Video for March 27th
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. Our travels have now taken us to Uganda where we are staying for a few days with Simon and Sarah Cawdell. Simon and Sarah were the clergy looking after Bridgnorth until they followed God’s call to work with the Church in Uganda two years ago. I’ll be interviewing them in my video next week.
The people here have been extraordinarily hospitable. The worship and devotion to God is an inspiration.You have to adopt a more open mind to plumbing and electricity here, something we of course take for granted at home. We feel quite secure although the area has been plagued with minor thefts over the past few weeks. Having a man armed with a Kalashnikov on the gate of the compound gives one some peace of mind, however. The free-range cockerel going off at three fourty five in the morning and steady and very noisy rain of windfall mangoes on the tin roof adds to the overall experience. They can grow literally anything here. But une mployment is very high. The economy is generating about 70,000 new jobs annually whilst the population grows by 700,000. We went out to a restaurant for dinner yesterday which to us seemed ridiculously cheap but was an average week’s wage for a day labourer.
I confess the non-functioning of certain basic services has made me irritable at times. Those who know me well might say that is out of character; I’m usually quite placid and tolerant. But it makes me wonder whether my normal presenting calmness is just good social skills. Perhaps the irritation at slow plumbing is the real me. Frustration is rather good at exposing our inner spirit of entitlement. I have tried the tactic of rational override, attempting to put my experience alongside the daily grind of people here who live in small thatched round houses with no electricity, refrigeration and barely enough to live on. However, when it was 30 degrees in the house and the electricity went off, so the fan no longer worked, the rational override/ put it into perspective tactic didn’t really work. I just went on being selfishly irritated and deep down wondering why God hadn’t re-arranged my circumstances to make me more comfortable. Jonah does something petulantly similar in his eponymous book when God causes his sheltering vine to wither.
It is experiences like this which demonstrate why the discipline of fasting from something we enjoy in Lent has such spiritual value. My sin of selfish entitlement can only begin to be forgiven and redeemed if it is brought into the light. Choosing to deprive ourselves of something we enjoy will do that. Fasting from food for 24 hours will likely make us hangry. Setting aside drinking, especially if we enjoy a glass of wine or other tipple last thing in the evening to relax, will in the short term expose our own irritability. The exposure of these things to ourselves, as much as anyone else, leads to deeper repentance. It raises the question whether these reactions of irritability are the real us, hidden beneath an English civilised veneer. It lifts our denial for a moment and helps us to realise how much we need God’s help to become the people he wants us to be. There is a reading of the book of Job that sees his ghastly experiences as this sort of spiritual journey. In the depths of his anger and distress he turns to self-justification. “If God would only appear, I’d convince him with clever arguments”. Those engaged in the 12 step recovery programme reach a point where they have to conduct a ruthless moral inventory. They do this after reaching an end of themselves and acknowledging their powerless to effect change in their lives, handing themselves over to a higher power. Those in recovery encounter a loving non-colluding acceptance in their recovery groups. If we dare to be honest with God about our own moral failings and character flaws, we too will encounter a God who is lovingly seeking us out. Jesus’ paradigm of God’s nature when confronted with heartfelt confession is the waiting father in the story of the prodigal son. This is not a God standing by to punish, but one who’s eyes are craning to the horizon looking for the prodigal’s return. It is in accepting being found like this that our hope of deep change finds its fulfilment.
+Richard