A German Gets Happy (Weird Story #2)

So this is the second instalment of the series of strange stories from people I love, and now we move into the crazy world of hearing from a person who actually experienced a miracle. This is Tim, my friend from church (who is also, if you’re interested, or even if you’re not interested, an incredible accapella artist and general musical genius). Enjoy!

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Hello world. My name is Tim, I attend the same church as Mike and he has asked me to have a go at blogging. This shall in fact be my first blog post ever. Please excuse my weird grammar, I only came to this beautiful country in October 2012. I am also an economist. These two things excuse a LOT of weird grammar, but let’s get back to business:

My back has been hurting all my life. That’s the way things are. I’ve been to several specialists and the only thing I found out is that it is some kind of scoliosis. This runs in my family and I have learned to live with it. I’m not in constant agony, it doesn’t even bother me that much on a daily basis, since you can get used to everything. But every two months or so I have a massive pain attack. Most of the times it happens when I get out of bed. I pretty much fall right back into my bed and try to stay there for two or three days until getting up feels normal again. The pain then subsides to its normal base level after about a week. I live with that base level of pain at any given time.

That former statement was true until that one night at church.

The day before, a group of us musicians had made an hour-long trip to our church centre in Peterborough, where we rehearsed for a whole day. However, this day ended up being one of those days that I would normally spend in bed. I participated, sometimes standing up, sometimes sitting, sometimes lying on the floor. We prayed for my back and - if I am completely honest - I didn’t believe that would change anything. Now this might sound harsh, so let me elaborate: I didn’t doubt God’s existence, I didn’t doubt my faith, but I had never experienced God as a God who heals physically. I had always intellectually believed in a God who heals, but I had also always lived with pain. Somehow my life reality and God’s promises didn’t line up that well.

A day later we actually put our newly rehearsed material to the test, it was amazing, God’s presence was strong, but my back was still unchanged. So after the service I was happy to get some relief by lying in the back of the Cambridge Revolution Bar where we have our student services. What a weird sight.

Three of my friends came up to me, asked about my back and prayed for me. Amongst them was a guy who is known to his church buddies for his deep appreciation for God’s healing touch and of course his impeccable fashion sense. When they were done praying he asked me if I was doing better. This was one of the more awkward moments of my life, because I really wasn’t. Not even slightly. Instead of evading the question, I was brave enough to say ‘not really’. The response came completely natural: ‘Then let’s pray again.’

These people genuinely believed, that God would heal me. These people had so much confidence in God and his good plans for us, that they didn’t even consider that it might just not work.

And it worked.

It really did.

It was the weirdest feeling of my life but I got healed. It was incredibly awkward during the first days, when it really felt as if there was something missing in my back. For the three months since then, my back has been better than I can remember it ever being. Most of the days I don’t feel my back at all and even when it is at it’s worst now, it is still better than it used to be every single day of my life before.

This is what God has done!

In John 4:13-14, it says: And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

That night in the Cambridge Revolution Bar, God has done something amazing to help me get that little bit closer to a place where I can live completely immersed in his awesome promises. That’s what God’s promises are: Nothing short of awesome. Let’s see what he has in store for us, let’s see what he has in store for you.

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My Dad Gets a Pleasant Surprise (Weird Story #1)

As promised (in the previous blog), this is a weird story. This one is from my Dad, and I think it happened last summer. To be honest this is a great place to start because if there is one person in the whole world who I can vouch for their honesty, my Dad is genuinely number one on that list. I also love that he wrote it like a cool slightly arty short story so you don’t get bored! Enjoy…

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"I just want to thank you.  They are so much better."
"Wow. Thanks. That's great. But it really wasn't me."

When she found me it was the second surprise of the morning.  The first was being grabbed by my vicar as I settled into a pew just as the service was about to start.  "We're going to offer prayer for healing today.  Are you okay to help with that?  You can go with Gemma."  I was a bit thrown.  I'd never been part of a healing service, but why not pray for people?  And I could just copy whatever my partner in prayer had been told to do.  So I said "Okay."

And when the time came, we placed our hands on the first person who came to us and Gemma prayed, and by the end of her prayer, I could think of no different words of my own, and queues had formed in front of all four pairs of pray-ers round the church, so I suggested we split and prayed one-on-one.  And after several others, the woman was there.  She had been waiting in line, and described the pain in both wrists that made it hurt just to move them, so I asked the God who cares about us that he might make it easier for her to move and do stuff without pain.  She thanked me and went back to her seat.

Ten minutes after the service ended, as the building buzzed with coffee and chat, I was surprised she'd searched me out.
"I just want to thank you.  They are so much better" she smiled, as she rotated her wrists in front of me.
"Wow. Thanks. That's great. But it really wasn't me."

***

So there you go. If you’re curious about anything and want to ask him a question, he's so cool that he's got facebook, so you can message him - https://www.facebook.com/steve.hood.39904?fref=ts - or his email is steve@accel.org.uk - genuinely feel free!  If you’re not curious then, well… why not?

I Have Doubts About God (but Buzzfeed helps)

Firstly, have a look at these.

http://distractify.com/culture/32-surreal-places-that-actually-exist-on-earth-i-cant-believe-this-isnt-photoshopped/

Secondly, blog.

This morning I went for a walk, and I admitted to God that in the last couple of months I’ve found myself wondering whether he’s just a figment of our collective imagination much more than I’ve ever done before. More than any time since I got baptised and got serious about Jesus, I have doubted his existence. So, that’s me admitting that.

Now, just to be clear, I really do believe in God. And the first thing I do when I realise that I’m doubting, is remember all the things that convinced me in the first place. There’s three big things:

1) Logic. Rationally I reckon there has to be something (not necessarily God like I know him) beyond the physical universe. Because the scientifically observable physical universe operates according to cause and effect. Everything that happens is caused by something that happens before it – like a chain. And we can trace that chain back to the big bang (just to clarify, I think that’s true), or maybe further to an idea of a multiverse, or an expand-and-collapse universe, but fundamentally wherever we get to, it still needs something to cause it. People say that God doesn’t help because he needs a cause too – but the thing is that if he isn’t part of the system of cause-and-effect, then he doesn’t. And if he’s beyond, apart from, the creator of, the physical cause-and-effect universe, then he could well be outside the system. Hope that made sense. Summary: the physical world is incapable of starting itself, but God is capable of just being, because he’s more than just stuff.

2) Evidence. There’s tonnes of evidence for the existence, and crucially the resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth. I won’t go into all the details, if you’re interested in it please just drop me a message and I’d love to explain some more – but fundamentally it’s a historically established fact (it was even in an Andrew Marr programme a bit ago…) that there was a whole bunch of people who claimed that they’d seen Jesus back from the dead, who were getting no benefit out of that, gave accounts of themselves and what happened that would have been really stupid ones to make up, and got killed for it rather than say that it wasn’t true. If there might be something beyond the physical world out there, then these guys (and, controversially, women) make a pretty strong case that Jesus is something to do with it.

3) Experience. Let me tell quickly you the story of how I became a Christian.

I’ve always had trouble with believing in a God that does miracles – by which I mean, intervenes in the world and does something exceptional to the normal laws of nature. This scepticism was the big thing that held me back from getting baptised for 3 and a bit years (I started thinking about it when I was 12): the thing was, I’d heard people say that they’d had ‘experiences’ of God when they got baptised, and to be honest, I didn’t really believe them. I didn’t believe that God did that. But at the same time, I thought that if I got baptised and God didn’t do that to me, then I might become less convinced that he was real at all. So I didn’t get baptised.

But then when I was 15 I thought about it some more, and talked it through, and I decided that I was convinced by the logic and the evidence, and I should really say publically that I believed in God, because that was what it was about, not any weird supernatural occurrences or emotional hype. And I talked to my Dad about it, and I remember really clearly the car journey when we talked me through this big list of bits he’d found in the bible when people were baptised, or received the Holy Spirit, and nothing crazy or supernatural seemed to have happened. And it was such a relief for me. Such a relief. I thought, ‘Brilliant. God doesn’t necessarily do this weird stuff. I never really believed it would happen to me and now I know that it won’t and it doesn’t have to. Ideal.’

The funny thing about God, though, is that he likes to surprise us. I went to get baptised, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have one of these weird ‘experiences’, and sure enough, I was overwhelmed by an inexplicably beautiful (and a little bit terrifying) experience of power and love. I just started weeping in this strange, joyful way. I remember it calming down as the song everyone was singing came to an end, and me thinking,
 
‘Ah, OK. It’s probably not God, it’s just that I’m nervous and the music is emotional. If it was God, why would it have stopped?’

And then it came back.

And  I ended up weeping with this strange joy through about half an hour of the service – I have this memory of getting changed into some dry clothes in the disabled toilets (I got dunked in a paddling pool) and still feeling this crazy overwhelming thing, and weeping, and just thinking, ‘God? This is crazy. You’re much more real than I thought you were.’

Now, when its someone else, its very easy to dismiss these things as delusions, as over-emotional things being misread as God. But when you’ve actually experienced it yourself, and you know how normal you were feeling before, how unimpressive the music actually was (no offence to the St. Marks Church band!), and what the experience was actually like – it gets a lot harder to explain away.

Funnily enough though, even after this, I was still sceptical about God doing stuff. It’s just pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? I still wrinkled my suspicious nose at anyone who claimed to have experienced God in church services or Christian conferences. I still thought that people who said that God healed people were probably just doing Derren Brown stuff and trying to make money. (I still think there are plenty of people out there doing that, by the way.) It just seemed unlikely. It felt a bit silly. Believing in God theoretically was acceptable, it made sense, it was rational. But believing in a God who does stuff was messy, it felt undignified, it got you associated with lunatics and conmen, or at least it did in my mind. It would surely be more sensible just not to credit any of that stuff and explain it all away as delusion or trickery. It would certainly be easier. The whole thing just felt silly.

But recently, and I’m finally getting to the point here, things have started to get even more incredible. In both senses of the word. Let me explain briefly.

That distractify.com thing at the top with the crazy places – that was in fact relevant to the blog. There are some amazing pictures – but the thing I find interesting is, that the really incredible ones are literally incredible – they are hard to believe! The one with the sand dune in the background really does look like a surrealist bit of photoshopping until you see the explanation and you think, ‘Sheesh, that’s a real place. I want to go there.’ The more incredible something is, the harder it is to believe.

And this is the thing that’s happened to me this term – the more mind-blowing stuff I see God doing, the harder it is to believe what I’m seeing. And that’s ridiculous in a way, because this is stuff happening that is pretty serious evidence that God is real. Stuff that is really hard to explain without him. But it makes it harder for me to believe in God at all, because the more incredible it gets, the harder my sceptical instinct squirms, and tries to close my eyes and shove its fingers in my ears. Tries to tell me that the whole thing is a mistake, that none of it can be what I think it is. Because it’s really, really weird.

But I’m trying to take my fingers out of my ears, stop squirming so much, and have a look at these things honestly, and see if they are really just coincidences, or the placebo effect, or the product of over-active imaginations, or whether when you combine them with all those other things I was talking about earlier, God might actually be the best explanation. I was going to try and tell you all these different stories of crazy/cool things myself, but then I realised it would be much more fun if I asked the people who they’re about to tell them for themselves! So the next few blogs will be stories from people many of you will know, about being healed, about hearing God speak to them, about their hands buzzing like a mobile phone on vibrate… (OK, actually that last one is mine, but I might tell that story too.)  

The weirdness will probably put you off a bit – it puts me off as I’ve just said – but I hope you’ll find them interesting anyway. I will leave you with a link to another one of these marvellous procrastination tools, and another one that has incredible bits in it. Enjoy!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/77-facts-that-sound-like-huge-lies-but-are-completely-true

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.