Why God Annoys Me

God is infuriating sometimes.

Why? Well there’s quite a lot of reasons. For a start, he insists – just like my mum does – on always being right. This would be fine, obviously, both in the case of God and of my mum, if it wasn’t for the fact that I, also, am always right. Since God is always right, and Mike is always right, the rather irritating possibility emerges that we might disagree about something, and then, surely, reality itself will be forced to implode.

Attached to this dilemma is the whole issue of God’s elusive behaviour. As tempted as I am to keep being silly, this is actually a really serious thing. There are quite a lot of times where I am convinced that God is able to do something, and I’m sure that he ought to do it, that it’s the sort of thing he loves to do, and I ask him to do it, and then he doesn’t. Or even just every day – I know that he’s capable of being tangibly present with me. I’ve experienced it many times, and I know loads of other people who have too. And I really want more of that – I think, surely, if I was more tangibly aware of you with me all the time, or even most of the time, that would be better, it seems to me that that would be better in so many ways. But he doesn’t do it.

And there are loads of reasons that I know for why he might not do this or do that, but if I’m honest with myself, I still don’t really get it. And there are things where even though I accept that he actually is always right and I’m sometimes wrong, it is really, really, frustrating; it’s really hard for me to accept that I don’t know everything – I hate it. It wouldn’t even be so bad if he always sat me down and gave me a full explanation of why he was right – if he actually tried to persuade me. On some things he does. But then some times, like my mum used to, when he says something or does something or refuses to do something and I ask him ‘Why?’ he just says, ‘Because I say so’. In fact, I’m even making it more palatable for the purposes of blogging here – he doesn’t so much say ‘Because I say so’; actually he has taught me stuff through the Bible and through his Spirit and through other people over the years to the point that I can’t help answering myself for him. I ask ‘Why?’ and then that annoying bit of me that will not be silenced says, reluctantly, ‘Look, he’s bigger than you. You are small and human and often quite stupid. He’s the perfect, eternal, and almighty God of the universe – King of kings, Lord of lords, God of the ages, Creator of all things seen and unseen, of all that you can and cannot imagine – he’s allowed to be mysterious. It is, in fact, to be expected.’ And even though in a lot of ways that is marvellous and beautiful, I cannot pretend that it’s not also really, really hard. Several times in the last couple of weeks, as I’ve been reading and thinking and struggling with some big question about God and the world – what the right thing to do is, what God really thinks – I’ve found myself genuinely hitting things in frustration. Because it really really matters and it’s really really difficult – sometimes genuinely impossible. And that is infuriating.

But then today I was thinking about this bit of bible that I’ve loved for a long time. And I looked at it again, and it really was like honey in my mouth. I’ll let you read it first – he’s talking about all the ways that Christians know about and experience God:

“We know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

The bit that really gets me in that is the very last line. “I have been fully known”. It’s important to note at this point, that there are two different types of knowing – there’s knowing about, and there’s personal knowing. If someone asks you whether you know Michael Hood you wouldn’t say, “Yes, he’s 5 foot 8 inches, brown hair with a few greys emerging, lots of freckles, born 4^th May 1994…” because that’s not what they mean. Knowing about someone is very different to knowing them personally. And definitely what Paul (the writer of this bit) is talking about is knowing personally – it’s seeing “face to face”. And that’s not just true of us knowing God, it’s true of him knowing us as well. And here’s where it gets deep: there’s a bit where Jesus was asked about who would enter into eternal life with him, and he said that there would be some who would, but there would be some who wouldn’t, because there are people to whom, in the eternal moment, he says: “I never knew you; depart from me.” He says there are people, many people, who he’s never known. Now of course God knows everything, he knows everything about everyone – but we see here that there are still people he never personally knows. Because personal knowing is voluntary. It’s vulnerability. To be known like this we have to allow someone to know us – we have to give ourselves to them and let them see us.

The bible actually uses the word “know” as a euphemism for sex, and I think that’s incredible. “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived…” And when I think about it, it actually makes so much sense, because the Christian vision of sex is of utter, intimate, knowing. I remember somebody telling me once about a couple of our friends who were going out, and they’d started having sex, but the girl had told this person that even though they’d had sex a few times now this guy had never once taken his shirt off. Because he had a bit of a belly, and he wanted to keep it covered up. Now I know that that’s story is sort of funny and quite weird, but I genuinely was so, so sad when I heard it. I just thought it was tragic – that they were having sex but he was still ashamed, still holding back and covering up; he still didn’t feel like he could be naked with her. Because if you believe like I do that our bodies and our minds and our souls are all wound up with each other, then being naked together is an utterly beautiful thing. To be absolutely exposed and vulnerable to each other, but to feel completely safe in that. To feel completely and unconditionally and ecstatically embraced – all of you, exactly as you are, every curve and dimple and imperfection – loved. And for someone to surrender themselves to you at the same time – to let you see them entirely, know them fully, and love them completely. It’s an incredible thing, isn’t it?

So when it says that I will know God fully, even as I am fully known, that gets me. He knows me, and I will know him, in the deepest, most intimate, most beautiful sense. And he’s not just another person – he’s the perfect one. He’s the risen Son. He’s the matchless, indescribable King, the true hero, the ultimate rescuer and the maker of the ultimate sacrifice. He’s the inspiration for every beauty of creation. The True Lover, my first love. And I am just broken and small and insignificant; but somehow I will know him, and he knows me.

And this truth has two effects on me. First, it makes me desperate to let him in, right now. Because like I say, knowing personally is a voluntary thing, so I really want to volunteer. I want to – weird as it sounds – get naked with him. I want to give him all of me, all the imperfections and knots and shadows, and also I want to give him my very best. I want to surrender every ounce of my brilliance to him and every bit of brokenness.

Someone told me a made-up story once about a young boy, who had a big collection of really beautiful marbles. And then one day he met this girl who had an amazing collection of shells. And he was looking at all her shells, and he liked them a lot. And she saw his marbles, and she loved them! So they decided to make a deal. They agreed that that night he would choose his ten best marbles, and she would choose her ten best shells, and they would bring them the next day and swap. So the little girl went home, found the best ten shells she had and put them in a bag. And the little boy did the same with his marbles. But as he put them in the bag he started looking at them again and thinking about how lovely they were and how he really did like them. Especially the very best ones. He didn’t want to give those away. They were his favourites. So he took out his very favourite marbles and hid them under his pillow, and put some others in the bag instead. The next day they swapped, just like they’d said. And that night the girl played with her new marbles for hours and she loved them – and she slept soundly with the little bag in her hand. But the little boy couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned all night worrying, one question turning over and over in his mind: “What if she kept her very best shells?”

And so whenever I get frustrated that it feels like God isn’t giving me what I want him to, I remember that story and I look under my pillow for the bits of me that I’ve refused to give to him. Because first and foremost I want to be known by God. I want him to have all of me.

And the second effect it has is to give me a certainty to hold onto in my uncertainty. In the times of anger and confusion at God for insisting on being huge and mysterious, I can hold onto this. Right now I know him in part – and it’s a pretty incredible part. I know him in Jesus, who came and revealed God’s character to us so that we could understand it, and revealed that fundamentally, it was love. I know that he loves me fiercely, and I know loads and loads about what he is offering me and what he wants me to do. Plenty to be getting on with. And I know him in the Spirit of Jesus that lives inside me, even though it’s tricky to pin down and sometimes much more obvious than others. What I know of him already is honestly greater than anything else I’ve ever known. But that’s not everything, because at the moment I only know him in part. One day, I will know him fully, face to face. And every drop of frustration and pain will melt into joy. I will approach the unapproachable. I will take hold of the uncontainable, incomprehensible glory of God himself, and I will know him, as completely as he knows me.

The Party is Real.

It is party season in Cambridge. My apologies if you have a life which renders this blog completely unseasonal because you’re in the middle of lots of ordinary hard work – but here, in the land of ‘I-think-in-terms-of-IQ-all-of-us-here-are-geniuses’ (genuine quote) and of multiplicitous boat-based activities, it is definitely the celebratory season. And parties are brilliant. I personally always used to love the time in a party when it had got really quite late, and people had sort of dissipated a bit, and you ended up having these hilarious, strangely deep conversations with just one or two people for hours on end. To be fair I also loved ceilidh-dancing the other night with seventy-ish people – so I suppose my tastes are fairly broad. Anyway, I came across an incredible story about a party recently and it made me have thoughts, so I wanted to share it.

The story is from a guy called Tony Campolo – he’s really cool, he’s a sociology professor, but also a trained minister in the church, and he does loads of stuff telling people about Jesus but also loads of projects trying to improve education, or medicine, or small business in the poorest areas of the world. He’s an all round top lad really, and this is a true story from one of his visits to Hawaii. Here’s a sort of abridged version of the story – in first person like he tells it.

***

Anyone who’s done it knows that when you travel to Hawaii from the east coast, there’s a time difference that makes three o’clock in the morning feel like nine. It was for this reason that I found myself wandering up and down the streets of Honolulu at three-thirty in the morning, looking for somewhere I could eat. I found a little place that was still open – a greasy little diner, the sort where you don’t really want to touch the menus, or think too much about anything before you eat it. But it was all that was open. So I got a coffee and a donut and sat down, and resisted the urge to hold my breath. As I ate, the door of the diner suddenly swung open and, to my discomfort, in came eight or nine boisterous prostitutes. It was a small place and they sat down on either side of me, chatting loudly and crudely. I felt thoroughly out of place and I was just about to get up and get out when I overheard the woman beside me say, “Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m going to be thirty-nine.”

Her ‘friend’ responded in a nasty tone, “So what do you want from me? A birthday party? What do you want? Ya want me to get you a cake and sing ‘Happy Birthday’?”

“Come on!” said the woman next to me. “Why do you have to be so mean? I was just telling you, that’s all. Why do you have to put me down? I was just telling you it was my birthday, I don’t want anything from you. I mean, why should you give me a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?”

When I heard that, I made a decision. I sat and waited until the women had left, then I called over the fat guy behind the counter and asked him, “Do they come here every night?” He said they did. “The one sitting next to me, does she come every night?” He said yes, that was Agnes, she came every night at 3:30. He asked why I wanted to know. “Because I heard her say that tomorrow is her birthday – what do you think about us throwing a birthday party for her – right here – tomorrow night?” A smile grew across this guy’s chubby face, and he called his wife out from the back room and told her my idea. She said that was a wonderful idea, that Agnes was one of those people who is really nice and kind, but nobody ever does anything kind for her. So we made plans. I said I’d come back at 2:30 the next morning with decorations and maybe a cake. Harry – the fat guy – said no, the birthday cake was his thing. He would make the cake.

At two thirty the next morning I was there, setting up paper decorations and putting up a sign I had made out of big pieces of cardboard that read, “Happy Birthday, Agnes!” It actually made the place look pretty good.

The man’s wife must have spread the word because by 3:15 that morning pretty much every prostitute in Honolulu was in that place. And me.

At 3:30 on the dot, the door of the diner swung open and in came Agnes and her friend – and we all shouted together, “Happy Birthday!”

Never have I seen a person so flabbergasted – so stunned – so shaken. Her mouth fell open. Her legs seemed to buckle a bit. Her friend grabbed her arm to steady her. As she was led to one of the stools along the counter we all sang “Happy Birthday” to her. As we came to the last line of the song, her eyes moistened. Then, when the birthday cake with all the candles on it was carried out, she lost it and just openly cried.

Harry mumbled at her to blow out the candles – “if you don’t blow out the candles, I’m gonna hafta blow out the candles for you!” – and eventually he did. Then he handed her the knife and said gently, “Cut the cake, Agnes. We all want some cake.”

Agnes looked down at the cake. Then without taking her eyes off it, she slowly and softly said, “Look, Harry, is it all right with you if I… I mean is it okay if I kind of… what I want to ask you is… is it okay if I keep the cake a little while? I mean is it all right if we don’t eat it right away?”

Harry shrugged and answered, “Sure! It’s okay. If you want to keep the cake, keep the cake. Take it home if you want to.”

“Can I?” she asked. Then looking at me she said, “I live just down the street a couple of doors. I want to take the cake home and show it to my mother, okay? I’ll be right back. Honest!”

She got off the stool, picked up the cake, and carrying it like it was the Holy Grail walked slowly to the door, and went out, to show it to her mother.

***

I love that story. I love it because it suddenly makes you realise just how beautiful it is for someone to know our name, and celebrate us. Birthday parties are amazing ideas – we just celebrate together the sheer fact of someone else’s existence. And we celebrate it because we really care about them; they matter to us; to us they are worth celebrating.

The other day I was listening to somebody talk about the bit where Jesus told three stories back to back, all really similar (it’s Luke 15). The first is about a shepherd who loses a sheep, and he leaves the other ninety-nine sheep to go after this lost one, and when he finds it he picks it up and carries it home, and then tells everyone to come to his house and celebrate that night, because he has found his lost sheep. Then the next is about an old woman who has only got 10 coins left to live on, and she loses one of them. And so she turns the house upside down looking for this coin, all day just searching for it, until eventually she finds it. And she’s so overjoyed at finding this coin that she declares a feast that night and invites everyone around to celebrate her lost coin, which has been found! And the last one is the most famous – the story of the ‘prodigal son’. A father loses his son – he takes his inheritance and runs away from home. Eventually the son has wasted all his money and he’s going to starve, and he decides –dirty and broke – to come back home and beg for work as a servant. And when he comes his dad is waiting for him, he sees him and he goes running out to him – picks him up and kisses him, dresses him up in all his finest clothes and throws a feast for the whole village to celebrate the return of his son.

And Jesus says as he tells these stories, again and again, “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents.” That means that the stories are about God and us: God is the shepherd, the old woman, the father, and we are the sheep, the coin, the son. And when you think about them like that, these stories are incredible. In each one of them the person really, really, cares about the thing that is lost. The shepherd will take ridiculous risks to go after this lost sheep because it means so much to him. He knows that sheep by name. He’s watched it grow up since it was a lamb. He loves it. And he carries it home, close to his heart. Jesus is saying that God really, really, cares about us. Each one of us personally, not just us put together. He cares passionately about you. About me. About everyone you ever meet. He knows you, he’s watched you grow up from your mother’s womb, he knows your name and he loves you with a fierce love. You personally. And so if we come home – if we ‘repent’, which just means to turn away from our selfishness, our rebellion, our independence, and come home to our Father asking him to forgive us and take us back, if we do that, he throws a feast. He declares a spectacular party in heaven.

Now this is completely impossible for us to imagine really – but its fun to try. What’s it like? A hundred thousand angels invited to dance and feast and celebrate. Beauty and movement and laughter and joy. And at the top table, at the head of the feast, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit sit, celebrating together. And then imagine – lets imagine that above their heads is a banner, a huge banner with a name written on it – the name of the person in whose honour they are feasting, the name of the person whose return they are celebrating. I genuinely had tears in my eyes when the guy said this, because I’d never thought of it like this before. If you’ve repented, if you’ve heard Jesus calling you and come home, then there was a night, when there was a feast in heaven, and above the top table, where the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit sat, there was a banner with your name on it. Your name. Imagine it.

I don’t know about you but that thought is strange and beautiful to me. Because the assumption of our age is that the universe is fundamentally impersonal. That ultimately, s**t happens and the world doesn’t care, so we just have to laugh in its face as much as we can. We live and we die and all we can do is improvise something in the meantime that will sustain the sensation of meaning. We pitch tents on the sinking sand of the universe and call them ‘personalities’.  But I really believe – even though sometimes I forget – that the world is better than that. That to be human is not to be in denial. That behind and beneath and beyond all things is the beat of a heart that loves personally. The arms of a shepherd who carries us home close to his chest; the face of a father who knows our name, and whose pulse races when he hears it. The truth is so much better than we think it is.

And I know it sounds like it, but I promise you that this is not just wishful thinking: not least because in a lot of ways even though it’s better it is harder. Love is by its very nature inconvenient. But much more so it’s not wishful thinking because I came to believe it not out of wanting it to be true but because I was convinced by the evidence. I am convinced, along with many others, that the only explanation for events of which we can be certain is that Jesus of Nazareth came back from the dead. A guy called Frank Morison set out to write a book explaining the true events that led to the obvious misunderstanding of the early Christians’ that Jesus had been resurrected. He looked into the history, the evidence, all the different explanations for what happened. The book he wrote is called Who Moved the Stone and its thesis is this: there is no other explanation. Morison argues that Jesus must have been resurrected and explains that he has become a Christian. If anyone wants to read the book just drop me a message and I will very happily buy it for you as a gift for summer reading. Because I am sure that the world is better than we think. That there is a God, and he loves you intensely. That he is the source of everything we truly need and he longs to give it to us. I think that something in us knows that right at the bottom of it, life is meaningful, and it is personal. And I honestly think that we’re right.

If you don't have me on facebook but do want the book = or suggestions of other books about the evidence for Jesus - you are more than welcome to email me, mikehood1994@gmail.com . Cheers!

Rabbits and Real Life

One Christmas, the Velveteen Rabbit was given to the boy for a Christmas present. He was a lovely stuffed toy, very nice to look at and soft to touch; but all the mechanical toys were bigger, and more impressive, and were always boasting about how real they were; how they could move and make real noises and do impressive things. Only the old Skin Horse was kind to the Rabbit. He had been around for ever and ever, and seen hundreds of toys come and go, and he knew all about the nursery-magic – all the strange and wonderful things that only wise old toys like the Skin Horse understood.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

***

Somebody read this out in church the other day, which was quite unexpected but also quite brilliant. And if you’ve seen my blogs on Toy Story or the Lion King you’ll probably already have worked out why I love it so much.

I want to be real. I think we all want to be real. I think we all have a desire, somewhere in us, to be who we actually are with each other – to live our real life, and not always have to create a fictional, edited version of ourselves for public consumption. I think this is partly why life feels so exhausting a lot of the time – we’re trying to do two whole lives at once: the real one, which we can’t help but live, but then also the slightly-made-up, nasty-bits-left-out, cracks-painted-over life that we feel we need to live in front of every one else. I could quite easily go on a rant about facebook and stuff at this point, about how we end up feeling rubbish about ourselves because we’re scrolling down the newsfeed, comparing our own real, messy lives with everyone else’s facebook-life – a kind of sepia-tone, photo-shopped, only-the-best-bits version, where we get a status update for every hilarious happening, every big success, and every time a massive thank you is in order to all my amazing friends and my gorgeous boyfriend and my awesome family, but we never get to read the dark moments. No one’s tweeting “I’m really lonely” so we think it’s just us – but it’s not. And at this point, I’d like to apologise for the fact that often I choose to write this blog at the end of a good story – so that every thing that’s difficult gets written about in the past tense, and I give the impression that my life always finds itself at these meaningful, pleasant happy endings. It’s not normally that simple, and I’m sorry.

I was chatting to my mate the other day about this, about what we do to ourselves with the whole facebook comparison thing, and then she said something that really hit me – it’s not just facebook. We live our whole lives like this. She said to me, the only time we ever talk about how we actually feel, is when we’re drunk. And I think a lot of the time that’s true. And it’s tragic isn’t it? And I think it’s because we’re scared that if people see the ‘real’ version of us, they’ll think we’re ugly. They’ll think we’re weird. They’ll put us in the box of people who’ve ‘got issues’ and never look at us in the same way again. Maybe, even worse, we’re afraid that they’ll use our wounds as a weapon and hurt us. So we just never talk about it. We have friends, and they’re good friends, and we love them, and they seem to love us, but we always have this thing in our heads reminding us that they don’t love the real us, they love the version of us that we’ve shown them – the one with all the messy parts and the ‘issues’ edited out, the one without the loneliness, without the fears. And that’s not quite the same. But it’s better than nothing, so we settle for it.

Well, this is me saying, let’s not settle for it. This is me saying – are we not better than that? Can we not all just agree that we will refuse to put each other in boxes, that we will refuse to label our friends as ‘weird’, that we will refuse to think even the slightest bit less of someone because they’ve told us the truth, and they’re life turns out not to be shiny or perfect? Because none of our lives are very shiny once you take the filter off. None of us are actually perfect. If there’s a ‘weird’ box, then we’re all in it. We’re all in the ‘weird’ box together. So why don’t we just stop being scared of it and have a party in the box? Let’s stop pretending so that we can stop being lonely. Let’s stop closing the door on each other. Let’s live our real lives together. Because “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

But the problem is, that I type this, and I hope that lots of people will read it and be nodding and saying ‘Yes, that would be so much better’, but at the same time I know that its not that simple. You can’t just become Real all at once, just because you’d like to be. But here’s the thing, the one thing that gives me so much hope:

“Real is a thing that happens to you. When someone loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

Here’s what I want to say, and you’ve probably heard it a hundred times, but I hope you’ll hear it differently this time. Jesus loves you. And I mean really loves you – not just to play with, not just because he pities you, not just in a generic, ‘God cares about people’ kind of way, he specifically, especially, loves you. He knows your name. I remember someone saying once, that if he had a wallet, your picture would be in it. And it would. And even better than that, he loves the real you. He loves you with all of your issues and your mess and your loneliness – he knows exactly how you feel, all your thoughts and fears and worries and the stupid things that you’d never say out loud, and he utterly, utterly loves you. He longs for you. He thinks about you all day. And that seems ridiculous to us because we can’t imagine someone being able to think about every single person at once – but this is God, he can and he really, really does. He smiles when you smile. He weeps when you weep. And my point is this: when you realise that he loves you, and he’s loved you for a really, really long time, something changes. You’re willing to admit to him that you’re not shiny and you’re not perfect. You start to tell him that you need him - that you need him to forgive you, and heal all the bits of you that are broken and that you don’t like to show people. You start to open the door, and uncross your arms, and let him come in and pick you up. And it’s then – when you admit that you’re “loose in the joints and very shabby”, and you need a God that can see past that and love you anyway – that he can start to set you free. When you let him love you, when you let him tell you what he thinks of you and how much he thinks of you; then you become Real.

And once he’s made you Real, its not so scary to be real with other people – because the idea that people will think you’re weird is a lot less frightening when you know that God himself calls you his child, his beloved, and his delight. And it helps you to let other people be real as well – because when you’ve admitted how shabby you are, it gets easier to love shabby people. It gets harder to judge them, or put labels on them, because you know that God loves this person as fiercely and completely as he loves you. And sometimes being Real will hurt, like the Skin Horse says. But then again, “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

So really, this is just me saying, can we be real together please? I think it would be better. And this is me promising that I, for one, will never think less of you if you’re real with me; I’ll never think that you’re weird or that you’ve got issues and I’ll never put you in a box and stay away from you. Because I’ve got issues, and God did not stay away from me, he came and he picked me up, and told me that he loves me anyway. This is just me, asking you if you want to come with me, and try to start living Real life.

Why Man Flu is Great (and why I don't need to prove myself)

I haven’t written a blog for a very long time – in fact as my brother pointed out today, this last few weeks has been the longest gap since I started it in Malawi. I would love to say that I’ve just been too busy, but looking back, I was always too busy to do this really this but I did it anyway – because I love it. Honestly, I think the reason I haven’t written anything for a while is because I haven’t had anything much to say! Not that nothing exciting has happened – lots of exciting things have happened. Since I last posted on here I’ve had one of the most epic experiences of my life: seeing one of my friends come to believe in Jesus, and getting to be there as he starts to enjoy Him. That has been an utter delight, and a ridiculous privilege – and it makes me grin and get excited just to think about it. I’ve also received a surprise visit from my girlfriend, started spending a unusual  amount of time on the roof of a bike shed, and become an expert in the manipulation of sock puppets. So plenty was going on, I just didn’t really have anything profound to say about any of it – but I’ve decided that it’s time to break through and write something anyway.

I want to write about something that I’ve known for a long time, but seems to be one of my favourite things to forget. It’s about proving myself.

It is exam term at the moment, so I have a lot of friends who are, shall we say, not feeling as zen as they might like. I am also not very popular this term, because us marvellous English students don’t actually have exams in first year. So what should be the case is that everyone around me is going mental and getting exhausted, and I’m just strolling around feeling chilled and peaceful, sipping on a can of Lilt. Sadly, what’s actually happened is that I’ve found myself with quite a lot of Shakespeare to think about, tonnes of rehearsals to be rehearsing in (that’s where the sock puppets come in), and many and various God-based activities to be doing. So much so, that by last Sunday night, I was genuinely really exhausted, and stressed, and I was definitely considering throwing a temper tantrum until someone brought me a time-turner. I also, ironically, felt guilty because I was supposed to be the one with no exam.

And then on Monday, I got man flu. And this man flu turned out to be surprisingly helpful. (Just to clarify, I don’t think that God mystically gave me a cold, but I think that He is exactly the sort of legend that will take anything, if we’ll let him, even annoying things, and turn them into something good. Like those people who make flip-flops out of old tyres.) The metaphorical flip-flop which God made out of my cold was basically this: it forced me to admit to myself and to Him that I was not actually capable of writing a brilliant essay, running several prayer meetings, having a spontaneous DMC with every single one of my friends, being funny with sock puppets for several hours, saving the world and getting some more milk from Sainsbury’s all in one day. I was obliged to abandon my semi-well-intentioned plan to do every single thing that God likes us to do all at once all by myself. Instead I switched to Plan B: do everything you actually have to do, and spend some proper, good time alone with God – then see what else you feel up to. And you know what? Plan B turns out to be pretty good.

The funny thing is though, that I’m still on Plan B, but I’m feeling quite a lot better now, and I’m actually back to doing pretty much exactly the same amount of stuff as I was before. But I don’t feel like I’m dying so much anymore. In fact, to extend the metaphor (as I love to do) I feel like I’m coming alive. And the differences are two things…

Thing One is that I’ve gone back to carving out time to enjoy God. That might sound a little bit silly if you don’t believe in him, but it is what I mean. Because the whole thing is pretty epic really – and by the whole thing I mean my current state of existence – in that God – as in ‘I AM’, the Creator and Holder-Together of the universe, the Epic Poet who spoke the stars into existence, the Author who invented us, the Craftsman who created us, the One True King, from of old, the Rightful Heir to the Throne of Everything – in that that God knows my name, and he smiles when he hears it. And even though I broke his heart but he actually likes me, he loves me to death. And I get to call him Dad, and he listens when I talk to him, and he does incredible things just to show me that he loves me, and the list goes on and on really. And since the man flu, I’ve been putting a bit more time and effort into enjoying that. Into reading about him, writing about him, talking to him, singing songs and doing silly little dances for him. Sometimes just being still and knowing that he’s right there with me.

And in that time, He’s started to remind me about Thing Two – and, as promised, it’s about proving myself. There’s a lyric in a song we were singing at church recently that starts to express it:

Jesus, you’ve nothing more to prove,
So what could separate me from your love?

(I love the attempt to make ‘prove’ and ‘love’ rhyme – tis pleasantly Shakespearean.) Anyway, I love the lyric, and it keeps on moving me every time I sing it. So then I was thinking about why, and this is my best guess…

I don’t just get exhausted because I do a lot of stuff. That’s why I get tired, but then there’s another type of exhaustion, something a bit deeper. And that deeper kind of exhaustion happens when I’m doing all this stuff that I do in an attempt to prove myself. When I’m doing it to try and demonstrate – mostly just to myself – that I really am a good Christian. That I really am ‘committed’. That I really do care about all the things I’m supposed to care about. That I really am following Jesus with my whole life. That I really am a good student. That I really am a good friend. A good boyfriend. A good person. To prove that I am who I think I am, that I am who I want to be. And that is exhausting. Like I say, not the things themselves – the things themselves I really love doing, they just get tiring if you do too many of them in one go without sleeping – it’s just this need to prove myself that eats me up.

And then I remember. I remember that Jesus didn’t say, “I’ll teach you the way to be as good as you need to be, if you’ll try hard enough, and then I’ll be pleased with you.” He said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” I remember that he can give us rest because he has done all of the work that we needed to do. He has put in all of the effort, and he nailed it. And the pun there was unintentional, but actually quite relevant – because instead of taking all the glory, all the praise that he had earned for himself, he let people spit on him, and kill him – because he was saving that glory. He was saving that glory so he could share it with us. So that we can boast, we can glory – I love that verb so much – we can glory in how much he loves us, the what he thinks of us, in the names that he calls us. He calls us friends. He calls us brothers and sisters. He calls us children of the living God, and he tells us that he’s proud of us. Not because of all the impressive things we did today, but because we’re his kids now. I remember that he loves us because he loves us, and there’s nothing we can ever do to stop him. I remember the prodigal son wandering home, literally covered in crap, and the Father running out and down the street and wrapping his arms around him and beaming at him and saying, “This is my son!”

I remember all of that and I realise that I have got absolutely nothing left to prove. I know who I am, and it’s never going to change. He’s proved it to me. So I’m still tired, but I’m not so exhausted any more. And it’s really good.