How’s your French? Well while you’re working on the translation, I can tell you that our good friend and colleague Marcel came out with this phrase at the end of a prayer time with our team recently. We’d kind of run out of things to pray, but we’re learning not to feel awkward about that, and to enjoy the silence. It’s hard to learn to pray together with others, and even harder to handle silence. But increasingly it seems that it is in these moments that God speaks. We have been trying not to come to prayer with a preconceived list of subjects, and it’s very tempting to slip back into that. It feels “safe” somehow when you have someone to “lead” a meeting – then you only need to sweat when it’s “your turn” to lead. The rest of the time you can just follow along. But this way, we are much more conscious of wanting the Holy Spirit to lead us – which he most often seems to do through the people present, although he may also choose to do so in more direct ways. This is much more scary: what if He doesn’t turn up? What if nothing happens? What if we just end up in awkward silence and the meeting drags? Two thoughts: firstly He is worth the risk; secondly even in empty silence there is value, if nothing else than to give momentary escape from the many and varied things that vie for our attention, to focus on the One who most deserves it.
The exasperating thing about prayer is that the more you learn about it, the more you realise how far you are from doing it well. And paradoxically, without that realisation we will never progress in prayer.
“The sun is always higher than the mountains” was the word that concluded our prayer time, which had started with some discussion about some fairly major challenges facing us. I don’t think it requires any explanation.
One of the commitments we’ve made recently is to learn to be led more by the Spirit than by our diaries, and when it comes to “ministry”, trying to get better at identifying those doors that God is opening, rather than being carried along by activity for activity’s sake. Well of course we have believed for a long time that this is what we are supposed to do, but when you’re a “ministry professional” there can be quite a gap between theory and practice.
One answer to our prayer, “God lead us to the right people” came in the form of a phone call from Camille*. Last time we had news from her she was very ill, but she is doing a lot better and wanted to see us. In the middle of the conversation she ventured that she couldn’t see how going to a church on a Sunday morning would ever work with her schedule, but that she would be very interested to find out more about what being a Christian is all about. She brought it up, not us! Open door! “Lets get together for a meal!”
The meal happened today, with Camille and her children. It just so happened that it was typically busy weekend with JCrois, a Christian youth gathering that happens each year in Nantes, so Sunday lunch was definitely not the most convenient. But we went for it, and we’re so glad we did.
We really wanted to do some “Acts 2:42 stuff” with our friends, to kind of model what Christians do (should do?) when they get together. Well, we didn’t do very well in the prayer department, mainly because we lost track of time. But we did manage to “break bread”, have fellowship and read through the first chapter of Mark together around the table – a first for our friend and her kids. Led to some interesting discussion on healing, and answered prayer. Not super in-depth, but probably just right for where our friend is at.
Was this church? Not quite, because we missed out the prayer bit. Definitely a step in the right direction though. We will it lead? We don’t know, but we’re really looking forward to finding out. Camille would like it to be at her place next time.
*You guessed it, that’s not her real name.
One of the most striking things about our return to France is what a different place we are in compared to August 2004 when we last came back from New Zealand. Last time we landed in the middle of a visit from the ship Doulos to Saint Nazaire (near Nantes), new interns joining us in our project to assist a church in the north of Nantes, various projects with Christian youth, and a whole bunch of meetings and conferences in the diary. We hit the ground running and didn’t stop to draw breath for several months.
This time we have arrived in a more typical French August: eerily quiet. If you didn’t know that everyone has head for the beach or the mountains, you would wonder whether you’d stumbled onto the set of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
But even so, many of the people we have most wanted to catch up with have been around, and the most meaningful things that have happened since our return 2 weeks ago has been renewing contact with friends. We’ve had a more or less constant stream of visitors, which has been both surprising and encouraging, and has really helped in dealing with the odd coup de blues* over leaving New Zealand.
We have not come back with a stack of new projects to launch into, but already we see the few ideas we have beginning to take shape. Some of them are not quite cooked enough to talk about them here, but we are really enjoying having the space to step off the ministry “roundabout”, and actually ask the question, “Lord, what do you have for us to do?”, and sensing the freedom to wait for him to answer before forging ahead.
Not sure that we’ve ever been in this place before.
*coup de blues – you can probably guess: a time of feeling down.
When you’re travelling there are so many things that can go wrong. In fact I had just been reflecting on the fact that our travel so far on this trip has been surprisingly uneventful and straightforward, when something happened. Sure enough – I didn’t really think we were going to get back to France without something exciting happening.
As we were travelling at 100kph along the motorway north of Auckland in our white diesel van on loan from OM New Zealand (yes, that great OM tradition of getting about in ageing but faithful vans has even made it to the bottom of the world!), when a big bang, a loud warning siren and a lot of smoke alerted us to the fact that something was not quite right. To make it even more exciting, the brakes failed, and my wife told me afterward that my face went even whiter than the van (which needs a good clean, actually – the van, not my face). At that speed bringing the van to a stop was a tricky manoeuvre, but a couple of hundred meters later I was able to safely pull off the road, as it turned out, right beside an emergency phone.
Little tip if you ever happen to break down on a New Zealand motorway: look for an emergency phone rather than using your cell phone. If you call from one of these, the motorway authority will have you towed free of charge to the nearest garage (something about keeping the motorway secure).
As it turned out, the nearest garage was in a town where we happen to have some good friends who were away overseas – such good friends that we actually know the door code to get into their appartment! We were able to camp there while the van was being fixed (broken fan belt and blown out radiator). It was a bit of a pain being delayed for two nights, but we made good use of the time.
It could have been so much worse. I know that just because God is looking after us it doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen. But in this particular instance we were pretty impressed by his care for us, in the way that a potentially disastrous situation turned into a reason for thanksgiving (the prayers of a faithfully praying mother-in-law also probably had something to do with it!)
[posted with ecto]
A drop of colour may change things,
My imagination may give me wings,
But with you Jesus I will fly away ,
In your hands I lay
Because you are strong and good,
Cry I could,
But you will cheer me up ,
I will drink in your cup,
Feed in your bowl
Because I have one goal,
To serve you only.
Laura Bourn (10)
Having been a parent for 13 years (we have just become parents of a teenager!), I should have learned a thing or two about prayer for and with my children. Sadly, one of the biggest lessons is that I don’t do it often enough.
You’d think it would just come naturally – I pray on my own, so why not with my kids. But it actually takes practice, perseverance, and a bit of training (for the parent as much as the child). I find it kind of hard to pray with a kid who has been bouncing off the walls only seconds earlier, but I must acknowledge that the problem is mostly in my head. I think of prayer too much as a sober, spiritual activity, and not enough as a natural conversation with the One who knows me more intimately than anyone. I don’t think that Jesus is at all phased by the exuberance of children, so why should I be?
Last night with some friends we prayed for my 6 year old son who has a persistent stutter for which speech therapy has been ineffective. We’ve tried lots of different approaches to help him get over it, but looking back, the times when there has been improvement have been directly linked with times of specific prayer for the problem.
It was really amazing to see how my son responded. Read the rest of this entry »
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