the lifetime of a party.

Charlie always liked house parties. He liked a good casual gathering, a few mates, the right sort of people, a few drinks, and a good chat. He liked to talk, to laugh, to make some jokes and have some ideas and generally just, you know, all that stuff. Most of all he liked being funny. Charlie loved the moment when the laughter died away and everyone looked at him – any more where that came from Charlie? That was the look in their eyes – and there’s always more where that came from. They loved it, he loved it, good time was had by all. It was a shame though, he almost felt guilty whenever he wanted to go and get another drink, or if he needed a piss, because conversation was going to slow down without him and he knew it. That’s a big burden to bear in a way. Once, he came back in and it was genuinely silent. To be fair though, he quite liked that feeling. Charlie always liked a good gathering. It was just a shame really that the others couldn’t be – you know – that they weren’t quite as – whatever. But it was all right. Good fun. Until Charlie went to the ball.

It was the big one, the one with years in the making, decades on the waiting list. And out of nowhere he’d got this invite. Gilt-edged. Hand-written – by the man himself – too good even for eBay this one. And he got the suit, he even borrowed cufflinks, and his dad taught him how to shine his shoes. He hadn’t had butterflies in his stomach since he was twelve years old. And as he walked up to the gate he looked at the invite again and thought it had to be fake, surely. But they let him through. He was plunged into clear water with his eyes open – everything glittered, everything swum. There were jugglers and dancers. It was beautiful. It was huge – it was almost ridiculous how huge the whole thing was. And there was room after room - dining halls with mountains of things he didn’t recognise that tasted strange and sweet, fountains of edible things, and men with little stalls, frying things that smelt so richly savoury that it made your mouth water. And music. Horns, and tuxedos, and saxophones, and a woman playing a double-bass like it was alive. And he danced. And there were people dancing all around him, and they looked and smiled, and danced together. And he felt so small he could almost disappear and so happy he could almost melt.

And the night wore on. Excitement mellowed into peace, a gentle awe-struck pleasure. He lay on the balcony, looked at the stars. A voice was singing beneath him, and it was jazz. No one had noticed that he’d gone outside. He’d barely noticed. Laughter swirled, up and around him, and he breathed it in, and out, and he propped himself up on his elbows, and looked out across the sea of sparkling lights, traced it with his eyes until it kissed the dark of the horizon. He lost his thoughts in the swell of the saxophones beneath him. He closed his eyes, slowly.

A hand touches his shoulder, his eyes open quickly and he sees that it’s him, it’s the man himself. He’s sitting next to him, looking out. Charlie looks around and sees two drinks of incredible sparkling liquid sitting between them on the ground.

“One’s for you” he says. Charlie picks it up, tries to drink it without taking his eyes of the man that’s sitting right next to him. Right next to him.

“I saw you leave, I thought I’d come say hello.” The drink is magic, it’s cold, refreshing, but his throat is tingling like it’s on fire, but not like he’s thirsty, like it’s warming his blood, he can feel every inch of the veins in his chest. He breathes. “Thank you” he says.

And then the man turns his head, looks straight at him, and his eyes are even better than everyone says. A grin starts to creep across his lips. Across Charlie’s too. He reaches out an arm and lays a hand on his shoulder once again.

“Charlie, I’m so glad that you came.”

***

I hope you like the story, I liked writing it. And all I really wanted to get at was, which party are you living at? Because the invitations to the ball are free, all you’ve got to do is ask. And I can’t tell you how good it is to hear the man himself, the Master of Ceremonies, Founder of the Feast, the Inventor of Delight, sit down next to you and say, “I’m so glad that you came.”

PS. If you still don’t get what I’m going on about, or if you want an invitation yourself, just drop me a message!

Rotten Teeth Soft Voice

Another one. Should I? he thinks.

He should, he thinks.

Again though?

Yeah. Again.

If it weren’t for the eyes it would just be the hat. It’s not even a particularly weird hat to be honest, although any hat is pretty weird on a man in spring. Is this a man, or just an old boy?

The black coat is ambiguous. Not a scary coat, but it has the potential.

To be honest it’s the posture. Actually, it’s the face. That aching, asking, awkward half-smile grimace on this tall boy with long hair and the black coat and the hat, with the eyes somehow slightly wider than is socially acceptable, and his shoulders say ‘I don’t want to bother you’. His lips say, “I’m sorry to bother you” and some people walk through in between them as the rich boy tries to stop and turn back to the tall boy with the long hair, and he sees his lips making more sounds but he can’t hear them.

That’s something unusual about him. He’s too quiet. Softly spoken so the rich boy is only gently awoken from the conversation that he had been having with his girlfriend. And he keeps on speaking and his face says ‘Look, this is as uncomfortable for me as it is for you’. His mouth says “I’m just so grateful that you’ve stopped, I’ve been out her all day.” And there’s a blackened rotten problem on his two front top teeth and its speaking volumes he doesn’t want to say. He’s talking about a hostel. A job, just in factory assembly or process, just factory. And he’s looking straight into the rich boy’s eyes and maybe its pretentious but it seems like the eyes are saying ‘Why does no one trust me?’ He gets the crumpled fiver and some pennies out of his pocket to show him, and he tells him that the woman who gave him the fiver asked him for four pounds change. He doesn’t laugh. The rich boy doesn’t either because he’s too busy being sincere but when you think about it that is pretty funny. She asked for change. Marx would have liked that one. Jesus would probably have flipped and started turning tables. Still, it’s pretty funny.

But the rich boy didn’t notice at the time. At the time he was thinking about the last time. Last night but one this guy comes up to him and says “Please don’t say no, have you got change for a pound?” And he does, and he’s a little bit frightened by the guy but he thinks he’s big and he can sort of see how you might need it so he stops and the guy keeps talking, talking, explaining and it doesn’t quite make sense and he gets his change out of his pocket and the numbers change, the guy wants the two pound coin and he can feel its going wrong but he doesn’t know how to stop it so – the guy says “What? You can give it here I’m not going to stop you and ask for your help and then just rob you am I” and so he hands over the two quid and the guy shakes his hand and just walks off. And rich boy looks at his girlfriend but not for long and they just start walking. And he hears the guy start laughing with a mate behind him. Laughing. And he thinks he shouts something after them but he’s not sure, they’re just walking away and he’s not even angry, he’s not fired up, he has no urge to kick something or scream, he just feels fucking small.

So he looks up at the tall boy and asks him how much the hostel costs. And he says its fifteen pound a week and if he’s there he has an address so he can apply for jobs. Rich boy has had his hand in his pocket since the start of the conversation but there’s only 50p in there. And he’s only got tenners in his wallet. He shows his girlfriend that he only has 50p and she opens up her bag and finds one pound fifty. So they hand him that. And he says, “Thank you”, and it sounds like he means it. Rich boy checks his wallet just to see if he has a fiver in there, he doesn’t. He holds the wallet in front of him, looks at the tenners. He looks at the tall boy with the long hair and the hat and the soft voice. No reasons go through his head just maths. He’s got seven pounds fifty, he needs fifteen. You’ve got a tenner. He hands it to him.

The tall boy is shocked. He takes it. And he smiles, and the rotten teeth come out, and he says, “I’ve got a home.” And he smiles, and he keeps on talking for a bit. They shake hands, he smiles, they say goodbye.

He might have been lying, he might spend it on crack.
But maybe trust is just a choice we have to make.

They might not keep it secret, they might not even understand.
But maybe trust is just a choice we have to make.

He might not mean it when he says it back.
But maybe trust is just a choice we have to make sometimes.

Elly Falls In Love (Weird Story #4)

I came across a funny little thing the other day about signs. Imagine a family you know say that they’re going on a seaside holiday to Scarborough. All very lovely, sounds great, so you wave them off and they go on their way, and then later that day you’re driving along on the country roads, and in the distance, you see their car. And it’s just parked at the side of the road. And as you get closer you can see that their parked just before a junction, next to a sign that says “Scarborough”. And when you get really close you see that they’ve got out of the car, they’ve got a little table and chairs set up and they’re having their dinner, right there by the side of the road.

You pull up wind your window down, and say, “Are you guys alright?”

They smile back and say, “Yeah, we’re loving it!”

“I thought you were going to Scarborough…” you say.

They say, “Yes indeed! And here we are! That’s the sign right there!”

Now obviously that’s quite stupid, but my point is that when Jesus did miracles, he called them “signs”. When he turned water into wine, or when he healed people like he healed Tim and Clare and the woman who came to my Dad, he described those things as “signs”. And he actually got pretty frustrated when people kept getting seeing the signs but not bothering to go where they were pointing.

Which is why I think this is my favourite weird story of all. It’s from Elly, who used to come to my church back here in Leamington, and then I bumped into on a night out in Cambridge a couple of months ago and invited her to come along with me to church in Revs bar that Sunday. And it’s been great because I’ve got to see a lot more of Elly since then, both in a literal and in a sort of deeper sense. So I asked her if she could try and summarise her story – and what I love is that crazy stuff has been happening recently, and she mentions it, but its not the point. My guess is that quite a lot of it is too personal to be particularly bloggable anyway – but mainly it’s that she’s not just excited about the miracles, she’s not getting out at the road sign and having a barbecue – she’s got to the real thing, and she loves it! And I think that’s epic. Anyway, here it is…

***

So this is basically about the past two weeks (with a little bit of before thrown in):

Before the amazing Mike took me to his church I would have said I was good with God. I loved him, he loved me. Simples. But now I realise that was a trickle – what I have now is a waterfall.  

I loved ‘God the Father’ from before I was born. I wouldn’t be on this planet without him. He protected me through everything. I loved ‘God the Holy Spirit’ from thirteen, he was the fire inside of me. He gave me strength, he taught me to forgive and sent me on a mission to protect the people I loved. He saved me again. But in the last few years I had started to hate ‘Jesus the Son’ and I didn’t even realise. In teaching me to forgive, he had become burdened with so much physical and mental pain that I hated him. This was pain that wasn’t his to bare. It was ‘that’ man, or ‘that’ boy’s pain, not Jesus’. Not the man who had died on a cross to forgive my sins. It was completely ridiculous for me to hate him but I did. I hated him to the point I screamed to the sky on our Weekend Away with church, but he just replied with one thing: love.  

From that moment he gave up whispering and started shouting. He gave me instructions so loud they could not be ignored. He answered my prayers for others. He forced me on to my knees with no option of standing. He made me truly smile at the world all the time. He performed miracles in my life. He made me not be scared of death. He provided me with the most amazing friends in Christ. He let me speak in (baby) tongues. He made his words come alive. He has just set my world on fire.

Before God was carrying me, he was protecting me as I tried to protect the people around me. He was my guardian. But now I am free. Now instead of carrying me, he is holding my hand. Holding my hand as I walk with him, wherever that might be.

God is not just my father any more, he is my best friend. He is the constant dialogue in my head: whether it is advice, begging (on my part) or just nattering about the weather, it doesn’t stop and I love it. He is the one who will give me a hug when the day has been hard. He is the man I dance around the house with when the day has been good. He is the one who has me laughing down the street or walking around with a scary smile on my face. Jesus the Man was what was missing in my life, and I didn’t even realise. Thanks be to God. 

Abnormal #unilyf (Weird Story #3)

Have another funny story. This is again actually from the person who the miracle happened to – this time my friend Clare (or, to be more precise, Rachael’s friend Clare, who I know a little bit). When I went to visit last month she had her arm in a sling from dislocating her shoulder on a charity Rock Solid assault course thingumee the weekend before, so it was rather a surprise when Rachael texted to say that this had happened. 

I like this story especially because it all just happened in uni rooms, without mood music or hype, and with two people who I’m not sure had either of them seen a miraculous healing ever before (which, to be fair, is not that surprising!). As always, the sceptic in me starts explaining it away, but on balance I agree with Clare and with Rachael that it was God – your own mind is of course yours to make up. I hope you enjoy it either way!

***

So at 6am one Sunday morning I found myself sat on a cushion, surrounded by emptying paint pots, fairy lights and bibles, in a cosy 24/7 prayer room. However, I could not get comfortable despite the snug surroundings, as I had dislocated my shoulder the previous weekend (for the 3^rd time in my life). But God had placed Emily and Rachael in the room with me, and tentatively he gave Rachael the courage to sit down next to me and ask if she could pray for my shoulder.

Bizarrely, I instantly felt warmth as Rachael placed her hands around the aching areas. My shoulder was still loose in the socket due to the damage to surrounding muscle tissue and tendons, but as she asked God to heal my shoulder and make it feel secure again, we both felt a physical pulse between us. Neither of us could work out, however, who it was that had twitched; it was more of an internal pulse of what I imagine was God’s power flooding through Rachael and down my right arm. The prayer did not ‘fix’ my shoulder, but the permanent dull ache was gone, and perhaps most relieving was the mental change. My fear to use or move my arm in case it dislocated again had vanished, I was no longer permanently holding it at my side.

Following this experience, I felt no need to take the pain killers that I was previously taking every 4 hours, and I didn’t wear my sling for the rest of the day. By the evening, both Rachael and I were simply in awe of what had happened. And so again, cross-legged on her bed, Rachael and I sat down to pray. This time, as Rachael spoke words of thanks for what had happened and prayers for the continuation of such improvement, I felt something like warm water pouring down my arm from her hands and out through my fingertips. Rachael had asked God to use his powers through her, and He did, just so easily. I am still pretty touched that God has placed such an incredible person in front of me just to help me out when I was struggling, and that through Rachael it was something His powers could so easily fix - rather humbling if I’m honest.

 The shoulder specialist is still amazed at how confident I am using my shoulder – and how well, physically, the shoulder has recovered in the short term.

interlude - the quiet fire

Cool story for you. Three political prisoners. One dictator. The three prisoners refuse to worship the statue of the dictator, because they believe in God, the Creator of the Universe, and they worship Him, and this statue is not Him. It is a statue.

DICTATOR: If you don’t bow down and worship my statue, I’ll throw you into this furnace. What god will save you then?         

PRISONERS: To be honest, ‘Your Majesty’, we don’t need to defend ourselves to you in this matter. If we are thrown into that furnace, the God we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your ‘power’. But you know what? Even if He doesn’t, you should know, that we will never serve your ‘gods’ or worship your statues.

***

I love that story because I love their sass. Is that a word? I will use it nevertheless. Sass. They know that God can do crazy things to save them, they think he will, but there they are, staring a king in the face, standing on the brink of a furnace, feeling their skin crack in the heat, and they say “You know what? Even if we burn for it, we believe in God, and we will worship him and nothing else. We will be faithful.”

That probably doesn’t feel as epic to you as it does to me, I don’t really know why I like it so much – but there’s something there. This fire in the belly, this sure-ness, this rock-solid, unshakeable confidence.

And here’s the thing that I’ve not really grasped before: that’s more than just faith. That’s faithfulness.

Faith, in this sense, is knowing that God can do amazing things. That God can save you from the fiery furnace. It’s knowing that he is alive, and ridiculously powerful, and he’s your Dad, and he will take care of you. So yes, they have that faith, but then there’s something else.

“Even if He doesn’t…”

This is faithfulness. This is us being faithful to him, it’s saying, ‘You know what? Even if He doesn’t…’ I’ll still love him. I’ll still trust him.

Does this make sense? It’s one thing to believe that God will do incredible things, but it’s something else to be certain at the same time – utterly, unshakeably certain – that even if he doesn’t this time, he is still God, and we’re still his kids. Because the fact is that sometimes he just doesn’t seem to do what we want him to do, sometimes we cannot see what he is doing or feel like he’s there at all, and nothing makes sense. But faithfulness means that we don’t let go. That we know he is always with us, however it feels. To be faithful is to know two things for sure: that he will never walk out on us, and that we will never walk out on him.

I was thinking about this, and then I was praying for my mate the other night, and I thought of this verse, which is really famous amongst Christians:

“ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

And it occurred to me that I have never noticed what this actually says. God’s talking to these people who are in exile, they’re lost, and they are hopeless. And he says that he plans to give them “hope and a future”. I’ve always read that as “good stuff in the future”. But that’s not what it says – God has a much better plan for them than what I used to think. His plan isn’t just to give them a good future. He’s going to give them hope first. He’s going to give them hope. You see he doesn’t just want them to be people who are OK because things are OK. He wants more than that for them. He wants them to be people who have hope, who trust, who have something golden and burning inside of them which can never be diminished, or broken, or lost. He wants to forge in them something utterly beautiful. To plant in them a peace “which the world cannot give, and the world cannot take away”. And then he wants to give them the future that they’ve been waiting for.

And how does he forge this hope in us? There’s a really powerful bit in another letter that talks about it – so I’ll abridge it for you:

“…we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not just that, but we also rejoice in our suffering, because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character, hope.

And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Why? How? Because when we were still weak and helpless, when we needed him, Christ died for the ungodly. For us. Hardly anyone would actually die for someone else, would they? - even for a good person. But God loves us like this: when we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And if he’s done that for us, then he will certainly save us; if he’s brought us home, he will bring us to life. So we rejoice in God, through our King, Jesus Christ, who brought us home.”

Now, the funny thing with that bit is that you can’t stop quoting it too early because it’s all connected. We’ve got something incredible to hope for. The glory of God himself, now, and forever. But it doesn’t stop there, because even when we don’t see that glory, even when all we see is dark, we grit our teeth and we throw a party in the darkness because we know that pain is a furnace. Disappointment is a forge. And we choose to let God craft in us something better, something deeper. Endurance. Character. Finally, hope. In the darkness he lights a fire inside us that cannot be put out. But it doesn’t stop there either, because that hope is not wishful thinking. It is not optimism. It will not put us to shame. Because it is a fact greater than life itself, and much more permanent: that God loves us. Even when we hated him, he loved us. Loved us so much it hurt, loved us so strong it killed him. So our hope is not just optimism. It is knowing a love greater than life itself, a love so certain that if we take hold of it nothing can ever take it from us, not even death itself. It is knowing that we have life – sweet and satisfying and rich – and we can begin to taste it now, but there will be feasting hereafter. But it doesn’t even stop there. Because our hope; the song of our hearts; the taste of glory on our lips, is the taste of God himself. The Glorious One. Bigger and better than we could ever imagine. He is the home our hearts are hoping for.

I just thought it would be good to talk about this because all these stories of God answering prayers in amazing ways are incredible, and I love them, but I also know people – sometimes the same people – who have big, big prayers which have not got incredible answers yet, some for whom its all over and it never came. And the faithfulness of some of these people, is something beautiful to behold. So as much as I want to see more and more miracles in my life, maybe even more, I want to grow old into someone who has this strange thing singing at the bottom of my soul, who has this quiet fire in my eyes – I want to be someone who has hope.

N.B. If you want to look them up, the story at the start is from Daniel chapter 3, the hope/future thing is Jeremiah 29:11 and the big paragraph is from Romans chapter 5.