me and rachael and the art of doing something

Last week I went to visit Rachael Leeson (who is, somewhat remarkably, my girlfriend) at uni in Exeter. I had a really, really, really nice time. This blog should probably have an ‘extreme soppiness’ warning label on it, so feel free to look away now, but hopefully it won’t be too nauseating. So here’s a little chain of thoughts about why it’s so fun being with Rachael – last week and these days in general…

thing one: we had good times with just the two of us.
This one is pretty obvious, but still, it’s true so I thought I’d include it. We went to the beach on Tuesday, even though it was forecast to rain, and it was tres amusant, as they say en Francais. We missed the train and so we had our picnic in the station, and we walked along the beach, and collected pretty shells, and went to look at the big lifeboat, and we had banoffee ice cream (inside, because it was too cold) and we went up to the top of a cliff and played hopscotch, and saw a bee fly into it’s burrow (who knew that bees had burrows?) and had an entertaining encounter with a dog trying to fetch a stick that was too fat for its face, and talked about all sorts of things, and missed the train on the way back as well and ate some butter crinkle biscuits. Good times.

but this was combined with thing two: we spent good time with other people too.
This one is still quite obvious, but less so. One of my favourite things about going to Exeter is getting to spend time with Rachael and her friends. They are legends and I love them, but the best thing is that they are Rachael’s friends, and now they’re my friends too. That we get to share love for them. It’s also fun because it means Rachael doesn’t have to have two lives (and same for me when she comes to Cambridge) – one which is with me, and one which is with them – and then she just switches awkwardly between them. Instead, she has one life, and I am a part of it. And when we skype I know who she’s talking about and I actually care as well, which is always good.

and thing two happens because of thing three: we are doing something together.
What I mean by this is something that has changed in our relationship since we started going out: we used to just want to be with each other, but now we’ve started to do something together. I think that a lot of the time we kind of assume that the only way to get to know someone better is to sit there and take turns to talk about yourselves, or maybe just to gaze deeply into one another’s eyes; but we’ve realised in the last couple of years that there’s only so much you can get to know someone like that. Mixed in with that, what really does the job, is doing things together. Maybe climbing a mountain (haven’t tried this with Rachael yet, but there are plans…), or maybe baking a chicken and mushroom pie (New Years Eve twenty-twelve all the way), or making loads of toasties and then giving them to people and talking about Jesus (last time she came to visit) – whatever it is, doing things together is an awesome may to be closer to each other without just spending all our time tying ourselves in emotional knots for the fun of it. And it’s a deeper sort of knowing too, a real kind of friendship, a trust, a companionship, because we’re companions on a journey together. I apologise for the pretentiousness of that last sentence, but my point stands. But there’s also a bigger thing going on here. What we’re fundamentally doing in our relationship has changed, because what we’re doing with both of our lives has changed. The way it is now, the way we want it to stay is this, and it’s pretty simple: Both of us are spending our lives loving Jesus, and loving people because he loves them, and hoping we can show them that, so that they can love him back. Sometimes we do that separately, and then when we’re together, we do it together. And in all sorts of wonderful ways Rachael helps me to do that better, and loving her is one of my favourite parts of that whole plan, and I hope that the same is true the other way round: but the liberating, glorious thing about it is that it means our relationship is not about us. The epic paradox of the whole thing being that the less it is about us, the more beautiful it is for us.

and as you can see, thing three flows out of thing four: we prefer Jesus.
This, to be honest, is the real cornerstone of why I love being with Rachael so much, it’s the river that flows through the heart of everything and keeps stuff alive – simply that we love Jesus more than we love each other. I remember this incredibly beautiful evening that we spent together back when I was in Torquay on my gap yaaah, and we were talking about some stuff I’d just read by Henri Nouwen. He’s this great Christian writer, and he was speaking about relationships and he said two things that changed a lot. Firstly he said that often we make relationships like hands clasped together with the fingers interlocked. 

We intertwine ourselves as tightly as we can with the other person, so there’s loads of contact, but if either of us moves, there’s lots of friction, and it’s really painful to pull ourselves apart, even for a short time, because we’re so tightly wrapped up in each other. Nouwen suggested that we try having a relationship like a pair of praying hands.

They are touching, there is contact everywhere, they are together. But instead of being completely entangled with each other they are pressed together, pointing in the same direction. They are free to move, and while they can feel each other moving they don’t lock each other in place. There is less friction, instead its a willing, peaceful, togetherness. He puts it better than I can: “This relationship is no longer a fearful clinging to each other but a free dance”. And the other thing he said was this: “mutual love is experienced as a participation in a greater and earlier love to which it points”. I remember sitting with Rachael and the two of us realising that our love for each other was a metaphor (I do love my metaphors) – that it was a part, it was a picture, of a “greater and earlier love”, that God gives it to us as a way to show us how deep and beautiful his love for us is, and how much he longs for us to share it with him. And I remember the two of us praying about that and just this incredible joy that came with it. Realising that God loves Rachael so much more and so much better than I do, but he lets me join in. That he loves me, so much more and so much better than Rachael does, but he uses her to give me a taste of it. And that together, he makes us a glimpse of his love to other people. 

And that’s why I love it when Rachael comes to stay, and she sleeps on my mate Joanna’s floor, and I get a call at 10am and she says they only just got up because they were up until three chatting about Chicken Run and the rest of their lives and Jesus. I love it because that’s part of the thing we’re doing together – loving Jesus and loving people because he loves them. I love it because I love sharing the brilliance of Rachael with other people – just like Jesus and the Father, they love each other so intensely, and they are utterly faithful to one another, but they open out that love and include us in it. I could go on about all this stuff for a very long time, but basically all I’m trying to do is publicly thank Jesus for Rachael, and what he’s done to the two of us. Because since we started loving Jesus more than each other, we love each other so much more and so much better. Because the more I love him the more I love her, and the more she loves him the more it is an honour and a delight to be near her. I promise I am not exaggerating. It is not perfect, and it is not always easy (especially living five hours apart most of the time), but it is always good. Probably because it’s not about us, it’s about Him – and he’s not always easy, but he is always good.

Your Story

I’m getting ready at the moment to tell stories for a couple of hours at an event we’re doing in college on Saturday night, which means I get to find all my favourite stories and read them again. And I think this one is my absolute favourite. I know I’m a softy, but I genuinely couldn’t read it at the end through the tears. Because it’s true.

It’s really just a story that Jesus told, reset in the modern world by Phillip Yancey in his book “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” (which, by the way, is crackin’). Anyway, I hope you like it.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. One night, after an argument, her Dad knocks on the door of her room and she screams, “I hate you!” That night she acts on a plan she’s rehearsed in her head a hundred times. She runs away.

She’s been to Detroit once before, on a school trip. The newspapers always talk about the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, so she thinks that it’s the last place her parents would look for her. California, maybe, but not Detroit.

On her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right, she decides; her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car teaches her a few things that men like. She’s underage, so they pay a premium. She lives in a penthouse, orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about her folks back home, but their lives seem so boring and provincial now, she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the words “Have you seen this child?” But she’s got blonde hair now, and with the makeup and the piercings she doesn’t look like a child.

After a year the first sallow sings of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street with nothing. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. Although “sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night she’s lying awake, listening for footsteps, and she doesn’t feel like woman of the world anymore. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She whimpers, softly. She’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s pulled on top of her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three times it rings through to the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and in that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if here parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them time to overcome the shock.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a huge banner that reads “Welcome home!”

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know…”

He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. There’s a banquet waiting for you at home.”

I don’t really know what to say at the end here except that I’ve never run away from my literal home, but I cry when I read this because this really is my story. And I tell it because I believe it could be your story too.

I'm Mike the Turtle

A Picture of a Turtle on a Post:

Here is a picture of a turtle on a post.

I first encountered this picture as the background on my brother’s phone. I asked him, as I'm sure you would have done in my place, “Why do you have a turtle on a post in the background?” He said it was from something someone had said to him about humility. They said that when you see a turtle on a post like that you know for certain that they didn’t get up there by themselves. They had help. And as Christians, when we do life well - when we are actually loving, forgiving, or generous, when something we do really touches somebody's heart, or genuinely changes the world, or helps someone meet Jesus - we know that we didn’t do it by ourselves. We had help.

An Obvious Observation About Walking on Water:

A while ago my pastor Simon Deeks was talking about the bit in the bible when Jesus walks on water. Peter sees him and says he wants to do it too, so Jesus calls him out onto the water, and Peter steps out of the boat, and he actually does it. He walks on water. And then he starts looking at the big waves and the storm all around him and he gets scared – and as he stops trusting Jesus he starts to sink. Straight away Jesus reaches out and grabs him and the two of them get back in the boat. But here’s the thing that Simon was saying: Peter looks at the waves and the storm, and thinks “I can’t walk on water in these conditions!” – but since when did the water being choppy make it any harder to walk on it? It’s impossible. It’s always impossible. The weather is irrelevant. The thing is a miracle from start to finish. And that’s true, for people who try to follow Jesus like Peter did, for our whole lives. God lives in us, and genuinely works through us to love and rescue people, and restore the world. That is a miracle from start to finish. But when things get choppy we start to worry and lose our trust that he can do it – when actually it’s been impossible the whole time, but he's been doing it anyway.

I Finally Get to the Point:

All this is really an elaborate introduction to the fact that in the last few days a lot of pretty serious disappointments have come my way. Four big ones, and then some little ones. Things that I’ve been genuinely gutted about. And I was getting a bit annoyed with God about that. Because they were all things I was excited about for his sake – things I thought he was doing – and then it turned out he wasn’t doing what I thought. For example, if you read the last blog, you’ll know about Scott. Scott hasn’t picked up his phone.  I’ve been calling him a lot, and once he texted me saying sorry he missed the call and could I phone later, and I did, and no answer, and no answer any of the other times, and no replies to my texts either. So here I am, thinking, “God – surely the plan was for me to meet him and be friends and for us to eat together and for me to tell him about you?” And I have no idea why he’s not picking up. But he’s not.

The only thing that has occured to me, that starts to make some sense of it, is that last week I prayed some very serious prayers, along the lines I’ve been praying for ages, that God would make me humble. That he’d cut out my arrogance and my judgemental-ness, and replace it with genuine, joyful, child-like humility. And then this week, everything stops going to plan. And it might just be a coincidence, but it also might just be a coincidence that God is using. To gently say, ‘Mike, here’s a humbling thing for you. You are a turtle on a post. Everything you have ever done for me that worked, I did it through you. You will not always succeed because you have no magic powers. You are not a flying turtle. I just picked you up.’

So there’s the big punchline for you. After much deliberation, my conclusion is this: I am not a flying turtle.

A Post Script:

I wrote this at two o’clock this morning, and looking back at it again, it strikes me that what I’m doing here is trying to work out what it is that God is doing by not doing what I think he’s doing in all these situations.  If that makes sense. Anyway, my point is that I could well be wrong about this just as much as I was about all the other things. Maybe God is doing something entirely different, or lots of separate things none of which I’ve got a hope of guessing. But there we go, for now I’ll just go on the basis that whether he’s intentionally ‘teaching it’ to me or not, it’s definitely true that I’m just a normal turtle, that I’m just a child. And I want to be the kind of kid that’s not too proud to ask his Dad to pick him up.

Meet Scott

This blog is about a guy I met last night called Scott. I’m not in a spectacularly political mood, and even if I was I don’t think I’d have that many answers to suggest; but I just want to tell you about Scott because I am really glad that I met him. I can’t vouch for the guy obviously, so I can’t promise everything he told me is true, but he seemed a deeply honest, straightforward guy. So here’s what happened.

I was about to walk past him on the street and he very politely started to ask if I could spare him any change – I started to say “I’m really sorry mate” as I walked past, and he immediately stopped asking, and said “No don’t worry at all mate, have a good night.” As he started to walk off I thought – ‘Mike. You have nothing you need to do right now. Jesus loves that guy just like he loves you, and he wants you to be with him and show him some love. Don’t be a coward. He’s not big or scary. And don’t be lazy or selfish. Get him a coffee.’

So I turned round and said, “Actually, I’d be up for coming with you and getting a hot drink or something?” And he said he would really love that. So I grabbed my bike and we walked across to MacDonalds on the basis that it’s always open. We chatted along the way, and he mentioned that he’d been living in a tent for a year. I asked him how he’d become homeless. He said that he used to live with his mum, but that the bedroom tax thing had come in and it was a 3 bed house, and she couldn’t afford it, so she’d had to move in with her brother, in his 2 room maisonette. So Scott had nowhere to stay. At the time he had a good job managing a garage on the edge of Cambridge, but after a while of him turning up unshaven or unwashed every few mornings (he was couch surfing with friends when he could, but he says with a lot of them he ended up crossing the line of overstaying his welcome) they asked him to take a break, and come back when he’d got his life back on track. He said you can’t receive benefits with no fixed abode. He’s on the waiting list for the council to get him housing, but he says there are too many people with a more urgent need, so he’s hoping for a letter to arrive at his mum’s house soon, but he’s not too optimistic. The homeless shelters in Cambridge are all full or specifically for people who are mentally ill as well, except Jimmy’s Night Shelter, which might have space, but it doesn’t have any more spaces for people with dogs, and Scott has a dog who he loves, called Slinky – after the dog from Toy Story.

So at the moment he lives in a tent. He’s been moved on six times in just over a year by the council, and now he’s in a place so isolated that no one’s likely to report him, but no one’s likely to befriend him either. If the council find his stuff they are allowed to just take it, and he would have to pay to get it back.

He asked me what I do, I said I was studying English. He asked what I wanted to do with that, and I told him that maybe I wanted to work telling people about Jesus, so we talked about that for a bit. He said his mum was a Christian but his Dad wasn’t, and he’d gone to Sunday school a bit but he’d never owned a bible, never really knew what it was all about. I wished I had a bible with me to give to him, but I didn’t, and so I suggested that we could meet again, get a MacDonalds and read some of the accounts of Jesus life and chat about it, using this thing called ‘UNCOVER’ that my brother had told me about. He said he’d be really keen for that, and it turned out he still has a phone, so we exchanged numbers, and I’ll call him sometime this week.

I am aware that this is not the most poetic or mind-blowing or funny of blogs – but the whole thing just felt really normal to me so I don't feel much urge to write it exceptionally. It was just like one person getting to know another. Which is, to be fair, what it was. But at the same time I felt like it was important, and something good was happening in me (and I hope in him) when we said goodbye and shook hands. So I thought I’d share it. 

A Story About Baby Elephants

Somebody told me an absolutely cracking story the other day. All credit and many thanks to Sam Brennan, who was that somebody, and has brought the brilliance of this story into my life. It goes like this…

A man is being shown around backstage at an old circus. The trainer shows him where the elephants are standing around, chains round their ankles holding them to posts in the ground.
“Wow!” says the man, “they seem very calm, do they not mind being chained up like that?”
“Oh they don’t like it,” replied the trainer, “they don’t like it at all.”
“Well in that case, why aren’t they struggling? Are the chains too strong for them? Have they given up?”
“Actually, the chains are not too strong for them at all. These are 4 ton elephants. They could snap those things easily. Even if they couldn’t, to be honest if they tried they could pull the whole post out of the ground!”
“What? Then why don’t they?”
“They have been in these chains since they were very young. When they were just babies they used to try to run away and break the chains, but they weren’t strong enough. So they stopped trying. And now, they just don’t try.”

I love that story. Not because it makes me happy to think about chained up elephants obviously – it’s pretty tragic in it’s own way – but because I think it’s so true. Everyone was laughing at me after Sam told it the other night because I was doing such a massive wide-eyes ‘oh-that’s-such-a-good-story’ face! So here’s a couple of things it makes me think.

One: We Don’t Know Now So We Assume We Can’t Know Ever.

I think there are a lot of people in the world today who are convinced that we can’t really know the answers to the big questions. That we can’t really discover any proper truth about who we are or what the world is or what we’re supposed to do with our lives. So for a lot of people the best we can do is 1) guess, 2) not overcommit, and 3) try to get along. And that’s a decent start I’ll grant – better than 1) guess, 2) kill everyone that guessed differently – but what if that’s settling for much less than we’re capable of? What if that’s just standing around thinking the chains are too strong for us when really we could be free? What I mean is: when was the last time most people really tried to investigate the answers to the big questions? To be honest I think a lot of us feel like we’re too busy to think about, read about, or talk about the meaning of life. And when you think about it that seems a little bit silly. And I honestly believe that we can know the answers, that we can discover who we are and what we’re living for – I believe that the chains are not too strong for us. So let’s give ‘em a go, surely? *

Two: We Think We’ll Always Be Normal, When God Can Make Us Wonderful.

I think a lot of Christians end up like the elephants in a different way, stuck where we are when we could so definitely be free. We have somehow been led to believe that while God is capable of creating the universe, inventing the supernova and the crafting the kiwi-fruit; capable of turning water into wine, giving sight to the blind, and raising Jesus from the dead; he is mysteriously not capable of changing who we are. That’s not true. He is able – not just that but he is ready and eager – to transform us completely. To take us, little problematic people that we are, and make us well-springs, volcanoes, where the unlimited, unimaginable love and light and goodness of God erupts into the world. He is able to deal with – and by deal with I mean deal with and be done with – our fears, our insecurities, our failures, the things about us that hurt people, the things about us that hurt ourselves. He’s a 4 ton elephant and he can break us out of whatever trap we’re in, whatever cycle, whether that’s really nasty dark stuff or whether it’s just feeling uninteresting and unimportant. All we’ve got to do is ask him, get his help, press into him, and trust him. I hope this doesn’t sound too much just like fancy words, because I really believe it’s true – it’s not always easy or painless but it is true. You may think that you’re a little baby elephant and the chains are too strong – but the biggest elephant in the world put your chain round his ankle just to be with you, and if you’ll let him, he can uproot everything that ties you down. Seriously – he can uproot galaxies.

But the elephants just stopped trying. And they never knew what it felt like to be free.

*The big reason that I think we can know is in the video I made at Christmas, it’s on the blog here in December, called ‘Yuri the Spaceman and Hamlet the Prince’!

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