Category: Humanity

Fatherhood

 What’s in a good father?

Safety. Strength. Right boundaries.
Presence.
Does the world need good fathers?
You bet we do!
I should know: I’m a half orphan.
I lost my Dad at ten.
In the absence of a good father, what should a child do?
Can a mother be enough?
A good mother is important, a good mother is strong: I know this too, I am also a mother.
But a woman can never be a man.
Femininity’s had a hard time, over the ages:
She has come under many threats.
There is another kind of threat, equally strong: to have to be all things.
Yet diversity is greater strength.
Masculinity can free femininity to come out of the closet, and let her hair down.
Femininity can free masculinity into a bolder expression.
We, humanity, are male and female,
And so we find our greatest expression together: male and female.
Whether it’s father, mother, brother, sister, colleagues, partners, friends: masculinity and femininity together rock!
We were made for each other.
What’s in a good father?
Safety. Strength. Right boundaries.
Presence.
Does the world need good fathers?
You bet we do.

What’s the deal with Salvation?

Does the World need a Saviour?
Here in New Zealand, we’re pretty self-sufficient, right?
Independent? Free?
Got it all sorted?
My home is at my left hand, and here at my right hand is Jesus Christ.
He’s stretching out his arms on a cross, saying: ‘Here, I’ll help you.’
He’s offering to die, and that’s a pretty serious thing.
But what’s it mean? What’s it all about?
Why would someone have to die to save us?
On the left hand, ‘She’ll be right.’ On the right hand, ‘I’ll die to save you.’
At this cross-road, a man is standing in front of us, offering to take our bullets:
The bullets that have shot us; the bullets we have used to shoot others.
The bullets being pointed at us now; the bullets we are, right now, tempted to use.
He is standing here, arms stretched out, saying, ‘I’ll carry it:
‘Just put the gun down.’
The offer of Jesus Christ is really very simple, at the end of the day:
‘I’ll take your bullets, but it’s time to stop shooting.’
‘I’ll carry your wrongs, but it’s time to start doing what is right.’
‘I’ll sort out the past, but let me change your future.’
‘God will forgive, and you also can forgive.’
The offer is here, right here, right now:
To accept is as simple as a few breathed words, ‘I’m sorry!’
To begin to change is to say, ‘Help me to be better!’
Jesus is giving us the choice.
Here in New Zealand, we’re pretty self-sufficient, right?
Independent? Free?
Got it all sorted?
You decide.

Giving Life

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Why is it more of a blessing to give than to receive?
Giving is the essence of our life and souls – our purpose; our fulfilment.

But to really give, we must first receive.
The baby must suck from his mother’s breast;
The child must grasp her daddy’s stronger hand.
The youth must wrestle with his father’s guidance.
The young adult must stand in vulnerable freedom, cheered on by her mother.

The independent adult must think, and feel, and test, and know that he and she is loved by her brothers and sisters, amidst the testing.

The middle aged adult (That’s me, folks!) must give.

It’s more of a blessing to give than to receive, you see:
It is the realization of all of the life that came before.

Life is to be passed on, in all its fullness: in all its beauty, and struggle, and profundity.
So, then: why not pass it on?

Why God, and not simply humanity alone?

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Why God, and not simply humanity alone?
Because it would seem that humanity is not alone.

But why would I say such a thing?
Need? Upbringing? …
Dependence?
Not really.

In my own independent thought, I perceive truth:
there is a microscopic world inside my own body, with billions of cells doing their own coded co-ordinated thing, keeping me alive largely through no doing of my own;
there is a mysterious Universe out there, vast, and ordered, and beautiful, and mostly utterly beyond our reach.
Is humanity alone? No: I don’t think so.

There is a reality greater than us: yet, from time to time, we are given a glimpse into that greater reality, like a glimpse into another dimension.
Jesus gave us a massive glimpse.
Power, beyond us. Knowledge, beyond us.
Character, beyond us.
Leadership.

Humanity is capable of great good and profound evil,
but there is a kind of leadership beyond humanity:
a kind of authority that transcends our kinds of authority.

Why not simply humanity alone?
Because we are not alone, and neither should we be.

We can reduce things to dust, but we can’t form ourselves from it.
We can save life, but we can’t create life from no life.
We can run away from death for a time, but we can’t resurrect ourselves into new life.

We are humanity.
Let God be God.

Grace

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What do we do when we fail?
We’re only human, after all: and failure seems to be an inevitable part who we are.
Jesus’s approach was something like this: go for gold, and at the same time trust in grace.

But what does it mean to go for gold?…
To aspire to be as good as we can be: to seek to be like God.
Faithful. Pure. Wanting justice. Pursuing what is right, and true.
Fixing things, when they go wrong.
And what does it mean to trust in grace?
Grace is a child reaching up to his mother’s trustworthy hand, when he’s accidentally wet his pants.
Grace is a father holding his daughter’s scared eyes without reproach, when she comes home late after a date.

God calls us into perfection, and simultaneously reaches a hand out to us when we fall, to lift us back up again.

Wow.

What can we do when we fail?
Get back up. Trust in the outstretched hand. Keep aspiring to walk, and then to run.

Failure is only the beginning, not the end.

Grief

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Grief is the deepest, most pained outpouring of love.
For how can we grieve if we have not first loved?
And how can we love, without knowing in our heart of hearts we may yet one day pay the price of grief?

Grief is a stroll in the valley of the shadow of death,…
and yet this is a place we need not fear to tread.
The valley is green: there are blossoms, there is light;
There are many coloured rainbows of memory erupting in our hearts.

Grief can change us, by making us more thoroughly human than we were.
Death can be swallowed up by a more vibrant grasp of the precious value of life.
The end of one season can pave the way for the beginning of something new.
The treasure of the past can forge a greater determination for the future.

Grief can reveal to us where our true treasure lies,
its pain fuelling us ever onward, toward the joy of restoration.
For is death the end? No, death is not the end.
Death is only the beginning.

I see Love standing over the grave, beckoning, waiting:
A greater Love, a truer Love;
A Love of beauty, and passion.

The Light is overcoming the shadow,
forever.

Time

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It has been said that our most precious commodity is not money, but time.
In my forties I now wholeheartedly agree.
Some say, ‘Time is money,’ but I say, ‘No.’
Time transcends money.
Time can be spent in many ways: the pursuit of money is but one of them.
A lifetime can be defined in many ways.

In what way do we want our lives defined?
How should we spend our set time?
What is of most importance in life?
Where does our true treasure lie?

The clock shows us that we are finite.
Our mortality shows us there are choices to make: priorities to establish.
What are your priorities?
What is of most importance, when time has run out?

What to make of Humanity?

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What to make of humanity?

We are children, sometimes, groping in the dark;
Groping, and clutching, and owning, and fighting.
Beating, and bullying, and insisting that we are the best.…
For what if we’re not the best? What if we don’t own?
What if we can’t win?

There is a vulnerability to the heart of humanity that is the heart of a broken child.
Desperate for love, dead without it, fighting tooth and nail to hide the lack that is within.

And yet with all of our flaws, with all of our brokenness, with all of our battling for self defence, and for personal victory, there are other realities too.
A capacity for love; a capacity for healing.
A capacity for sacrifice.
A hand reaching out to a higher Way.

I can see now why God loves humanity:
even a humanity that robs, that rapes, that murders the chance of another for life.
I can see why God bears with our failings.
There is a seed of the chance for change, even admist the deepest failing;
There is the chance for a new kind of life, even out of the ashes of the old life.

The child within can still reach out to the higher Way.
And while that chance still exists, while that possibility still breathes,
God waits, and beckons, and stretches himself out on a cross in death, to carry the full cost of giving us another chance.

Redemption comes at a high price,
but life after death is sweet indeed.