did on the Friday but as it's 356 days ago maybe you will forgive me.) This is possibly why I am finding these few weeks off so stange, the last time when my day to day wasn't prescribed by a contract or diary or travel guide kind of belongs to a part of my life which I don't remember so well. It's only been a year since I was a student but the separation I feel from the time Before is quite amazing. It's funny that I share the same city as Student Fran, the same church and a lot of the same friends, but everything is very different. Student Fran was a visitor to this fair corner of the world. She was falling in love with it at quite a rate, but she was a temporal part of it nonetheless. Real Fran has her home here. She might not know which night it's cool to go to Arena or what the owner of Mega Kebab is called, but this town is her town. (Well there's probably a few members of Day for Retired who are seventeenth generation Devonian who might disagree, but for the fact that I pay my Council Tax to Exeter City Council I think I count!).

I think this is only going to be a brief post partly because a) I want to carry on reading Red Moon Rising and b) I have to pack to go to my friend Cat's hen party in Birmingham this weekend. But also maybe it will be brief because I'm in quite a thinkative mood at the moment and want my thoughts to be a little bit more collected before I spread them too ill-advisedly over t'internet. I wish I journalled better. I am very aware that quite a significant twelve months of my life has just passed and I think an equally significant twelve months are about to begin. I feel like this is a good time to look back on what God might have been/still be teaching me and work out what I should be taking forward with me, and possibly what I might need to let go of. I think this is a good thing to, however I'm also aware of the difference between reflection and dwelling. The latter isn't always terribly positive for me! We'll see though.

Right, much more banter promised for next time. I'm going out in public in a tutu for goodness sake. Watch out West Midlands.