Another chance for a quick blog before starting back to college on Monday!!
This time I've been thinking about how we in the West view healing and medicines. I have seen how the British health service has taken my father-in-law and step father and treated each of their ailments as individual ailments but never as holistic. And yet as Christians we are happy to send someone to the local hospital after we've prayed for healing for them if nothing happens. But to suggest sending someone to a herbalist, who deals in holistic medicine and how may or may not be a Christian is seen as wrong. We seem to put our trust in the trained professionals whether doctors or preachers. Again I find that if I, in certain places, were to stand up and preach, prophecy, whatever, I would be asked where I got my training from and if I said just from God I could be looked as askance.
I am not saying that we go to untrained herbalists or acupuncturists or other types of alternative healers, but I am also saying that not all doctors are Christians and so maybe we should not put so much trust in them as we do.
Perhaps again we need to go back to trusting God and asking Him what His plan is for our healing!!
Saturday 30 October 2010
Friday 29 October 2010
Best Laid Plans.....
I was planning to blog every day because of it being half term but there has been family and friends to catch up with and assignments to get sorted and God on the move.
There seemed to be a plan at one point at to what I was doing but now things have shifted. I think I am being led down a path I'm not sure about which will not have the same clout and recognition I had been hoping and then this morning I read in "Reconciliation and Justice as a Way of Life" in an article from John S Holden called "A Witness and a Testimony" (oh this is where college seems to be kicking in - everything is referenced!!) that I am very slowly working through, 'You want for instance to do some great service and to fill some great sphere. but Christ's answer to your longing is to set you down to face the difficulties of a small work in a place where there is little recognition'.
I have had to put together a personal statement in my university application process and have found it very hard. It is very much about honouring oneself which is just so hard anyway. But I had planned to do Social Policy on a number of accounts; it makes going to university at my age worth it as it will be doing something worthwhile, and also I have had this prophecy about how I have the keys for industry, agriculture, the arts, education, government, and so much more that I believed going into something Social Policy related would be the way God would fulfill that.
Well after a trying week trying to do a Sociology assignment and get this personal statement to be on the Social Policy angle I gave it up to God. Oh why didn't I do that in the first place. And then started on a Cultural Studies/History assignment which I was really enjoying.
Well what seems to have come out of it, and from this sentence from this article and other types of confirmation is that it looks like I'll be doing History and Creative Writing. I've always wanted to do Creative Writing but have been put off as it seems so popular at the moment. I just love to write. And also I have always loved History and in fact said not so long back that I wish I'd been encouraged to do History when I was 18.
I have a friend at the moment who is struggling with his life but he says he wont pray about it because God may not give him the answer he wants. I know God isn't obtuse but sometimes if we are willing to say, and mean, 'Jesus, You are Lord of my life' then sometimes He does what we don't expect. Or what I feel in my case, is pushing me where I wanted to go but didn't think it was 'good enough'.
Thank goodness we have a loving Father who's on our side. Shame we don't trust Him more :-)
There seemed to be a plan at one point at to what I was doing but now things have shifted. I think I am being led down a path I'm not sure about which will not have the same clout and recognition I had been hoping and then this morning I read in "Reconciliation and Justice as a Way of Life" in an article from John S Holden called "A Witness and a Testimony" (oh this is where college seems to be kicking in - everything is referenced!!) that I am very slowly working through, 'You want for instance to do some great service and to fill some great sphere. but Christ's answer to your longing is to set you down to face the difficulties of a small work in a place where there is little recognition'.
I have had to put together a personal statement in my university application process and have found it very hard. It is very much about honouring oneself which is just so hard anyway. But I had planned to do Social Policy on a number of accounts; it makes going to university at my age worth it as it will be doing something worthwhile, and also I have had this prophecy about how I have the keys for industry, agriculture, the arts, education, government, and so much more that I believed going into something Social Policy related would be the way God would fulfill that.
Well after a trying week trying to do a Sociology assignment and get this personal statement to be on the Social Policy angle I gave it up to God. Oh why didn't I do that in the first place. And then started on a Cultural Studies/History assignment which I was really enjoying.
Well what seems to have come out of it, and from this sentence from this article and other types of confirmation is that it looks like I'll be doing History and Creative Writing. I've always wanted to do Creative Writing but have been put off as it seems so popular at the moment. I just love to write. And also I have always loved History and in fact said not so long back that I wish I'd been encouraged to do History when I was 18.
I have a friend at the moment who is struggling with his life but he says he wont pray about it because God may not give him the answer he wants. I know God isn't obtuse but sometimes if we are willing to say, and mean, 'Jesus, You are Lord of my life' then sometimes He does what we don't expect. Or what I feel in my case, is pushing me where I wanted to go but didn't think it was 'good enough'.
Thank goodness we have a loving Father who's on our side. Shame we don't trust Him more :-)
Sunday 24 October 2010
Jesus Christ Superstar
I've been meaning to blog the thought on going to this for about 3 weeks now but the busyness of college and family life is taking its toil, so some of my first impressions will not be there but here goes -
Firstly it was great to see an amazing rock opera done with such skill and style by an amateur dramatic group. And with the director being an acquaintance of ours that made it even more fun.
From what I remember neither Andrew Lloyd Webber or Tim Rice were Christians when they wrote this and I know this director isn't which actually makes it an interesting piece to wonder at why they did it. But to me, in that last week of Jesus' earthly life so often in Church we forget that He was fully human as well as full divine. Here was a real man, with feelings, knowing He was going to His death, a death that He had witness probably hundreds of times and so knew how horrid, how painful it could be, and by this point would know what His human body could endure. He knew what the total humiliation was going to be and I do wonder if He feared He would let everyone down, that His humanness would totally take over.
I'm not sure about others, but for me very much the fact that Jesus could go through all that fully human and still obey God, that He did have fears and concerns, that He did wonder what the whole point to it was, why after all His time on earth there were still beggars, cripples, people who needed healing, people who still didn't recognize who He really was, what was really inside of Him, and yet inspite of all that He was still willing to obey God, still willing to go to the cross and die in the hope that He and His Father had got things sorted, that He was doing the right thing.
Sometimes I get upset that people don't know who I am, that they don't see what is inside of me and because of who they are hear things that I say in a different way to what I mean, and yet God knows and actually I am just to be open and to obey God. And if Jesus truly was fully human, as well as fully divine, if Jesus also felt insecure in His mission, and had real human feelings and yet still obeyed then I know I can do it too.
I wonder why so often though we do not want to see the humanness of Jesus. I wonder if that would mean that if we did then we would know that His live and His obedience to God are obtainable, whereas if we accentuate His divinity over and above His humanity then we can keep telling ourselves that we will never attain to what Jesus did!!!
I do remember someone once teaching that if we could get our heads round the fact that Jesus' divinity in His humanness came from the same Holy Spirit that lives in us then we would be so so different.
Firstly it was great to see an amazing rock opera done with such skill and style by an amateur dramatic group. And with the director being an acquaintance of ours that made it even more fun.
From what I remember neither Andrew Lloyd Webber or Tim Rice were Christians when they wrote this and I know this director isn't which actually makes it an interesting piece to wonder at why they did it. But to me, in that last week of Jesus' earthly life so often in Church we forget that He was fully human as well as full divine. Here was a real man, with feelings, knowing He was going to His death, a death that He had witness probably hundreds of times and so knew how horrid, how painful it could be, and by this point would know what His human body could endure. He knew what the total humiliation was going to be and I do wonder if He feared He would let everyone down, that His humanness would totally take over.
I'm not sure about others, but for me very much the fact that Jesus could go through all that fully human and still obey God, that He did have fears and concerns, that He did wonder what the whole point to it was, why after all His time on earth there were still beggars, cripples, people who needed healing, people who still didn't recognize who He really was, what was really inside of Him, and yet inspite of all that He was still willing to obey God, still willing to go to the cross and die in the hope that He and His Father had got things sorted, that He was doing the right thing.
Sometimes I get upset that people don't know who I am, that they don't see what is inside of me and because of who they are hear things that I say in a different way to what I mean, and yet God knows and actually I am just to be open and to obey God. And if Jesus truly was fully human, as well as fully divine, if Jesus also felt insecure in His mission, and had real human feelings and yet still obeyed then I know I can do it too.
I wonder why so often though we do not want to see the humanness of Jesus. I wonder if that would mean that if we did then we would know that His live and His obedience to God are obtainable, whereas if we accentuate His divinity over and above His humanity then we can keep telling ourselves that we will never attain to what Jesus did!!!
I do remember someone once teaching that if we could get our heads round the fact that Jesus' divinity in His humanness came from the same Holy Spirit that lives in us then we would be so so different.
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