We enjoyed a couple of days visiting local places with a friend and I was once more struck by the variety of God’s creation.

We live in an industrial area, famous once for coal mining, but Wentworth Castle Gardens are situated just a few minutes from Barnsley. You wouldn’t know this is the industrial north! Now the home of Northern College, the house was once the home of the Wentworth family, despite being situated in Stainborough rather than Wentworth…

View of the house

Some of the beautiful wildlife in the gardens:

Some of the amazing trees:

Unusual holly:

We also visited Aysgarth Falls in the Yorkshire Dales, possibly one of my favourite places in the world (I just love waterfalls!) Here again, the beauty of God’s creation is stunning:

God is good!

Dave preached a very challenging sermon on Sunday evening from Psalm 126:

“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.” (Ps 126:5-6)

The challenge is for us to have God’s heart for the world and to reach out to those who don’t know Him with compassion and tears, rather than having what he eloquently described as ‘dry-eyed syndrome’. I know it’s a challenge to draw so close to God that we feel His heart and weep His tears.

Lament is not a popular subject. We much prefer the idea of victorious celebration and smiling happiness to the wretched uncertainty of lament, where it is not clear what God will do or how He will do it. But lament, a lost language to many of us, is definitely one to be found in the Bible: as Michael Card says, “At least 80 of the Psalms are actually Laments. It has become a lost language to our culture, yet almost every major Biblical character recorded a lament. There must be a reason for that.”

Tears are far more than the prosaic ‘liquid product which lubricates the eyes’. They reflect our hearts, with great emotion – of sadness, anger or even joy – prompting the release of tears. If we are to truly reflect God’s heart to the world around us, then we need to learn how to sow with tears.

Despite the artistry of films, crying is not usually pretty. There is reddening of the face and sobbing—cough-like, convulsive breathing, sometimes involving spasms of the whole upper body. We rarely look good while we’re crying! But unless our emotions are touched and our wills moulded to obey God, we will remain hard-hearted and ineffective.

Graham Kendrick’s song ‘Soften my heart’ is my prayer for the day:

“Soften my heart, Lord
Soften my heart
From all indifference set me apart
To feel Your compassion
To weep with Your tears
Come soften my heart, oh Lord
Soften my heart.”

Yesterday as a long-awaited treat, I went to see ‘Toy Story 3′. A kids’ film that speaks to the child in all of us.

I have huge respect and admiration for the creativity that goes on at Pixar Animation. The first ‘Toy Story’ came out in 1995, when my son was just five years old. It’s amazing to think that fifteen years later, we all still wanted to see the new ‘Toy Story’ just as much as when he was a child…!

Pixar pioneered the idea of a ‘short’ before the main film and I’ve always loved those as much as the longer films they make. Capturing ideas and character in a few minutes takes a lot of skill and creativity. Making a lamp (the ‘i’ in ‘Pixar’) that you care about has to be something special! So I was just as eager to see the short as I was to see the film.

This time, the short was entitled ‘Day and Night’ and the official plot synopsis is given below:

“When Day, a sunny fellow, encounters Night, a stranger of distinctly darker moods, sparks fly! Day and Night are frightened and suspicious of each other at first, and quickly get off on the wrong foot. But as they discover each other’s unique qualities — and come to realise that each of them offers a different window onto the same world — the friendship helps both to gain a new perspective.”

[Read more: http://www.firstshowing.net/2010/06/05/watch-this-making-of-video-for-pixars-short-day-night/#ixzz0uaVcORrq]

The synopsis can’t possibly capture the magic of those few minutes, watching the tensions and excitements of these two vastly different characters and having life revealed to you in the shape of two cute 2-D characters. Pixar’s skill is using the creative medium to unveil truth. Which of us has not looked at someone very different to us and not felt jealous of them, envying them those traits which are so different to us whilst also feeling suspicious and resentful of them, simply because they are different? Which of us has not envied someone else’s lifestyle, honestly believing that the grass is greener on the other side? Which of us has not, at some point, longed for change in our lives and yet been afraid to take the risk of doing something in a different way?

The simplicity of the genre cannot actually hide the significance of the message, and that’s the secret of Pixar. They have real truth to communicate. They do so in a style that makes us laugh, that awakens our curiosity, that sets fire to our imaginations… but their success lies in the fact that they are handling truth.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about ‘Toy Story 3’ yet!!

Have you ever had the joy (!) of getting some new computer part, only to find that it doesn’t work because it ‘doesn’t have the right driver’? It has taken me a long time to understand the jargon, but apparently a ‘driver’ in this sense is a program that controls a device. Every device, whether it be a printer, disk drive, or keyboard, must have a driver program. Many drivers, such as the keyboard driver, come with the operating system. For other devices, you may need to load a new driver when you connect the device to your computer and if you don’t… you don’t get very far! It’s maddening to have a shiny new printer that just sits there looking at you (without printing anything) because it can’t communicate with your computer because of driver problems.

On Sunday, Garry preached (amongst other things) about what ‘drives’ us or motivates us as people. With coloured ovals that resembled the Venn diagrams I loathed at school (more maths, you see…!), he talked about 3 things that drive us to do the things we do:
1) what we want to do
2) what we have to do
3) what we ought to do

Now, if all those three drivers line up, we are happy and enjoy what we’re doing. But if what we have to do isn’t the same as what we want to do, there is conflict. And if what we want to do or what we have to do are not the same as what we ought to do, we’ve got as many problems as the printer that sits there inert.

So, if we’re feeling stalled, maybe it’s because the things that are driving us aren’t talking to each other. We have to bring those three motivating forces into alignment so that we can live whole, integrated lives.

Paul talked about this conflict in Romans 7. “What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise,” he writes. “I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.” (The Message)

You can feel his frustration and despair at the end of Romans 7: “Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?” But thankfully, he doesn’t end there. He goes on to say, “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.”

God’s influence and help in our lives make all the difference, and, as Garry pointed out, there is no conflict within the Godhead. What God wants to do is exactly the same as what He has to do and what He ought to do. The unity of God gives us hope when we are wrestling with driver issues.

I have continued to think about the things that inspire me and have been pondering ‘authenticity’ recently. What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be genuine, rather than counterfeit?

The first dictionary definition of ‘authentic’ surprised me: “conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance, or belief.” As someone who struggles with the unreliability of feelings on a daily basis and who is, therefore, striving to live by faith rather than by feelings, I liked how this definition was anchored in ‘fact’. Authentic living is rooted in reality, not fantasy.

The second definition is ‘not counterfeit or copied’. It’s very easy to ‘fake’ things at times, especially in Christian circles. We can ‘look the part’, but as in the old sketch, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than flapping your arms makes you an aeroplane. We need to learn to walk with God for ourselves, not copying other people or putting on a show. God sees the heart. Authentic living must, therefore, be genuine and must reach the parts that only God sees. What we are in private must match up with what we are in public. Authenticity and dissonance don’t go together. Dissonance (lack of agreement or consistency) is most often associated with musical sounds that just don’t ‘sound right’; usually intervals of the second and seventh, or diminished and augmented intervals, and all chords based on these intervals. In the same way that such sounds ‘hurt’ our ears, a life that is dissonant can’t please God, because there is a lack of agreement between who we say we are and how we really are.

Synonyms of ‘authentic’ are given as ‘bona fide, genuine, real, true, undoubted, unquestionable.’ All of those adjectives could be applied to God, and as always, He is our standard for authentic living. If we look at the life of Jesus, we see someone who lived to do His Father’s will. There was consistency in His lifestyle. He lived with people who knew Him: “…which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched”, as John says in 1 John 1, yet there was no sense of dissonance in His life. He is our great high priest, our example, our hope and the genuine article!

Does this mean, though, that to live authentically we always have to be on a high? That we always have to have the right answers or be living on the mountain top? I don’t think so. We are frail and fallible people, who wrestle with sin, who struggle with doubt. We are like the man who cried out to Jesus, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) I think the mark of authentic living is not a denial of doubt or fear or uncertainty, but a willingness to trust God through all of those things.

We’ve finally got some notices in the notice board:

The poster says ‘The best vitamin for a Christian is B1’.

Yesterday we had a number of birthdays to celebrate for the coming week:
Ellen…

Lincoln…

Amber (you can run, but you can’t hide…!)

Letty…

And Garry decided to play for himself as well!

After the meeting, we had the usual conversations:

Another busy day!