Not knowing

so I´ve been thinking. As you know I´ve been working in a girls prison, trying to share a bit of God´s love with them (cliche - but you know what I mean). I keep saying that it´s great to be doing real youth work again -- but it´s also completely different. Normally with a youth group, there's feedback - young people respond to the activities and discussions, they argue and disagree, they hang out and chat, they have opinions.

With the girls in the prison, there is virtually no feedback whatsoever. With rival gang members in the same group, none of them are going to respond to discussions or share their personal thoughts. The rest just seem passive and hardly respond at all - perhaps wanting to keep their heads down and out of trouble. As they all have to file out together at the end of the session, there´s no time to hang out with them or have a more personal conversation with one or two of them. And the more I hear their lack of response, the more I realise how much I want to know. I want to know what they think. I want to know their response to what we talk about, the activities I use to try and explain and demonstrate God´s love for them. I want to know if any of them have faith, if they want to seek God, if they want to change their lives.

And I realise that I actually have no right to know. No right at all. I realise that my desire to know their response is just the same as the big campaign evangelist who needs to know (and publish) the numbers of converts who have arrived at the front of the auditorium - and it always seems to me that that is all about boosting their own ego rather than ... rather than what ... actually I can´t even think of why else you´d need to know numbers like that (does that prove my point?). No wait... of course it´s cause we want to celebrate what God is doing in people´s lives .... but actually are we really celebrating God and praising him for his work.. or are we celebrating our own acheivements - and patting ourselves on the back???? Somehow we need to know that we are making a difference, that our actions are worth something, that someone is listening to what we say or reading what I write!.  (Did you know that there´s a thing on this blog that lets me know how many people read each post!)

And the more I think about it, and the more I go to the prison, the more I realise that I am not responsible for the girls response to what I do. And my job isn´t to create results or certain responses -- but simply to obey what God is leading me in. The girls response does not validate my work or my life even. Of course this isn´t an excuse for being insensitive or offensive but having no response from the girls makes me pray more, to listen more to God´s leading whilst I´m preparing sessions, and to pray for the girls inbetweentimes. The success (or not) of my work in the prison (-and whether or not I know which it is), doesn´t make any difference to how God accepts and loves me. I don´t have to earn anything or prove anything. It´s OK to not know.

Heretical readings???

I´m on a mission to finish reading all the books that I´ve started reading and not yet finished (there´s been a fair few over the last couple of years) ... and I thought I´d share a few thoughts about the most interesting ones.

First up is 'The Orthodox Heretic and other impossible tales' by Peter Rollins. It´s brilliant -- and is probably the most recent book that I´ve started and taken a while to finish reading -- not because it´s hard going or difficult - but actually because it´s one of those books that need to be chewed over and digested slowly allowing its ideas and stories to take up residence in your brain for a while - before you work out what they really are and really mean. It´s a collection of stories, parables, tales - whichever description you like best - which make you think.

That´s it really. But they really make you think!

Some are re-tellings of parables that Jesus told -- with a twist or an unexpected ending. It´s funny how reading a well known story retold with a few differences makes you reflect on what the original actually says (or doesn´t say) - and what it might actually mean for us today. (How have we become so convinced of the accepted intepretation of parables that we never stop of really listen and let God speak through them again?) It´s startling to realise that our actions and our lives in response to Jesus are so different to what we say we understand to be his teachings.

Many others are new stories or old stories - but all with that capacity to stop you in your tracks - to take time to ponder and grapple with it. It´s a refreshing way of thinking of God and our relationship with him. As great as systematic theological study is (?), theology (the study of God) comes alive when we think about it within our own stories. We need to see God´s interaction in our schizophrenic lives (aren´t most of us a random and incoherent collections of personalities and opinions?) and our inconsistent relationships with others. That is when stories matter. When so little is black and white. In the midst of messy lives and even messier relationships. When we see God at work - transforming us and others.

I´m sure that this is a book that I´ll be coming back to... but for now I´ll leave you with just one of it´s stories......

"Jesus withdrew privately by boat to a solitary place, but the crowds continued to follow him. Evening was now approaching and the people, many of whom had traveled a great distance, were growing hungry.
Seeing this, Jesus sent his disciples out to gather food, but all they could find were five loaves of bread and two fishes. Then Jesus asked that they go out again and gather up the provisions that the crowd had brought to sustain them in their travels. Once this was accomplished, a vast mountain of fish and bread stood before Jesus. Upon seeing this he directed the people to sit down on the grass.
Standing before the food and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks to God and broke the bread. Then he passed the food among his twelve disciples. Jesus and his friends ate like kings in full view of the starving people. But what was truly amazing, what was miraculous about this meal, was that when they had finished the massive banquet there were not even enough crumbs left to fill a starving person´s hand."

Pursuing God

The bus ride to and back from El Salvador also gave me the chance to do some reading.
This time, it was a classic by A. W. Tozer: The Pursuit of God. It was really good to reflect on how we search for God -- that our relationship with Him is not a result of right opinion, but of our connection with and experience of the living God. He explains how God planted in each of us the seed of longing for Him, but we choose how we continue to seek Him in our lives. He is at work all around us. The spiritual world is not separate from us or in a different dimension, but rather is an integral part of every aspect of our lives in the material world, "inviting our attention and challenging our trust".

We all have some sort of spiritual awareness, which we can choose to recognise and cultivate in order to see more of God - and to hear his voice. Interestingly he talks of how God is always talking - it´s just a case of us learning to listen - or to tune into his voice. "Every one of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain- a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an ssurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine."

With that basis, the presence of faith is not anything to do with right theologies, or a one off formulaic prayer, but "a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God". "Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus." That is somehow a huge challenge - but at the same time, a hilarious relief -  recognising that to seek more of God, I actually need to do less and listen and observe more. I want to do that.

You know you´re in El Salvador when ....

Yes I´ve just come back from a weekend in El Salvador where I was visiting Karla (who wants to do Stride in Uruguay) and meeting with her sending church. Being just next door to Guatemala there´s lots of things that are very similar -- but I did notice a few differences....

You know when you´re in El Salvador when...

1. The first thing you do is eat pupusas (and we had a choose of 7 different pupuserias within the space of one block!)
2. The roads are smooth
3. They have roundabouts (and the people know how to drive around them!)
4. The same sort of shopping malls -- but I didn´t see any gringos.
5. It´s just an hours drive to the coast

6. Church starts at 7AM !!!!!!!!
7. It´s so hot that I sweat standing still.