Listen to the Rhythm of the Rain

It has rained here all week.

Perhaps it is the ancient Scots blood in me, born down from my ancestors that acclimatised to gloomy, dark weather living up in the north of Scotland for all those centuries, that makes me feel comforted in rain. Rain has always felt soothing to me and this week I have been grateful for it calming my soul because this week has been difficult for me on a few fronts.

Justice has always been my driving force, although I didn't come to realise that until late in life. Learning that I love justice and hate injustice is what led me to study sociology and understanding how the world works, how it turns, how sociologists are passionate drivers for change in society. A passion for a just world and a believer that one person can impact the world for better. To break the darkness with light. 

But this week it has been tested because I had unfair and untrue accusations said to me, from both my workplace and an extended family relationship and in the past it would have been in my nature to cower and submit and give in and quietly walk away, letting it go, absorbing that shame and injustice, or as Erin Hanson says in her beautiful poem, that I "gave them what they wanted..... gave them life with endless sun."

Standing up for yourself is not always very easy. It is stressful for me. It still impacts negatively on my health but I have learned better how to deal with it and how to mentally process it.  I have learned how to confront bullies. I have learned what happens when you do. I've learned not to be controlled by others. 

I have learned that it is not always the healthy way to stay silent. 

Sometimes, though, it is necessary to be silent (such as dealing with personality disorders as I mentioned in my last post) and knowing the difference is part of this journey.

I've had to do both this week - confront unfair accusations and also to ignore the raging of a narcissist.  In doing so, working through these challenges, I realise how much I've grown personally and spiritually. Able to stand in the confidence of my belief systems and values and integrity, while partnering with God through life to grow closer to Him and lean on His strength through difficult times, to be sheltered by Him and heard.

So, I've been grateful for the rain this week, that has brought a calmness to my day, a solace of cool, quiet, refreshment, a steady presence and reminder that nothing beautiful would ever grow if it wasn't for the rain. 

Here is Erin Hanson's poem in full. You can find her wonderful work here on Instagram.

Constructing Jesus in our own Image

Religion is all about control.

Jesus is not.

Religion is a form of crowd control.

It all depends on the crowd.

For me to explain my own processing, I have to talk for a minute about how the basics of what I would come to know as social science influenced my pathway back to finding Jesus. 

Social science is looking at patterns in communities and individuals and finding out the why behind those patterns. 

As humans, whether we realise it or not, we love in cultural bubbles. The Earth is a bubble. A country is a bubble. A culture is a bubble. A family is a bubble. A home is a bubble. A workplace is a bubble. A school is a bubble. Your tennis club on the weekends is a bubble. Your church is a bubble.

Within those bubbles we have micro-cultures of spoken and unspoken rules.

Some people in society like to think they are non-comformers. They rebel against the social norms. It happens everywhere. Culture wouldn’t be culture without the rebels. Perhaps teenagers are the biggest non-conforming group (in my experience based from my daily research project of 4 teenagers). They have learned societal rules in childhood - in a western country things like: don’t pick your nose. Don’t lick shopping trolley handles. Don’t scream in church or have a tantrum in the store. Go to school. Wear these type of clothes. Have this type of hairstyle etc, etc. When they start discovering themselves as teens and realising it’s all just adults trying to control them, they push back for a bit. Eventually, the majority come around and conform to the society they are functioning within. If they don’t, society has its ways of punishing them, putting them in the Out groups.

Culture dictates the rules of society. Rules dictate culture. 

In my life experience of living in the chandelier-swinging happy place of Pentecostal Christianity to the starched collars of conservative, fundamental Christianity, and then into mainstream Christianity, this is no different. 

Humans can’t help themselves. We have to form groups. In groups. Out groups. In-groups of the Out-groups. We like rules. We like boundaries and we like to have a leader to tell us what to do and to have someone to blame when it all goes belly-up. Think about it. Who leads your place of work? Who leads your country? Who leads your church? Who leads your school? Leaders are everywhere because we as humans demand it.

As the book The Lord of the Flies demonstrates, you put a group of people on an island in the middle of nowhere and a culture and leader will grow. 

It’s the essence of the rise and fall of empires, civilisations, movements. Groups. Culture. Leaders. Rebels.

Groups. Culture. Leaders. Rebels.

A cycle of the history of the world in four words.

So what is my point in relating religion and culture?

Jesus knows that culture is man made. He knows that we will function within the cultures we adapt to, wherever we find ourselves. But that shouldn’t mean that the rules of that culture get attributed to Him.

He is not a rule-follower himself. He stirred up some trouble when he was here. He rebelled against the cultural norms of the day, especially the cultural norms of the religion of the day.

What if culture is blinding us to truth?

What if we can’t see the real Jesus because we’re too caught up in ritual and rules and cultural constructs? What if you start looking at everything around you from this point of view?

I did.

What happens when you start looking at Jesus beyond the boundaries of cultural context?

It changes the ways you see Jesus.

As I began to look at my belief system, my faith, I needed to separate out what was culturally-influenced Christianity and what was actually Jesus. 

I Remember His Goodness

We were in the middle of the lawsuit and everything was stacked against us.

We had already had to withdraw it because of statute of limitations issues and other reasons and now Bill Gothard was threatening sanctions against us for even filing a lawsuit in the first place. Sanctions that involved paying him money and what he called 'biblical reconciliation' among other things.

I couldn't understand it.

God had given me specific direction years before that this was what He wanted me to do. Not just me, but a few of the others also. Why was He now not coming to our rescue. Why did He not intervene? I was getting angry with God. It was my go-to reaction when things got bad. It's God's fault. He doesn't care. He doesn't listen. He won't even answer prayer.  He doesn’t do what he says he will do - in his own Bible, no less. 

I was mad, angry, disappointed, hurt that God would tell me to do something and then leave me all alone. 

The experience of the lawsuit allowed me to see God in a different way. I thought that, because I’d grown up in a pentecostal church, I understood spiritual battles, but this was a completely different experience to what I’d ever seen before. It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. It began in 2014 (for me in 2012), and didn’t stop until 2019. This was the period of time personally for me that was fraught with danger. My husband nearly lost his life through cardiac arrest, our finances were decimated, my children faced health issues-we’d just get through one thing and something else would slam us. It felt like a Job-of-the-Bible experience. I would never, never, ever recommend anyone going into something like this without reckoning and understanding that your life might be shattered.

Why were the onslaughts so powerful? Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally? 

And where was God? Why was He not helping?

Then the answer came. It came in the morning one day and I was pleading with God for help. Not just for myself, but for the other amazing women who were also on this battlefield. We were being pounded and we were battered and bruised. We needed help.

That still, small voice - those old words hidden in my heart from childhood.

“No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6.

It was like a light went on that day. “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Why had I not seen that before?  Was I guilty of ignoring Jesus?

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” 1 Timothy 2:5.

Once I understood this and processed it, my belief system began to make sense and change, but it was small steps at a time.

I changed my approach. I began praying to Jesus, not God. I began asking Jesus to stand in the gap for us girls. To go to our Heavenly Father and ask Him to help us. Every morning, faithfully, I would pray the same thing. I also asked Jesus to shelter each one of us under his wings of protection. I took our names, one by one, to him, every day.  I asked Jesus to remind God of us fighting down here for Him.

“He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust… He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge: his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”

I prayed this every day for two years.

We began to climb out of the battlefield. We began seeing victories and triumphs, ultimately leading to our finale in the court room in January 2019. We were safe. We had done what we needed to do, what God had asked us to do. God had stood with us and fought along side us. The battle was over.

This experience for me, was more than this fight though. It was getting to know God in a different way, a new way. It allowed me to process the doubts and questions and showed me what had been missing for so long from ‘organised religion.’ 

Jesus.

I know that is a bold thing to say. I know that it will cause many to recoil and look askance at me. But it’s true. The church, both liberal and conservative has lost its way collectively and found ways to circumvent Jesus. While it doesn’t deny Jesus, it struggles to accept him.

They’re ignoring Jesus.

They’re going straight to God. Trying to understand God. Trying to reconcile the Old Testament God with the New Testament God. Does God have a personality disorder that in one time in history he’s horrible and in another he’s merciful? If you understand God through the eyes of what is written, and man’s trying to understand it, it would seem so.

But if you start looking at everything through Jesus and what he stands for, it changes everything.

I come back to the question I asked before, because it’s important and needs clarification.

“It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally?”

The modern day church has forgotten about Jesus. Both the liberal and the conservative.  It has set the culture of its own christianity as an idol before the people. It is arrogant. It speaks for God as an authority. Men and women interpret the Bible from their own cultural perspectives.

This was why our battle was so fierce. We were exposing some of the greatest hypocrisy and heresy and abuse the christian world had ever seen. It hadn’t just gathered in the confines of a cult, it had spread widely across all denominations. The fingers of this heresy, had touched many places, many people, ruined lives and turned people away from God. Slowly, subtly, over generations, the darkness had undermined the very cornerstone of faith and belief through men who were hungry for power and lusted after glory and it had warped the true message of the Gospel. 

Jesus.

And God was angry.

I don’t think I will ever truly understand the implications of our little group of women going up against something so dark and evil and much more powerful than us, or the man we were fighting in court. I have tried, but I don’t think I will ever know the significance of that in the spiritual. 

But what it did do for me was open my eyes to Jesus. Somewhere I had lost him. Somewhere between the years of 5 and 45 I had lost Jesus. 

Why had I lost Jesus? Because I thought I knew who Jesus was and the battle in the lawsuit showed me I didn’t. My construct of Jesus was man-made and idol-like. 

I needed to find him again.

Little Idols Everywhere

What does this quote mean in context of christianity?

When I was 15 years old I travelled to Thailand with my family and some members of our church on a missions trip to take materials and encouragement to the struggling churches in the north of Thailand and to take medical supplies across the border to the refugees in Burma.

As we travelled through a country where Buddhism is the main religion, my parents would point out the little idols everywhere and make points along the lines of ‘look at the crumbling idols they worship here. Why would you worship something man-made that’s going to decay and rot?’

But idols are everywhere and they don’t always come in the likeness of an image. What if my beliefs also had crumbling idols. Ones you couldn’t see made of wood or stone, but were still there, still idols? What if my beliefs were man-made ideas about God?

Until I began to study sociology I didn’t have the words to articulate what was already causing doubts in my mind about the type of christianity I was into. 

Cultures are made up of values, beliefs and symbols. 

Religions too are a mix of values, beliefs and symbols.

Cultural christianity is no different to this.

I’ve been trying to pin point when my doubts began. Where those little lights of truth tried to creep in. 

When those doubts and questions started intruding into my safe, comfortable belief system. I’m not sure I can pinpoint it exactly, but it was lots of little, trivial, sometimes not trivial events or observations that made me file them away in my brain to ponder. Sometimes I think living in and experiencing other cultures helps to broaden your world view-you start to see life through the eyes of other people who have different backgrounds, different cultures.

As I’ve been thinking back on it this last week, I’ve struggled to write it down. It’s not easy to put your idols on display before you and realise they have no power, and are man-made, even now when I have worked through all this.

What I started to question went against everything I had been raised to believe. Everything I’d been taught about God and christianity. I’ll tell you about a few of them.

In the early days of my doubts, I kept coming back to this question: what do I know?  “I know that I know that I know’ - as we used to say in YWAM. What I knew was at the core of my belief was:

• the existence of God

• That He created the world

• That Jesus His son came to Earth.

Beyond that, I was open to anything. I was prepared to start over, from scratch. I said to God that I wanted to find the real Him and would He help me please, on my search, because I was scared as hell to do it.

When I was a child growing up in my beautiful, safe christian community fairytale, I was a timid, quiet creature with no obvious beauty or talents, but I was good at one thing. Remembering things, and specifically, Bible memorisation and knowledge. During church time and the long sermons instead of taking diligent notes as some would, I would totally switch off, open my Bible and read the ancient stories or study the maps in the back. I got to know the Bible very well.

It wasn’t until we joined the Bill Gothard cult in my late teens that Bible memorisation became mandatory and rote and took the life out of it. I felt that I had gained a good knowledge of the Bible just from those Sunday mornings in church when I found ways to entertain myself without getting a growling from the parents. This helped me later in life as I looked for God. 

My mother tells me that one of her proudest moments is when I won the Bible quiz at a community night when I was about 11 or 12 years old. 

All those times reading and re-reading, I feel like I was hiding God’s Word in my heart, as Psalm 119:11 says. 

Two incidents stand out for me in the beginning of my questioning.

A member of my family really got into the debate between Armenianism and Calvanism. It was the topic of discussion wherever we went for awhile and it made me feel uncomfortable. To give a brief summary of what the two schools of beliefs are, Calvinists believe that God is 100% sovereign and knows everything that will happen because he planned it. Armenians believe that God is sovereign but has limited control in relation to man’s freedom.

Of course it is much more complex than this. But my issue with it was multiple:

1. Why must God be limited to these two concepts. What if neither is right?

1. I recalled the Bible verse from Matthew 18:2-4. “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them, and he said: ‘truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” It seemed to me that making faith complicated with debates about God’s sovereignty and more importantly, teaching about God’s sovereignty was perhaps not what we were supposed to be doing.

The other incident that occurred happened on social media and was the one that really shook my faith up. The one that really got me digging deep for answers.

I happened to know two acquaintances - both christian - who had sick newborns with life-threatening conditions. They, of course, were asking all the people to pray for their babies.

But one died and one lived.

The family of the one that lived praised God for the answer to their prayers. God had saved their baby. God had shown them mercy. God had saved their child’s life.

But what about the other baby? The one who had died? How does God decide who lives and who dies? 

Does God decide who lives and who dies? Do prayers en masse make a difference? 

But both families had prayers en masse. Did one family have more people praying than the other and that made a difference? 

None of this seemed right. None of this seemed to be fair. Did I want to know a God who made decisions like this based on the numbers or fervency of prayers? Did one family have more sin in their life than the other, so God punished them? How can I follow a God like that? 

I can’t.

So was this a man-made idea of God.

Probably.

I kept coming back to these Bible verses, ‘For the Lord your God is a God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.’ Deuteronomy 10:17. Or this one: “Then Peter began to speak: ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism.” Acts 10:34

Of course God also says to pray without ceasing “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, so I am not saying that prayer in these times is pointless. 

I have come to see it as an act of faith. A comfort in troubled times, an open expression of worship and acknowledgement of God. I do not believe anymore that - unless it is in very special circumstances such as a spiritual battle against evil which is intercessory prayer, which I might get into later - that prayer should be used as a bribery of God to give you what you want or need or show how good your faith is so God will reward you.  God is not Santa Claus. 

Then someone mentioned the Old Testament and the angry God we sometimes see in those old stories. God does seem angry at times. God did wipe out entire generations - sometimes ruthlessly, cruelly. There were a lot of rules and harsh punishments if the rules were broken. Like - really harsh. Unthinkable harsh.

In reading the stories of the Old Testament we often forget that actually something is missing from God’s perspective. A doorway to the truth.

It wasn’t until we were in the middle of the lawsuit battle and crying out to God for help when everything was stacked against us, that I learned about this. It surprised me.

Little Lights Everywhere

When you've grown up as I have, surrounded by a christian community, beginning to question your faith feels scary. It also feel dangerous. 

Who dares question God? 

It would have been more comfortable to accept everything.

It would have been more comfortable to just believe what I'd been taught and not rock the carefully constructed, safe boat of beliefs which sailed in that ocean of my world.

It would have been more comfortable to overlook the inconsistencies, the hypocrisy, the bending and manipulating of the Bible. The bending and manipulating of the Church and the people.

But safety does not always go hand in hand with truth, and I would rather have truth. Everytime. Even if it's painful and hard and even if it meant facing God's wrath. I had to know. I had to find out who I believed in and I wanted answers. Was God the God of my parents? Was God the God of my church? Was God the God of the books I read or the christian radio station I listened to, or the contemporary music I loved. Was God the God of the hymns? Was God the God of the end time preacher or the guest speaker from a far away nation? Was God the God of Bill Gothard? All these voices. All these opinions. All these interpretations? What was truth?

How do I shut out the voices - all those messages - and how do I find the God of the Truth?

Not my truth. Not their truth. Not even 'truth'. But 'The God of The Truth?"

It takes courage to find it. Some have the search forced on them. Others seek it out. The majority prefer the safety of their carefully constructed boats and never think of leaving the shore. But truth has a funny way of making its presence known - creeping up on the complacent, knocking at the doors of passivity. Who chooses to listen? Who wants to listen? For if you do, it will overwhelm your soul and there will be no turning back and nothing will ever be the same again.

I found Jesus when I was five years old, at the same time as both my parents who had been raised in traditional churches such as the Anglican and Methodist church. My father was not a church goer in his early adult years, but through my mother, they heard about this new movement in town and were curious to find out more. They eventually immersed themselves into the pentecostal church community, which in a few short ten years influenced my life so dramatically, that by fifteen years of age I was living away from my hometown in the big city and my father was about to start pastoring a small community church. We took short term missions trips to places like Thailand, Malaysia and Burma (Myanmar) and travelling to Australia with Barry Smith, the end times preacher and a close personal friend of my father and mother.

The last ten years had been full-on, evangelical, pentecostal immersion. The church we attended in my childhood hometown was no slouch in the scene of New Zealand pentecostal churches either. It was a hub of dynamic preachers, guest speakers and church launching. Looking back through my childhood autograph book, (a popular trend in the 1970s and 1980s), I have the signatures of some of the christian world's best-known teachers in there from the 1980s. People like David Wang from communist China and the famous evangelist Ray Comfort.  My parents moved me from the local public school and into the newly established christian school. I thrived. It was a wonderful time - a wonderful community. It was total immersion into the pentecostal world and the church was at the centre of it and my family in the middle of it. Hook, line and sinker.

When I went off to YWAM in 1990 to Australia on a big adventure, I was barely 18 years old. Looking back this is one of the best times of my life. YWAM was perfect for me. I made lifelong, beautiful friends and it really cemented the call in my heart to give my life to God's service - regardless of denomination. Regardless of culture. Regardless of church politics and christian politics. I was, as we used to say then, 'sold out for God.' I really meant it.

Two important things happened to me when I was with YWAM. The first experience was a night on the Goulburn base when I told God I would go anywhere and do anything for Him and I meant it.  I gave God permission to take over my life. I then expected He would send me off to the countries I feared the most like North Korea or Iraq because it always seemed that missionaries told tales of going to places they never wanted to go to and that God laughed at them and sent them there. The second was in Sydney, Australia after we returned from Indonesia. I had gone to the bathroom with my friends early in the morning and while I was at the basin, a woman I had never seen before approached me and told me that God wanted me to know He had a job for me to do in the years ahead. 

This was the first of what I now call the little lights. Little glimpses into the true character of God. Little moments of light that I would remember years later, when I needed to.

I listened to her and took on board what she was saying, but at the same time I was self-effacing. There were others more fervent and more gifted than me. I even wondered if she'd mixed me up with my friend. I also had come from the background of hyper-spiritualism and had a hesitancy and natural questioning towards anything smattering of the supernatural. My parents, while believing in the spiritual world and 'spiritual warfare' (a christian term for battles of God against Satan), were cautious about all the fringe activity that went with this. They never totally bought into the 'demons behind every lamp-post' craze that swept through the Pentecostal Church in the 1980s.

You know how when you look back on your life you see forks in the road. Decisions made that controlled destiny.

I made one of those in 1991. I was in Hawaii at the YWAM university and a ministry opportunity came across my path. To go and work as an assistant to the widow of Keith Green in Texas. But I let it go. I turned away from it and came home to New Zealand. A year later I met Bill Gothard, and all my life changed.

I don't want to dwell on that time because my experiences are well documented in other places. 

But I was 20 years old when I met Bill and my family had became involved in IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles) while I was away with YWAM. So I went to work for him as his secretary in his beautiful, plush office in Chicago. This was - as I would discover years later - the 'job' I had to do for God. This was my Iraq and my North Korea. 

In many ways, this was my martyrdom, because it did suck the life out of me.

But the heresy of Bill Gothard only layered upon the constructed images of God and faith and christianity that were already there. Later, when I began to question, one of the big questions I asked was;

 Why was my family vulnerable to the deep deception of Bill Gothard's teachings? 

In Part 2 I'll talk about what questions led me to deconstruct everything I thought I knew about God and the little flashes of light in the answers that helped lead me back to God.

Disclaimer: I use Wikipedia to give basic information about some of the people and organisations I mention. Wikipedia is not always a reliable source - but I do not choose to link to some of the websites as I now disagree with their theology and don't want them getting an increase in visitor traffic.

1.11.71

I am writing this on All Hallows Eve. Tomorrow is All Saints Day. My birthday.

Outside my bedroom window is a rose called Many Happy Returns.

It's about to burst into flower on my 50th birthday.

When I was a child, my dear grandmother would always sign my birthday cards with "Many Happy Returns," which means I hope you have many more happy birthdays. 

Well, Grandma, I'm now at my 50th happy return.

There are times in a life where words are not adequate. I have thought over for many weeks what I wanted to write for this occasion in my life and it fails me. How do you fit 50 years into a single blog post? You can't.

As William Wordsworth, the poet said, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," my heart is one of gratitude for all that has passed, for God who has strengthened me, who gave me guidance and gave me purpose.  

Wordsworth says it best for me when words fail me. 

A childhood friend once described me as 'gentle.' My sister once said I was 'without guile.' I like to think I still retain some of that old me. I like to think it was those attributes that helped me fight a great evil over the past ten years.  That was a job I had to do - but was it my calling in life? No, I don't believe it was my only calling and purpose in life. I hope not. I hope that even though I'm fifty I can still hold dreams and ambitions.

What is happening for me in my life right now, in this year of 2021.

I have two adult children and two children still at school. They all still need me, though the needs are different to when they were small. I'm about to celebrate my 24th wedding anniversary. A marriage which has been tested by trouble and strengthened by faith.

I am about to go into my second year of studying towards a Bachelor of Social Science at Waikato University. My interests are leaning towards Maori studies and Forensic Psychology (studying the criminal mind), but I had a slight diversion into climate change science which surprised me in how much I enjoyed it. I also love research. I am doing well in my grades, which always surprises me,  considering how I did at school when I was younger. I enjoy the discipline of academic writing-so different from creative writing.

I work as a Receptionist in a local medical centre, and after years and years of not working outside the home, I am loving the relationships, work dynamics and learning I am doing there in a place which supports a healthy work/life balance and furthering my education, and is a superb environment for learning human behaviour.

I have discovered the joys of nature journalling and watercolour.

I have a small house with a beautiful garden which brings me joy every day.

My little children's book is still a popular kiwi book.

I want to learn more about the Hebrew natural calendar and live more by the cycles of nature, rather than our Gregorian calendar. This includes learning about the moon, the sun, the solstices, the constellations, the seasons. It's a fascinating subject and one I've been researching for awhile now, peaked by my son's love of astronomy and the Maori meanings behind Matariki. 

Some years ago, I found the poem Love After Love, by Derek Walcott, which is my favourite poem. I post it here as a kind of beacon for me going forward. 

My symphony for the future is simple. 

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common — this is my symphony. (William Channing).

Finally, I finish with a hymn that has been on my mind for the last month or so leading up to my birthday. 

The words mean a lot to me because my relationship with God has changed so much and I have learned so much of His character. This is my favourite version of this hymn. I've been playing it loudly over the speaker first thing in the morning when I get to work.  I hope you enjoy it too.

Amazing Grace.