Oct 27, 2020 | Care Conversations
It’s OK to Feel . . .
We finished last time with the question, “How do we deal with grief, pain and sadness?”
The first response is, “It is OK to feel grief, pain and sadness.”
Remember our yardstick for understanding? The Word of God. The Bible is filled with stories of people who experience tragedy, grief, misery and deep sadness.
Almost half of the Psalms focus on lament. For example,
“How long . . . must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?” Psalm 13.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me… I cry by day but you do not answer, and by night but I find no rest…” Psalm 22.
Our lives are a mixture of knowing joy in the presence of God and deep anguish of the soul. Paul experiences the heights of joy in Romans 8 – boldly proclaiming the great love of God in Christ, and then . . . almost immediately we see in Romans 9 “. . . I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart . . . ”
C S Lewis, after the death of his wife, Joy, said, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear . . .” Fear and grief may be frequent visitors during our earthly life. The Psalmist again shares this: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in You”. Psalm 56:3. Note he does not say IF I am afraid, but WHEN I am afraid. It will happen; the twin experiences of grief and fear will affect us.
Oct 27, 2020 | Teachers Talking
Something Beautiful for God
Each class in a primary school was asked to choose a person who had faithfully followed the Lord Jesus to make a redemptive difference in the lives of others. During the year, the students would have the opportunity to tell this story. Year 4 chose Mother Teresa and here is her story…
Unwavering Compassion
Few have embodied the mission of Jesus as sublimely as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, born in Macedonia (1910 – 1997), better known as Mother Teresa. At 18 years of age, she joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland. After taking her vows as a Catholic nun, she taught in a secondary school in Calcutta, India. In 1946, in the midst of the widespread suffering and poverty around her, she received a ‘call within a call’ and she opened a school for slum children, relying on volunteer and financial support. Two years later she was granted permission to start her own order, with the mission to care for the homeless, those rejected and uncared for by society, the lepers, the blind and the disabled – those shunned by everyone.
The order she commenced began with only 13 sisters and came to be known as the Sisters of Charity. It now numbers 4000 nuns who care for the underprivileged, disabled and disadvantaged through AIDS hospices and charity centres around the world. Mother Teresa’s life of service provided people the opportunity to die with dignity. Calcutta’s Home for the Dying allows “people who have lived like animals to die like angels – loved and wanted”. She passed away on 5 September 1997 and her life witnessed to Jesus’ love expressed to those who had no capacity to repay her compassion.
How did the students respond to their exploration? They learnt “We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
The class wrote and acted out a drama about Mother Teresa’s life at a presentation night. Students were challenged about their own attitudes to the materialism of the surrounding culture and how they might show the sacrificial love of Jesus to the poor and lonely in practical ways and this was later expressed in their service activities. They had encountered the sweet fragrance of a life lived for Christ just as many years earlier the famous journalist Malcolm Muggeridge visited Calcutta and said “when the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I was leaving behind all the beauty and joy in the universe…” (Muggeridge M. (1971) Something Beautiful for God p. 17)
“… live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 5:2)
Grace and Peace
The Team
The Excellence Centre
Oct 27, 2020 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
Shaken but not stirred. Some of you will recognise this famous statement from the James Bond movies. When requesting his preferred beverage, James Bond, the British Secret Service agent, 007 would request his drink be shaken and not stirred. When it comes to the journey of faith, the idea of being shaken but not stirred relates to our foundations and what pins us in place when hard times hit. In other words, the more we understand who God is, the more secure we become when we collide with the ballistic missiles of affliction, fired at us by the enemy, designed to demolish our faith. Although we feel the impact of difficulty and we may be shaken up, our foundations are not stirred because we are planted in an unshakable Kingdom. (Hebrews 12:28). We might feel shaken but we remain unstirred.
Every one of us have, or will experience the tremor of tragedy and distress throughout our lives. Yet, we have a hope that runs deep and flows from the arteries of Kingdom truth, and that will always lead us back to our solid foundations which remain unstirred, even when we feel shaken. When the missiles are fired at us and we feel like the shaking could take us out, we turn to the unchanging King, who sits on His immovable throne, in the kingdom that is built on unshakable foundations. This King always, always, always knows what He is doing. Being confident in who our King is and who it is we belong to allows us to be shaken but not stirred.
So, friends, get your ”Kingdom foundations” on today.
Best days to come
Wen
Catch up on more Thoughts of the Week here
Oct 21, 2020 | Perserverance
Hope Through Perseverance – The Journey with Others in the Face of Hardship
As we have journeyed through 2020 with the theme of Hope through Perseverance, we are acutely aware of the truth that faith is not an indemnity against difficulty. The ragged edges of reality cut into the flesh of our lives when we encounter a crisis. What we are guaranteed is God’s presence, His people and His provision along the pathway. Each of these shape within us stories of faithful endurance and in turn we become the storytellers of God’s goodness and faithfulness as we learn to stay the path when trials hit.
In this edition, we are reminded that God designed us to journey through life in community and relationship with others. Collectively we walk the journey, holding one another up, spurring each other on and demonstrating that our faith can endure in the face of the fire. In the end, together we become a signpost of hope to each other and also to a world that begs for something beyond wishful thinking that is underpinned by a positive mental attitude.
Think about what inspires you and means the most when you are facing and enduring your own trials. Apart from the faithful presence of God, is it not the faithful testimonies of others who have stood the test of time, stayed the path and although they have been shredded by some of life’s worst tragedies, they raise their heads and bellow in their loudest voice that God is still God in the midst of all things. These heroes of the faith all testify to the irreplaceable love and support of those who walk the miles of tragedy with them through the ditches of disaster.
It seems that longevity of faith is connected with faithful companions who God bonds us with who become His living embodiment of love and encouragement when life gets tough. The love of our friends in the midst of crisis is irreplaceable. It is a lovely act of God to create community and to immerse us into a body of people who are orientated around Jesus and united in purposed.
The Apostle Paul is a Biblical hero of the faith who encountered unimaginable hardship and suffering. In 2 Corinthians 6, we read his account of affliction with one thing after another raining down on him, peppering him with adversity. Yet, Paul also speaks about the irreplaceable value of his friends and colleagues (Romans 16), who journeyed with him.
In the pages of history, we read of many other heroes who have stood the test of time in the pilgrimage of faith. William Wilberforce was one such hero. He was called to champion the abolition of slavery, facing crisis after crisis in his attempt to take down the mountain of cruelty that permitted the slave trade. His call was clear, but what sustained him was his connection to the community known as the Clapham Sects, who became a community of faith and a force that not only carried Wilberforce through his darkest hours, but also became a collective community of change that lead to the abolition of slavery. Wilberforce articulated, that no matter how noble the philanthropic vision for abolishing slavery may have been, it was foolish to think he could accomplish this without the support of the community of faith, friends, colleagues, and his family. He walked a road if immense sacrifice being constantly vilified on his 18-year campaign of social reform, pursuing the revocation of a lucrative trade business that horrendously assaulted black human lives. The realisation of his vision came on his death bed after his long battle with a debilitating illness that at times crippled him. The community that God raised up for him, were the group that held this champion of faith up in his worst hours.
I wonder as we ponder this, who your hero(s) may be? Who comes to your mind as the person or people that are your mainstay; people who have done the hard yards with you in your times of trial? These people are your champions and the ones who keep you buoyant when you think you’re about to drown. What a gift God has given us in friendship and community.
As we head towards the end of this year, may we endure and be storytellers of God’s goodness and champions together in the community of God. For the victorious journey of faith in times of trial, is inextricably linked to the people God has planted in our lives who will cheer us on and walk alongside us on the rocky road, until we cross the line and shout “God is God in the midst of all things”.
Read more from Tina Lamont
Oct 20, 2020 | Care Conversations
A few years back we planned to trip the UK to visit family. I have two brothers and one sister who are UK residents. A couple of months before we were due to set off, one of my brothers was diagnosed with bladder and liver cancer. He died a week before our trip. Why him? Why were we denied the opportunity to spend time together?
A family we know well suffered a tragedy. Our children grew up together. The mother of the family is a wonderful Christian educator; dad was a church pastor and sadly he died of lung and brain cancer. Why such tragedy in the lives of servants of Christ?
My wife, Maureen, spent fifteen months caring for and nursing her close friend as she succumbed to throat cancer. Why such suffering for such a godly woman?
Maureen’s sister is a generous and compassionate person, who has spent much of her life in nursing others. She has experienced two bouts of serious breast cancer and her husband has had a series of aneurisms and kidney failure requiring dialysis three days a week for the rest of his life. As if that wasn’t enough, their thirty-year-old son has been undergoing treatment, including three major surgeries, for brain cancer. How much pain can a family bear?
Judah Levi Brown a three-year-old boy was found unconscious in a swimming pool, belonging to family friends. His mother had been carefully monitoring the children. She was distracted for less than a minute. Medics rushed him to hospital; the prognosis was poor. His mother, father and extended family prayed fervently that he would be miraculously saved. He was pronounced dead three days later. Imagine the pain, the guilt, the anguish . . .
A short time later, Judah’s parents became aware of a similar tragedy with a young child; people also prayed and this time the child recovered. Imagine the confusion, the sense of painful joy for the second family intermingled with an agonising sense of unfairness.
Is God sovereign? Is Christ sufficient? Is He fair? How do we deal with such grief, pain and sadness?
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