Available Light

Up early. Read the lections. Kneel. Remove my glasses and episcopal ring - why are they both so heavy in the silence? Set the timer going. Those little numbers flicking round are a trap. Why do I need to peek? The gong will sound at the end. I know it's about control, or the illusion of it, and this is one of the things I am slowly learning to relinquish. As the wisest man I've ever met said, " The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves to others or judging others' gifts to be better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most... the divine light of faith is totally available in the degree that we consent and surrender ourselves to its presence and action within ."...

I mentioned last post the three young people from YWAM who visited us during their Faith Week . Watching them bustle around the house so full of youthful Christian energy made me think, with a pang, of myself at their age, the age when this photo was taken. I was converted to the faith of Christ at 21 and in 1975, a couple of years afterward, went to work for a fellow Christian who ran a window cleaning business in Christchurch. My fellow employees, both about my age, were Graeme Carle , who is now senior pastor of Hillside Church in Auckland, and Marcus Arden who was then, is now and perhaps forever shall be a travelling e vangelist . We cleaned the windows in Noah's Hotel in Christchurch, and the days were spent in long and earnest and inventive and hilarious discussions of the Bible, life, the Bible, the universe, the Bible, and everything. And the Bible. A month or so into the job two things happened simultaneously. Firstly we three employees developed the growing convictio...