Too easily forgotten

We serve God by serving others. We love him by loving others.

So much to try to digest about what those truths should look like in my own life...

Mutua Mahiaini

A brilliant, brilliant quote about performance versus God's grace.

We know of course, how central the forgiveness of our sins is to salvation. We preach it, we believe in it. We see that first repentance and surrender to Christ as a glorious moment. We also accept that having come to the Lord, we must continue to purify our lives. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness". 1 John 1:19 But in talking with many belivers, I get the impression that most of us consider the ongoing repentance of the saved as a not-so-glorious experience. A sort of sad necessity.

Sin grieves God. We must not down-play the seriousness of it in the life of a believer. But we must come to terms with the fact that God's grace is GREATER THAN ALL OUR SINS. Repentance is one of the Christian's highest privileges. A repentant Christian focusses on God's mercy and God's grace. Any moment when we bask in God's mercy and grace is our highest moment. Higher than when we feel smug in our decent performance and cannot think of anything we need to confess.

Whenever we fail-and fail we will, the Spirit of God will work on us and bring us to the foot of the Cross where Jesus carried our failures. That is potentially a glorious moment. For we could at that moment accept God's abundant mercy and grace and go forth with nothing to boast of except Christ Himself, or else we struggle with our shame, focussing on that as well as our track record. We fail because we have shifted our attention from grace and mercy. One who draws on God's mercy and grace is quick to repent, but also slow to sin.

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

So, its been a while. I tried my best to resurrect the blog, but for some reason I just haven't felt like blogging much while on Relay. I have however, been learning a whole heap and God has been BRILLIANT, so i plan on reflecting on the last ten months (now sadly drawing to a close!) in the very near future. I think blogging what I've been learning will help me to order my thoughts and process the madness that has been Relay.

So, stay tuned (if you can really be bothered!)

B E A utiful!

This is just a little something for me to look back on really...today I had a great day!

The weather was beautifully sunny and yet crisp. The prayer meeting I went to rocked, despite not being well attended, the people who were there really REALLY love God. Awesome times of realising the full truth that Jesus didn't let anything stand in His way of reaching the Cross, of fulfilling the reason He came from Heaven to earth, because He was compelled by massive love and compassion. Marvelling at what true obedience in the face of overwhelming circumstances looks like. An unexpected lunch invite from a member of the new committee I'm slowly getting to know. Watching a couple of students talking to their peers about Jesus made my heart ache with joy! Waking past a couple of Muslims half an hour after Si had spoken to them and over-hearing them still talking about Jesus. Getting a text an hour later to say someone else had just walked past the same pair and they were STILL talking about Jesus. Receiving truth-filled post from other Relays-THANKYOU!!! Being taken out to dinner with most of the old committee by an amazing and hugely generous longterm UCCF supporter who regaled us with tales of his work in Thailand. Spelling semi-rude words with our fingers descending into uber childishness all round. Really loving the students. Having a lengthy, honest talk with mum and stepdad about my plans for the future, which more than likely involves not getting a job but travelling abroad to share the Gospel and putting into practice more of the amazing teaching I have learnt this year. Asking this question of myself-"out of all the opportunities I can see, with the person God has made me now, how can I best show the world the truth about God so that they can respond?" Knowing that whatever decision I make, God will be with me because that is His sovereign promise to me as His daughter. Preparing to step out of the boat.

GRITTY

The last two weeks have been somewhat crazy and now, accompanied by numerous mugfuls of lemsip and my duvet, I am going to attempt to make some sense of it all. Physically I am exhausted and feeling pretty much the same emotionally and spiritually.

I think its fair to say that Sussex mission week has been eventful! I'm always wary to label mission weeks as "sucessful/unsucessful". If the Gospel went out then thats all that matters and we can trust God to be at work in all that has gone on. Both the lunch and evening events were packed out and the talks prompted lots of questions from non-Christians, which was great! Throughout the week I was reminded of just how blind the world is to the truth and how desperately they need God to open eyes and soften hearts. Without God doing a work in people's hearts through His Spirit, however long or hard we preach it, the Gospel will simply just be a bunch of words. So we must, must be praying that He will be using all our efforts for His glory, to bring people into His Kingdom. I was so encouraged by the stories shared each morning at the prayer meetings of how faithful God was being, and hugely touched by the fervent prayers by CU members for their peers.

Praise God that Christ is our hope and our salvation! That even when people come along to events with the express intention of scoffing at everything that is said, when verbal attacks are made towards people who are proclaiming truth, and even when an individual who claims to be the Messaiah becomes disturbingly confrontational, God is still sovereignly at work in all situations. With great sadness I admit that the sinfulness in my heart lead me to feel real anger towards the scoffers, mixed in with some degree of fear. Instead of my first reaction being one of wanting to sit down to try to help them get at what we were really saying and not just what they thought we were saying, I just wanted to tell them to shut up and have some respect. I also really wanted to just go off and cry at the sadness of the whole situation. And yet only by the grace of God was I able to walk over and offer answers of truth to the questions they had about Christianity. I don't know when it happened, but I had completely forgotten about the reality of the daily spiritual battle we are in. That to the world, the good news of Jesus is nothing but foolishness. And yet we are called to persevere, remembering that the ultimate battle against evil has been won. It is finished, the victory cry that rings in our ears. Jesus has told us to go make disciples and so we must go, knowing that He is with us every step of the way. Jesus was mocked and misunderstood most of the days of His life and yet He still continued to love, to humbly forgive and ultimately He died on the Cross for all sinners. And it is by keeping our eyes fixed unswervingly to the Cross that we find the strength and boldness to continue proclaiming Jesus as Lord. It is in Him that we find our indentity, our value and worth. It is in Him that we find our rest and comfort and shelter. He is our rock. Jesus is, has been and always will be, Lord over all. And so we will carry on pointing people to Him, because He fully and completely deserves to be praised and glorified over all the earth.

Some things...

Not much blogging activity on my part due primarily to the following things;

• Late night editing sessions of USCU mission week promo vid, FUN FUN FUN
• Last minute composing of the all important kareoke song for Relay 2 next week-lyrics soon to be disclosed, but not until the South-east have blown the socks off the competition!
• Reading of CJ Mahaney's book on Humility-True greatness (thoughts to follow...)
• trying to decide what on earth to do post-Relay...some options include, getting a job that actually puts money into the bank, volunteering on the Om ships http://www.omships.org/, joining the circus with fellow Relayers (!), working for a charity or church.........really should be thinking/praying more about this as June will be here before I know it.
• teaching mother how to use her new laptop
• Trying to write an evangelistic talk on "what is life all about anyway?"
• Loving prepping Bible study on Hosea 13
• getting my head around the fact that God is sovereign, hears my prayers but answers them in HIS timing and according to HIS will!

Bloggage to recommence upon my return from training in Herefordshire by the end of next week.

Tuesday (original i know)

Today has been pretty much brilliant, and its only lunchtime. Went to prayer breakfast on campus at the rediculous hour of 8am, and then just sat and chatted with a couple of lovely girls for 2hrs. What an immense joy that it is my job for the next 5months or so, to encourage people as we share our lives and get into the Word together! Then I wandered around for a while in the rain, and eventually found somewhere to sit to prep my talk for Relay 2. I can't have been there for more than 10mins, when a woman came in and sat on her own at the other end of the table I was using. When I looked up, I could see that she was crying, clearly in some distress and was holding something very tightly in her hand. I got up to ask her if there was anything I could do to help and she she just shook her head. Not really knowing what to do next, I gently offered her a hug. She accepted, and that was the start of the most amazing conversation I have ever had with someone about Jesus. Praise God that He gave me not only the words to say, but the compassion and love to not just ignore her as others were doing in the room. Praise God that throughout our conversation He was answering every single prayer I silently sent up. Praise God that the Gospel is our hope, that because of Jesus we can know a life other than despair and isolation and darkness. Praise God that His Holy Spirit is at work softening peoples hearts. Praise God that it was HIS love that was touching my new friend, and that He was blessing me massively in doing so.

We talked for a long time. It turned out that in her hands she was clinging onto two big crystals as hard as she could. I asked her softly why she was doing that, what it was that she was hoping to gain from the crystals. Her answer-healing and security. Praise God that I was able to challenge her in a non-confrontational manner, that eventually she was able to see the crystals for what they were, just crystals. We talked for a long time about the One who could really give her those things, about the One who could understand and identify with everything she had been through and was experiencing. Praise God that He is the only One who can help us all, that He is the only One who can change our hearts and heal the past. We talked about sin and how Jesus has paid the ultimate price for our forgiveness, and about our individual responsibility for claiming that righteousnesss in Christ. Praise God that in a room full of people two complete strangers were able to share intimate details of their lives with each other, that I was able to use some of the worst times in my life to give glory to God and to help this woman. Praise God that when a 23yr old Christian holds out the Word of life, a 37yr old woman recognises that they are words of wisdom!

Please, please join with me in praying for Catherine. It was a pleasure to meet her and we have exchanged numbers. Please pray that we would be able to meet up again, that she would hold on to the truths I told her today and not be overwhelmed by them. Please pray that her heart would be open and that God would use this time of hardship to break into her life. Please do also pray for me, that I would be continuous in my prayers for her, that I would be a great witness to her for God's glory. Praise God that He does have good works prepared in advance for us to do, and praise Him that He equips us and uses us in our weakness to reach out to those around us!

second attempt

Ok...so blogging has been left by the wayside for a LONG TIME now. Mostly because I have been busy living life and partly due to my very own laziness. Today however, I remembered the reason I like blogging, because I want to encourage others by sharing what God is doing in my life. I have a love/hate relationship with blogging in that it makes me stop and think and try to order my thoughts into some sort of coherent manner, which takes EFFORT! What I do like (and have definitely missed) is having some sort of record of the amazing things God has either done in me or used me for, or both. And so, with trepidation I am stepping back up into the blogosphere.

So much has happened since I last blogged so I shall try to summarise. My first term on Relay did not go at all as I had neatly planned out in my head (!!!) I made mistakes, I wasted a lot of time and for a while pretty much almost lost sight of who I am in Christ. There were a lot of things going on in my family life and never before had I been faced with the extent of the enormity of my sin. I was horrified and almost let it paralyse me by looking inwards, away from Jesus. It was one of those times when there's just so much stuff going on inside a person that you actually truly believe that you could implode at any time. I won't go into the specifics because they aren't helpful. What is important though, are the lessons God graciously taught me over and over again, that it was Him who lifted my eyes back to the Cross. God blessed me in so many ways and I can truly say its a privilege to be working alongside the students at Sussex uni. I hold them very dear to my heart and they continue to be in my prayers.