New Paths

After having spent an hour or so battling with distraction, sleepiness and other things that interrupted my devotional time, I decided to go out somewhere different for a walk.  It’s good to be adventurous!  The discipline of devotional time is good but my relationship with Jesus does not have to look predictably the same every morning.  How quickly our lives can get boxed in, settled into dullness and routine.  I am not saying that routine is wrong, don’t hear that, but spontaneity can be good; responding to nudges from Holy Spirit is always good.  It keeps my relationship with him fresh, alive. 

Holy Spirit is endlessly creative with his ideas and likes to come up with the unexpected.  I need the nourishment of the bread of life but I am trying to learn to let him lead.  Sometimes I sing, sometimes I sit in silence, sometimes I read huge chunks of the bible, sometimes I get stuck in one verse, sometimes I read something else, not scripture.  Sometimes I sit on the floor in my bedroom, or in my office in the morning sun, or on the sofa in the sitting room.  And sometimes I go for a walk with Jesus instead!  Godly habits are good but when I get boxed in by religiosity, where I think I “haven’t done it properly” if I haven’t read my bible then written in my journal, it kills life.  

I drove, via a takeaway where I grabbed a coffee and a sugary treat, to a new country park and walked up the first trail I saw. It was still and quiet, miles from home and no-one was around.  As I climbed, the steepness of the track felt like the path I have been on spiritually. I passed a bench along the way which had a nice view but if I had sat there and then gone back to the car, I would have missed out on so much. There are always temptations to stop on the way, like Abraham’s father in Haran.

My destination was called Windy Hill and the path was clearly marked, like the path God has for me.  Hebrews 12:1, says he has marked it out for me, even when it doesn’t feel like it.  I need to keep walking in the direction he last pointed me in, until the next road marker appears.  I kept going.

I reached the top of Windy Hill quite quickly only to discover that it was definitely misnamed today and was far from the idyllic spot to sit and drink my coffee and eat my treat.  It was swarming with the famous Scottish midges who were clearly hungry.  As I looked back over the way I had come, I was surprised at how much ground I had covered.  God spoke to me about how looking back to see how far I had come was a spur to continue.  It is good to spend time being aware of how far I have come, celebrating the fact that I am not where I was.  In that celebration, I have the opportunity to thank God, to praise his faithfulness in bringing me to this point.  Seeing what he has done in my life is an encouragement to keep going when the path seems hard or uncertain.  Just like he told the Israelites to remember what he had done for them in the rescue from Egypt, his provision for them, his goodness. It helps us keep following.

As I looked around, enjoying the openness and how much I could see, despite the fact that on the very high peaks there was still morning mist, I spotted another peak further on.  Another spur to continue on was the presence of the midges.  Sometimes enemy activity can be an encouragement to keep moving! 

On that next hilltop, there was a breeze and no midges biting.  It is worth persevering, God always has more for us to grow into. None of us has “arrived” while we are still on this earth. I could see for miles.  After the confinement of lockdown, this seems like a real time of expansion, of our horizons being extended, of our vision being enlarged.  In this land of big skies and wide, open spaces, God is stretching me, growing me, increasing my capacity for more of him.   

As I walked back down the path, I was thinking about going back and looking back.  I don’t want to suffer Lot’s wife’s fate in Genesis 19.  She looked back at the place she was leaving and became a pillar of salt.  In the unfamiliarity of this time where so much feels new, it is tempting to look back to what was with a sense of regret or longing.  I am excited about what God is doing and about the possibility of what lies ahead but sometimes it can feel like life was a lot easier where I was.  When I’m tired or feeling the emotions of being in this new place, the voice that whispers, “who do you think you are?” or “what if you got it wrong?” can feel very seductive.   

Reading the story in Genesis 19 later, I was struck by the verses where Lot, instructed to run to the mountains, asked instead to be allowed to run to the nearby town of Zoar.  He was scared and so settled in the moment for the limitation of the town named “Small”.  He doubted that he could make it to the mountains.  He allowed fear and doubt to cripple his ability to obey.  He allowed to fear and doubt to limit his choices and pull him into smallness.  How easy that is to do.  Small feels safe.  Small feels more attainable.  Small feels like less effort, less risk.  Small feels like something I can do in my own strength.  Small feels a whole lot less scary. 

The temptation to smallness is something that I feel I have battled with forever and is part of my identity that needs to be reworked, reshaped, like the pot on the potter’s wheel in Jeremiah 18.  The pot had been defiled, corrupted, marred, spoiled from the potter’s original intention and so he reworked it.  Smallness of thinking, limited mindsets are not part of God’s design plan for any of us.  We are children of a very big, very powerful God who is limited and constrained by absolutely nothing.  In this land, I sense that God is encouraging me from those familiar verses in Isaiah 54:2

Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes.

I feel like smallness is also part of what has happened to the body of Christ and so in this unsettling time that we are going through, God is reshaping his church to increase her capacity for more of him.  The body of Christ needs to be reshaped to carry his glory, to be a vessel through which his light can shine to the uttermost parts of the earth.  Where it has become misshapen, God is at work.

For me, I am choosing to allow God to show me where smallness and limitation has invaded my thinking, my life.  How often do the words, “I can’t” penetrate my mindsets, my decision making?  How big is my God?  How big are my dreams?  Have I limited myself to what I can achieve in my own strength?  Where have I put limits on what is possible, what is “allowed” and are those limits scriptural?  Mark 10:27 reminds us that he is a God of possibility:

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.

I wonder what boxes God would like to break us out of, what possibilities he would like to insert into our lives.

For me this is a season of exploration as I allow God to lead me into new things, new ways of seeing, new ways of operating.  There is always so much more of God, and in God, to explore.  I am in a new place, with a new church, new people to get to know, a whole new land to explore and it is a picture of what God is doing.  These two verses of scripture from Isaiah 43: 18-19, that seemed to get overworked in the last year or two, illustrate what God is doing:

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

So, let’s be thankful and remember, but let’s not look back to the past, with longing, regret, or rose-tinted glasses.  This verse is very strong, it says forget the past (to be held in tension with the verses that say “remember”!).  It is easy to understand the instruction to forget, to move on, when it was not good but there are times God asks us to move on from what is good.  In the same way that he talks about pruning those that bear fruit in John 15:2, in order to increase fruitfulness, sometimes there is a laying down of what seems good, in order to move into more fruitfulness.   

Ultimately, we get to choose to trust that he knows the path he is leading us on and so my prayer is that he would open my eyes to perceive the new thing that he is doing, in my life, and in the church more widely, and that any mindsets that would limit or restrict my ability to run into it wholeheartedly would be renewed.