Yesterday, I managed to cut my finger. I still don’t know how I actually did this, but I suddenly became aware of pain, looked down and found blood oozing from a long cut that looked like I’d sliced the finger on something sharp.

The Bible describes itself as being sharper than a double-edged sword (Heb 4:12). The Message version brings the metaphor more up-to-date and talks about a surgeon’s scalpel. Part of the Bible’s job is to jolt us into awareness of the disparity between God’s way of doing things and ours and to prick us (cut us) so that we are changed.

This morning, I continued my daily reading plan and found myself, once again, at 1 Corinthians 13. This is such a familiar chapter that it’s easy to skim over the words defining and describing love. Today, I found myself arrested by this mirror, as sharply aware of my failings to live up to this definition as I was yesterday by the pain in my finger.

If we substitute our name for the word ‘love’ in the passage (1 Cor 13:4-7 in particular), we quickly see our shortcomings and understand the limitations of our love. And that’s when we’re thinking about those we really do love! God wants us to love our enemies with this kind of love, not just our friends and family! (Matt 5:43-48) God’s word has the power and capacity to cut us, to wound us, to hurt us… but it does this not to harm us but to transform us and make us more like Jesus. Just as a surgeon inflicts short-term pain on us in order to bring long-term relief from pain and healing to us, God’s word is there not to make us feel comfortable or nice, but to show us truth and reality and to bring our lives into conformity with God’s truth and reality. Don’t flinch from the cuts of the Word. They are there to shape us further into the image of God.

‘Messy play’ is an important part of growing up. With a toddler, it refers to playing with different media such as paint, glue, playdough, glitter, sand and water, all of which have the capacity to be messy. Messy play usually ends up with paint daubed everywhere and bits of playdough stuck to the carpet, however many protective layers have been used!

It’s no surprise that I don’t much like messy play, especially when it comes to cleaning up afterwards. But it strikes me that that says more about my obsessive need for control than it does about the value of the play itself.

I don’t like mess, but life is messy. It’s colourful, vibrant and wonderful, but it’s indisputably messy. Last week I watched a group of children take hold of pots of playdough and roll them into different shapes. They used cutters to produce animals, food shapes and vehicles. They squeezed and squashed the playdough into what they wanted to create (‘Grandad’s car’), and the end shapes were indubitably more interesting than the original lumps of the material. That is a parable of life: God squeezes and moulds our lives into the shapes He wants our lives to be, like a potter working with clay (see Jer 18).

But then the unthinkable happened. Instead of being content with the pristine colours, making green cars and blue elephants, some of the children began moulding the colours together to create a mishmash of playdough, a rainbow-coloured gloop which could no longer be separated back into its constituent parts. I was horrified. If I’d thought the play was messy before, now I’d lost total control!

Life can seem like that to us. Not only does it feel like God’s squeezing us and moulding us and we’re being pressed into shapes we don’t like, it can feel like we’ve lost our identity entirely and we are being moulded together with other people into something that looks, to us, messy and ugly. I loved the definition of the separate colours, all in their separate pots. I didn’t like the multi-coloured mush at all. But this parable reminded me that God is building people together into His church in a way that is more concerned with the finished whole than the sensibilities of the constituent parts.

The analogy doesn’t work entirely, of course, for God never crushes our identity in the way those children worked tirelessly to blend the playdough colours together. But this scenario did remind me of the need to relinquish control in order allow the Master Potter free rein (and reign!) and the fact that a jumbled-up whole is not necessarily a bad thing. Messy play will never be the same again!

We had two more birthdays to celebrate tonight (apologies for the photos, taken on my phone rather than on a camera; perhaps I should just admit to not being a photographer!)

Journeys can be great fun, but at times – usually because of bad weather, with poor visibility, high winds and driving rain – they can also be frightening and daunting. Journeys on mountain passes when visibility is not good are particularly dangerous because of the twists and turns and steep drops involved. Life is like a journey, and so often we like to do this journey on our own, but we need God with us if we are to negotiate the difficulties of journeys successfully.

In Acts 9:3-9, we see Saul on a journey to Damascus to take Christians as prisoners to Jerusalem. He was stopped in his tracks on that journey by a blinding light and a voice from heaven, and as a result of this, he was struck blind for three days. His life was completely transformed by this encounter with the Light. Ours can be too.

In the Old Testament, Moses reminded the Israelites that God gives us choices: life and prosperity or death and destruction. (Deut 30:15-18) So often, we run around aimlessly like headless chickens with no sense of direction, but God wants us to see and know the paths we should take; He offers us enlightenment because He is the Light of the world and His life is the light of all mankind. (John 1:4) Jesus said that the eye is the lamp of the body (Matt 6:22); because He is Light and Life, He enables us to see clearly. Life is a journey we should live with Jesus as the headlight, leading and guiding us through all storms.

The many people who worked in the nib-making industry in Birmingham in the past would probably have told you that they were making nibs. With each worker expected to produce 18,000 nibs a day, the sheer number of nibs produced in the city was phenomenal; it is estimated that 90% of the world in the 19th century used nibs that were produced in Birmingham. Nibs were sent to Australia, to America, to Japan; wherever and however people were writing, they were doing it with nibs made in Birmingham!

The job was unglamorous, tedious, boring and monotonous. Workers were not allowed to talk to each other or to sing because concentration was required to manufacture the nibs in such quantities that our minds, even in this day of computers and automated manufacturing, find hard to comprehend. But I would contend that these people were not actually defined as nib-makers. They were engaged in changing the world.

I doubt they thought of it that way: for most of them, especially the women, this was a job providing an income necessary for living (and in an environment that was considerably safer than many other industries in those days.) But the end result of all those nibs was an increase in literacy throughout the whole world which was unprecedented. The nibs provided the means for all children to learn in the new schools how to write and thus change the face of society. In our day and age, when pens are so readily available and so cheap, mass-produced and treated as largely disposable, it’s hard to realise the impact all those pen nibs must have had on the whole world.

So often, our lives seem just as mundane and ordinary as those nib-makers. We work at jobs because we need money to live. We may not see how our ordinary, everyday lives can change the world, but God’s work in this world is often subversive, subtle and radical without looking it! We need to learn to distinguish our actions from our goals. Our ‘job’ may seem insignificant and largely irrelevant, but the purpose behind what we do, when we aim to serve God and work for His glory, can have a lasting impact far beyond any production targets or measurable outcomes.

Garry continued looking at Rom 12:9-21 this morning, focussing initially on Rom 12:10 which tells us to be devoted to each other in love. This kind of ‘brotherly love‘ (made up of two Greek words for love, philia & storge) involves the affection and love a person has for family members and a mutual regard and love which values others.

To be devoted means to be given over to God, to be utterly single-minded in our pursuit of Him. Since we have been adopted into the same family and are now children of God, we belong together and should share with each other (see Gal 6:9-10). This involves honouring each other, giving preference to each other out of the love we have for each other. (Rom 12:10) We are all different (as Paul has outlined earlier in the chapter, Rom 12:4-7), but need to learn to accept and appreciate each other, despite the differences!

In addition to this, Paul calls us never to be lacking in zeal, but to keep our spiritual fervour, serving the Lord. (Rom 12:11) The word ‘zeal’ could be translated ‘diligence‘, and Garry spoke of the nib-makers in Birmingham who revolutionised literacy in the whole world in previous centuries.

In moving from quills to nibs, writing became easier, but was still only available to the rich, for one pen nib cost one guinea, roughly a month’s salary. As manufacturing made pen nibs cheaper to produce, 144 pen nibs could be produced for the same price, and each person working in a factory on a ten-hour shift was expected to make 18,000 pen nibs a day. To do this – a rate of one nib every two seconds – required concentration, diligence, and perseverance. God expects no less from each one of us, as Col 4:5-6 reminds us. We are to make the most of every opportunity, not missing a trick, as the Message version puts it.

God calls each one of us to serve Him with fervour and zeal, something we can only do if we don’t lose our focus and work consistently for His glory. The challenge is for each one of us to be a nib-maker to the King – to be someone who will persevere in the calling of God, no matter how boring or monotonous the tasks may seem, for we have an eternal perspective that gives meaning to the mundane.