Why Stephen Fry Is Right, and I Love God.

Stephen Fry recently said some really powerful things in an interview about what he would say to God if he met him – he talks about suffering and injustice, especially for children, he refers to the East African Loa Loa eye-worm which eats children’s eyes and blinds them, and he imagines himself asking God, “How dare you?” He says, “It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.”

And I think that he’s right. I think that the reason that the video has been so widely shared and has provoked such a huge response of support and agreement is that everyone knows deep down, and feels really strongly, that it’s not right. It’s not right. Bone cancer in children is not right. It is utterly, utterly evil. So part of what I want to say is that I completely agree with that.

There’s just a couple of things I want to share about how I feel about it as a Christian; as someone who believes in Jesus and believes that he is God – the creator of the world revealing himself as a human being. Two things.

One is that it made me think of something I heard a man say recently, when he was talking about how he became a Christian. He was brought up atheist, but when he was in his twenties his father died suddenly aged 52. And he said something like this:

“It really made me look up and think about the world for the first time. And I thought, there’s really two ways the world might be – either it’s all just a product of matter plus time plus chance, you know, the sort of normal, no-God universe; or there’s a God who created it all. And I felt like the way I was feeling about my dad, the sorrow of it, didn’t seem to make sense in the no-God universe, if we were all just stuff.”

He was saying that his sense of grief about his father seemed to him like something that did not fit in a universe that was purely the product of time and chance and evolutionary process. And as I watch Stephen Fry speaking it seems to me like he’s really expressing a deep feeling that we all have – this profound sense of injustice, that the world is not as it should be – and that strangely, that feeling doesn’t quite fit in a world where there is no God. I think we are heartbroken and outraged by suffering because it is actually wrong. It is not right. We know, deep within us, that there is good and there is evil, and that the Loa Loa worm, and Auschwitz, are evil. And I just want to suggest, as gently as I can, that it seems to me, we have that feeling because good and evil are real things. There is a way that the world should be and a way it shouldn’t be, and if everything is just matter plus time plus chance, then that doesn’t really make sense. If that’s all it is, then this is just the way things are. There can be no ‘ought’. But if there is a God, and there is right and wrong, there is what ‘ought’ to be; then it makes sense that our hearts would hate pain, and wrong, and injustice, and suffering.

And the second thing I want to say is that I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry hates. If I met the God he describes, I hope I’d have the courage to say what he says too. But I think that God isn’t like that. I think God isn’t like that because he died on a cross. A guy called Pete Greig puts it much better than I could:

“The Nobel Laureate writer Elie Wiesel recollects a terrible moment in Auschwitz when he saw a child hung from the gallows. For more than half an hour the boy writhed, his body not yet heavy enough to finish the job quickly. Forced to watch this atrocity one observer cried:

‘Where is God? Where is God now?’ But another person pointed to the child’s corpse and wept: ‘There he is, hanging on the gallows’.

This is the tragedy at the heart of Christian faith: the belief that God suffered with us, like us and for us. That God is not distant, malignant or dispassionate. The cross, if it means anything at all, means that he identifies with us in our suffering, and that he is not yet fully in control. Evil things happen which God does not want or intend. When a woman is raped, this is not the will of God. When a child is sold into slavery, God is not the perpetrator but the victim.”

Stephen Fry talks about how he would prefer the Greek gods, because they admit to being human and capricious, whereas the Christian God presents himself as all-seeing and all-wise and so on. I see what he means, but I think that in the bible, and in Jesus, God presents himself not as a kind of ultimate dictator who watches approvingly over every agony, but as a God who to a very serious extent has allowed the world to be not what he wants it to be, and feels the pain of that. There are loads of reasons for him doing that, and it would make this blog way too long to go through them, but the most important thing is that in Jesus we see God himself not as the perpetrator but becoming the victim with us. And for us.

When Jesus saw his friend Mary after her brother had died, he wept. God weeps. And after I’d watched the video I started to imagine, what if Stephen Fry really did get to say that to God, to stand before Jesus and say those words? And I am sure that if he did, when he’d said his piece and he looked up, he would see tears in Jesus’ eyes. And he would see the wounds in Jesus’ hands. I think this is why for so many people who are oppressed, whose lives have been devastated by suffering, Jesus makes sense.

And I also think he makes sense to people because he isn’t just sympathetic but then powerless to help. He is the true source of hope. He came back from the dead, and he tells us that we are right that injustice and suffering and pain are wrong, that they are not the way things should be, and he says to us – Look. I was dead, but now I am alive, and it will not be this way forever. Evil will not prevail forever, cancer will not exist forever and one day death itself will die. There will be no more tears.

Walter Wink once said, ‘Against some images of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.’ So what I’m saying is, Stephen Fry is so, so right. We are right to hate evil, and injustice, and pain. But I don’t believe he’s right about what God is like. If God were like he thinks he is, I would hate him too; but I think God is revealed in Jesus, who wept, and died, and rose, and so I love him.




You can watch the original interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo#t=35

New Years Resolution: Be More Free (and maybe learn to dance)

I’ve been thinking about New Years Resolutions (as I suppose most of us do every year) and I reckon they’re quite a strange thing.

It seems to me that normally, in our (Western, consumerist, post-modern) culture, we hold – consciously or not – to a basic assumption about happiness, and more specifically about freedom. We’re big on freedom, we love it – and I’m all for this, I think freedom is great. But we tend to think of freedom pretty much as being able to do what we desire to do. In its most obvious form this is your classic getting-the-day-off-school freedom, or the its-fresher’s-week-and-my-parents-are-a-hundred-miles-away freedom. We think being free is just when there are no restrictions stopping us doing what we want. Of course, we realise it’s not always that simple – and plenty of people have learnt to wait for the second marshmallow (if you don’t know what on earth I’m talking about, watch this delightful video). So sometimes this kind of freedom means putting work in now, perhaps not having as much of what we want, so that we can earn more of what we want later on. Maybe there were some days growing up when Jonny Wilkinson didn’t really want to kick a rugby ball for some more hours, but he knew that one day, he wanted to be the best, so he went and kicked it anyway.

And this understanding of freedom, on the face of it, makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense especially to us in a Western setting (with its emphasis on the individual over the group), and in our consumerist setting (where businesses succeed by arousing our desires and convincing us to spend money on them). It also makes sense in the post-modern mindset, which doesn’t really include the idea of choosing our worldview by trying to work out what corresponds to reality, but encourages us to find a belief system that ‘works for us’, which usually means, one that satisfies, or allows us to satisfy, our desires.

What surprises me about New Years Resolutions then, is that sometimes they seem to be a little crack in that understanding of happiness – a flicker of a different way of thinking about freedom. Of course some of them are just second marshmallow things: we resolve to go to the gym more so we’ll be healthier and more attractive, or we want to put more time into that project because we think might be our big break. But some New Years Resolutions look a bit like we’ve got hold of a different understanding of what it actually is to be free. We realise that even though most of the time we don’t really desire to turn our phone off when we get to the pub and not touch it all night, if we could just make the effort we would enjoy our friends much more. We realise that even though we never feel like getting up for it, when we actually can get ourselves to go for that cycle as the sun rises, it’s the most beautiful thing.

I'll get to the dancing thing in a minute...

When I’m really busy in the middle of term, I never really want to take an hour to chat to my big brother, but if I ever do, it turns out that I love him, and he is wise, and I end up much more than an hour’s-worth better off for having talked stuff through with him. Actually I have exactly the same thing with talking to God and reading the Bible! I barely ever feel like doing it, but then when I actually do, some days I find myself literally weeping with joy at the glorious reality of it. Or take wasting time on the internet. This is one of my big struggles at the moment. The thing is, when I waste time on the internet its never because something is forcing me to do it – no one is tying my wrists to the keyboard or doing the whole Clockwork Orange thing pinning my eyes open as I scroll through the newsfeed. I am perfectly free in the normal western sense. I do it because at that moment what I want to do is scroll down; I want to click on that article and read about ‘Twenty Three and a Half Hilarious Reasons Why You Should Never Send Pictures To Your Ex’. But when I think about it I realise that it doesn’t satisfy me, it doesn’t fulfil me, it doesn’t make me feel alive. What I want is not a very good guide to what I ought to want, the thing I’ll wish I’d done in retrospect. I don’t want what I want to want. And I think if we’re honest, this is what its’ like for all of us: our desires aren’t actually very good at leading us to what we really need.

And this makes a lot of sense in a biblical worldview. The bible talks about God as our father, or sometimes it imagines him like our mother, and so – obviously – it talks about us as kids. But not just kids – if we don’t know God then we’re like kids who don’t listen to their parents. Now so far, this might not be the most attractive illustration you’ve ever come across – you’re sympathising with the kid here and you don’t like the sound of this parental authority very much, certainly not as a description of God – some giant Dad nagging us about tidying our rooms. But just come with me a second, and imagine a kid who starts learning ballet. I’m getting the urge to call him Billy but that would become confusing so we’ll go with Matt.

When Matt’s four, his parents take him along to a little children’s dancing group and he enjoys it, and they take him back every week. Usually they have to tear him away from his lego to get him out of the door but once he’s there he has a good time. And then when he gets to be about 7 or 8 the training starts to get a little bit more serious. They do a long physical warm up every week, with lots of stretches that are actually quite painful. And not just that but they do strength and fitness exercises that leave him exhausted. Every week he gets into the car after dancing and complains that it hurts, and it’s too hard, and he doesn’t want to do it anymore. But because he’s only 7, his mum and dad are in charge and they tell him that he can’t quit now because he’ll regret it later, so he keeps coming back reluctantly every week. Matt starts secondary school and he’s getting a bit more into the training – still hates the stretches but he’s actually quite enjoying the strength stuff – but now he’s got another problem because people are laughing at him for doing ballet. He’s getting picked on and people are calling him names, usually it’s just ‘banter’ but he feels really humiliated. And he wants to quit. He wants to stop dancing and just switch to something more acceptable – maybe basketball, he doesn’t mind basketball. But his Dad sits him down and says he won’t sit by and see his own son get put off doing something brilliant because some other kids were laughing at him. And Matt keeps going.

All the way through his childhood Matt is restricted. He doesn’t get to do what he wants to do. But on the day that he comes home from his grade eight ballet exam he sits down and he looks back. And he realises that to be fair, a bit of him has always loved it. Ever since he started, there’ve been those moments, those tiny glimpses, where he felt like his body was doing what it was made for. And he realises that now, when he moves, he is wonderfully free. He is elegant, and powerful, and athletic. He can lift another person over his head and spin them round and put them back down and make it all look and feel as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He is ridiculously free. He can dance.

Jesus said that even when we aren’t restricted from doing whatever we want, that doesn’t mean we’re free.* He said we’re still slaves to our own desires, because we can’t control them. We can’t decide what we want to want. And they are not good masters – of course sometimes they lead us to satisfying, fulfilling things, but loads of the time they take us down a dead-end, and hold us back from the things that would make us really alive. But he says if we let him set us free, then we will be free indeed. Really free. He says that right now we’re kids who’ve run away from home and won’t listen to our mum and dad – and it means we’re getting controlled by all those desires that we don’t realise yet are actually leading us in the wrong directions. Away from who we could be, away from what and who would really bring us to life. And occasionally, when we make a New Years Resolution, or maybe when something that we’d really desired lets us down, we get a glimpse of that. But Jesus said it doesn’t have to be like that because he wasn’t a runaway – he was a true son. And he promises that if we’ll be united with him, if we’ll come be with him and identify ourselves with him, then we can be true sons and daughters too. That God wants to adopt us back, and take us in, and nurture us, and grow us, and give us more and more moments of real freedom – so that even though he might lead us through bits where it feels like serious effort, where he’s asking us to do what we don’t desire, one day not so far away we will look back and a smile will creep across our faces and we’ll whisper, ‘Thank you’. Because we’ll realise that now, after all that, we can dance.

*I’m getting this stuff from his conversation in John chapter 8, verses 31 to 36.

The Lion King and the Deep Story of Life - Part 3 - The Stampede

This is going to be a very unusual blog about Christmas. To be honest, it started in my head because during a moment of quiet at Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, the Lion King popped into my head. I remembered that this clip was the next part I wanted to write about, and suddenly it occurred to me that weird as it was, it’s sort of about Christmas. If you want some context, have a quick look at the clips from Lion King blogs 1 and 2 (http://stuckontherooftops.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-lion-king-and-deep-story-of-life-1.html) then have a watch:

Honestly, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times, it’s worth watching it again – partly because this blog makes no sense without it!

This obviously is a huge moment in the film – it’s so dramatic of course – but it’s worth noticing as well that there’s a sense in which it almost feels inevitable. It might be just that I’ve seen it a hundred times but I don’t think it is: when Mufasa lifts Simba out and gets him to safety, at that moment something in you knows that he won’t just clamber out after him and be fine. That wouldn’t be right somehow, that’s not what real stories are made of.

And I think that’s because we know from all our stories that the greatest acts of love are the acts of sacrifice. Whether it’s Gandalf with the Balrog, Aslan offering himself to the White Witch, Katniss risking her life to save her sister, or Jack at the end of Titanic: the ultimate act of love is to give your life to save another’s. As one great storyteller once said: “Greater love has no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.”

Now, for every story like this – every moment where someone makes the ultimate sacrifice – there need to be three fundamental elements to the situation.

1) Someone needs to be in mortal danger, unable to save themselves.

Obviously, Mufasa wouldn’t need to save Simba if he wasn’t in danger. Something I think is really powerful about this particular scene is the symbol of the gorge and the stampede. Simba is stuck, the walls are too steep, and he is too weak, and the stampede is coming, the clock is ticking.

And here, I’ll start explaining the relevance to Christmas – to us and Jesus. Of course in one sense, we’re definitely stuck in the gorge. We’re mortals, and we will die, and there’s not a lot we can do about that. But it’s not enough for me to say that – because if there is a God, why should it be? Why wouldn’t he just let people live forever? I remember thinking about this a while ago, and thinking – imagine it. Imagine that people never died. Would that be better or worse?

Personally, I think the answer is complicated. Because we wouldn’t have the horrible pain of losing someone; but then on the other hand, people are quite as capable of inflicting pain when we’re alive as when we’re dead. If everyone lived forever then people’s cruelty, all human evil, would never come to an end. We would keep on breaking our relationships over and over, and the wounds that we inflict on one another would keep on festering and festering. And physical wounds too: agonising illnesses and conditions would be never-ending. I think that if we couldn’t get healing for our bodies, reconciliation for our relationships, and restoration for our characters – then living forever would be hell.

If we are to be like we currently are – so limited in our ability to live together without inflicting wounds – then it seems like we need to be limited by death as well. I know that’s a big claim, and there are lots of other reasons that I think it’s true – so please message me if you want me to defend that a bit more. But I think that’s the reality, that’s why we can’t escape the stampede.

In fact, Jesus went even further. He taught that death is a full stop, but it’s not the end of the story: that there is a final chapter. He called it his wedding day: when the body made up of ordinary people from every tribe and tongue and nation, every person that wanted him, that loved him, that trusted him, would be his bride. And here’s the thing: he said that we could live forever, and that it wouldn’t be hell because if we’ll let him he is capable of restoring our bodies, of restoring our relationships, of restoring us to the people we were made to be. He promised to craft out of us an eternity which was colourful, and full to bursting with real life, and unscarred by hatred, untouched by tears. He claimed that this was possible because he could reconcile us to himself, to God – and because God is the source of all goodness, all healing and all forgiveness, that out of that one ultimate reconciliation everything else could flow.

But he also warned that without that centre – without us loving him and letting him reconcile us with God – all the other things that would need to happen to make living forever a good thing would be impossible. Our bodies couldn’t be healed, nor could our relationships, and nor could our personalities. CS Lewis expressed this idea in a way that’s strange but quite powerful I think:

“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

So Jesus warned people – with tears in his eyes – that the stampede was coming. That we are in terrible, terrible danger from ourselves. And the walls are way too steep for us to just climb out of our mortality.

2) Someone else needs to be able to save them, but only at the cost of their own life.

This is the difference between the emotional depth of your average Bond film – where someone gets in trouble, and then at the last minute Bond does some impressive acrobatic thing and shoots some minor characters and rescues them – and the really deep war movies, or action movies, where for whatever reason the hero pays with their life.

Ridley Scott directed the film Gladiator, and when he was sent the script originally it had a different ending to the one it has now (spoiler alert by the way). Maximus (Russell Crowe) did all the rest of the film the same, and got to the final battle, the duel between him and the bad guy Commodus: and in the original script, he won. He won the fight, turned in triumph to the roaring crowd, and went on to save Rome. But when Scott read the script, he said they had to change the end. Maximus had to die. In the film, he does kill the bad guy, but he gets wounded, and instead of living victorious, he dies victorious. In an interview, Scott was asked why he changed the ending? He said that Maximus had to die, so that we know that he really loves Rome.

As some of you might have noticed it was actually Jesus who said, “Greater love has no one than this: that they lay down their life for their friends.” And he wasn’t just talking about how his followers should live – he was talking about himself – what he was doing. Christmas happens at 1 minute 50 seconds in that video – when Mufasa sees Simba, and jumps down into the gorge to get him. Jesus stepped down and took on our humanity, even our mortality. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know the stampede was coming – that he didn’t realise he was going to have to die – on the contrary he was constantly talking about it. He said that he had to suffer, be rejected and be killed,* that he was laying down his life of his own accord,** and he was giving his life as a ransom for many*** - paying the price to set many people free.

Jesus taught that the reality which we can feel in stories – that someone has to die, that the deepest expression of love is sacrifice – is actually the ultimate reality. That we need God to sacrifice himself to save us.

I know that again, this is a massive idea, it is the claim at the heart of everything that I am convinced of about the world, about myself and about God. It would just be ridiculous for me to try and say everything I have to say about it here, but honestly, if there’s anything I’d love to talk about, it’s this. So please do feel free to ask me.

3) They have to do it.

It’s not enough for someone to be in danger and someone to be able to save them. Mufasa has to do it. And he does it because he loves Simba, and he would give anything for him, even himself.

Same with Jesus. I tend to be so used to the whole thing that I forget that he was a real man, with real feelings, who made a real decision to actually do it. God revealed who he was by becoming a man, so we could see his character – see what he’s actually like and how he really relates to us – and we see him wrestling quietly in the darkness the night before he was arrested, sweating blood with anxiety about what he was about to face, knowing that he had the power to just walk away whenever he wanted. But he didn’t. He loved us so deeply, so completely, that he gritted his teeth and bore the insults, the mockery, the torture, and finally death itself. That’s what God is like. A man who would do that.

And he has done it: everything he needs to do to make it possible for us to be his bride on that wedding day – for our final chapter to be one that never ends, full of unimaginable, deep and delicious beauty.

To be honest at this point the metaphor breaks down a little bit – because Mufasa can only save Simba to live a life without him (well, sort of…). But Jesus bore all the weight of death, and then beat it. So he doesn’t just save us and then leave us – he saves us to be with him. And that means that like in any relationship, reconciliation is a two-way thing. He has offered us his life, real life, but that’s not it – we have to accept it if we’re going to be reconciled, if we’re going to be that bride, if we’re going to be rescued and set free into true joy. We have to accept it.

So that’s where I’ll leave it for now. Sorry it’s been such a long blog, but I felt like I had to do a truth so huge and deep and difficult a bit of justice. And please do message me, I’d love to chat about any questions or problems or anything you like about it!

But for now, that’ll do.

Love,
Mike

*Luke 9:22

**John 10:17-18

***Mark 10:42

Also, bible bit to look at: Isaiah 52:13-53:12

wife-material and the (not quite) leap of faith

I wrote this story on a bus in Africa. I wrote it because my friend Lara had just said to me something along the lines of, “You’ve talked about having an amazing experience of God when you got baptised – I think if something like that happened to me, maybe I could have faith like you do. But I’m not the kind of person who could convince myself of something like that, unless something happened to me like what happened to you.” When she said it I realised that I was not very good at explaining what ‘faith’ actually is. And to be honest, I’m still not. But I like to give it a go anyway.

So the first thing to clear up, is that Jesus was never that big on ‘faith’ just in the abstract. No, what he was constantly going on about was faith in him. About believing in him, trusting in him. Kind of like you trust a person. I heard somebody pointing out the other day that getting married is very much not about certainty. You can’t be certain that you’ll live happily ever after, you can’t possibly hope to know everything about your spouse beforehand, and you can’t begin to know where the two of you will go together, or what shared life you will end up living! All it is, is that you know that person enough to bet your life on them. You know them enough to commit. To say,

 ‘I don’t know everything about you. I don’t know what kind of person loving you will make me, and I don’t know where or to what loving you will take me; but whoever and wherever that is I want to go there, because I trust you.’

That is faith right there. And it’s the same sort of faith that it takes to commit to God.

But please hear me that this is not a Vegas marriage – it’s not irrational and whimsical and misguided – it’s thought through. In fact, let me tell you my secret list of criteria that someone needs to fulfil before I will marry them:

Things I don’t need to know:

- What their hair looks like first thing in the morning

- Whether they secretly watch ‘Made in Chelsea’
- Whether they can currently, or will ever be able to, bake an apple strudel

- Whether they will always or ever earn any money

- Precisely what they will be like in 50 years time.

Things I do need to know:

- That they are good, that deep down they are trustworthy and true, that fundamentally their desire is to become more like Jesus and to love others as much as they love themselves, and…
- That they love me.

That’s it. I reckon to bet your life on someone you’ve just got to know that their deep down nature, their character, is the best one you have ever found, one that’s worth your trust; and that they love you back.

And it’s the same with God. There’s a weird bit where St Paul writes that while he was introducing this bunch of people to Jesus he “resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He’s telling all these people about God and they’re having all these conversations – and Paul’s got so many complicated, brilliant philosophical and theological answers to all these really important questions, but he refuses to remember them. Instead he decides just to stick to this one thing: Jesus Christ and him crucified.

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the approach was less than helpful! But I’m realising now that in a way it makes sense: he was saying, look, there’s loads of questions, loads of difficulties and ambiguities and uncertainties, and yeah there are answers out there, but there’s only two things you really need to know. You need to know deep down what God’s like, and you need to know that he loves you. And Paul reckons you can see both those things by looking at Jesus Christ on the cross.

By looking at Jesus, because he said himself that by looking at him we can see exactly the character of God. We think to ourselves, ‘if God became a person, what would he be like?’ And Jesus says, ‘I did, and I’d be like this.’ As he said to his friend, Phillip: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

So what is he like then, this God? Well we can look at Jesus’s whole life, of course, and it’s incredible, but most of all we can look at the cross. And we see there someone who is utterly selfless – who literally pours his life out for the sake of others. Someone who is completely faithful – who endures the worst imaginable agony rather than fail his Father and his friends. Someone who is incredibly gracious – who prays for the very soldiers that have driven the nails into his hands. Someone who loves, outrageously. Unstoppably. Unquenchably and undefeatably. Almost unbelievably.

And we see that he loves us. He told his friends that he came “not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” A ransom back then was not so much for kidnappings, it was the price you had to pay to buy a slave’s freedom. So Jesus said that he was giving his life to buy us our freedom. And not even just the freedom right now, from meaninglessness, and fear, and guilt, and delusion and shame, but freedom forever from the power of death – freedom to share in the life that raised him from the grave three days later.

He is good and he loves you. And if you get that, I think the two of you can work out all the other stuff together.

Now I’m not expecting you just to take my word for it – the whole Jesus thing – I’m hoping that you’ll investigate it. Because the beautiful thing about it is that its not just a private assertion – not one dreamer’s vision, or one sage’s teaching – it’s a public life, a public death, a public resurrection that we can submit to genuine scrutiny. Of course it takes some effort – it takes effort to get to know other people, it takes effort to know things about history, it takes effort to learn how to walk – but it’s not impossible. Maybe message me and ask about it, or read a book about it, or pick up the bible that’s in your drawer somewhere and have a look at Luke’s gospel about it. Because I’ve looked at this stuff quite a lot and I’m seriously convinced that there is sufficient evidence to bring you to Jesus. Of course it can’t force you to trust him – it’s not literally compelling – he’s not going to break down the door and blind you with heavenly light. When you’ve done the thinking and the looking and you’ve seen him, the trusting part is up to you. But you don’t need to take a flying leap of faith across some huge chasm of ignorance, you just need to start with a genuinely open mind and look at the evidence. A book I just read which is brilliant is ‘Why Trust the Bible?’ by Amy Orr-Ewing. I would love to lend it to you or send it to you if you’d like!

Anyway, that’s the end of this blog, but originally I was supposed to be introducing a story I wrote a while ago. I blogged it before, so some of you might have seen it back then, but if not, here it is. It was my attempt to explain in story form, all of this stuff about faith, and investigating, and trust. Hope you like it!

The Journey

Anna lived at the foot of Too-Tall Mountain. She lived in a little town on the flat ground in the shadow of the mountain, and it was the whole wide world. To Anna, its cobbled main street was the great Silk Road, its old well was the ocean, and its people were the human race. The only other thing was the mountain.

One day a little boy, about Anna’s age, nine or perhaps ten, wandered up to her as she was mending her raggedy doll on the back step of her little house. He introduced himself as Cescu. She told him her name was Anna, and then suddenly, as if there was no time for small talk, he rushed up beside her and whispered something in her ear. And what he whispered was a rumour. But not your average every-day nasty rumour. This was a beautiful rumour. A glittering rumour that made her heart leap and her eyes grow wide and her toes wiggle. He whispered that he had met a man – a strange and wonderful man – who claimed to be from the top of the Too-Tall Mountain. Not only that, but he said that he had not been alone up there, that at the very top of the Too-Tall Mountain, above the clouds of fog, there was a great city of gold. A shining city, where the people laughed and danced and feasted, where their faces almost seemed to reflect the light of the sun. And as the whispers poured into her head like a sparkling stream they seemed to awaken a startling array of dreams and hopes and hungers that somehow she knew had been there inside her all along. It was as if the whispered words were the first songs of spring, and now a hundred tiny creatures of her heart, that had been in hibernation for a winter that stretched back as long as she could remember, were stretching their dewy limbs and joining in the chorus. Yes – they sung – there might be a city beyond the clouds! There could be a land where the sun was warmer, and the soil was deeper, and even the tears were brighter! There should be. But then a new thought loomed up on her like a big, dark cloud.

“It must be a very long journey to the top of the mountain. Far too long. We’ll never make it.” But then another thought, “Maybe this man you met could carry us? He must know the way. Maybe he could carry us up the mountain while we sleep – I’m sure we couldn’t make it by ourselves!”

The little boy looked puzzled for a moment, but he slowly shook his head. The strange man had spoken about the way up the mountain. He said that to reach the city – to truly reach it – a person had to walk. Even a person with little legs. He said that in the days long ago some people had been carried to the city in their sleep, but when they awoke something was always wrong. The richly coloured streets and houses seemed dull to them, almost translucent, and they could never bring themselves to sit, or lean, or lie down to rest on anything in the city for fear that they would fall right through. He said the only way was to walk the mountain.

She wondered, rather loudly and with a troubled frown, how on earth, if they were not to be carried, they would ever find the way.

But Cescu remembered what the strange man had said about that as well. He said that the way to the city was easy to recognise. The path that leads to the city, he had said, is the steepest, narrowest path, and also the most beautiful. If you find yourself on a path that is easy, or wide, or ugly, you have taken a wrong turn.

Now Anna was not sure she liked the sound of that at all, but as she looked up at the Too-Tall Mountain, she found herself unable to stem the awful flood of hope that gushed through her chest and into the tips of her toes.

She looked at Cescu.

“Well,” she said, “I still don’t think we’ll make it.” She thrust her grubby hands into her pockets and grinned. “But it looks like we have to try.”

Now, to tell the tale of all their twists and turns, of all their bruises and blisters, would take many more words than I am prepared to write, or you are prepared to read, and perhaps will serve to make a tale of its own one day. So for now we will hear of just the greatest incident of the long, steep road.

The two young travellers had begun to notice, as they passed out of the foothills and into the real mountain, that more and more they swore they saw distant glimpses of the strange man on the path ahead of them, and although it seemed improbable, they began to stumble across marvellous gifts – sometimes big and sometimes small – piles of refreshing wild-fruits for them to eat, or little shelters of branches and leaves for them to rest in. And this strange and unexpected kindness came and went until one day they found a note, carved into the sticks of a shelter they had found:

SOON COMES THE CREVASSE.
YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Now this message both confused and worried the young pilgrims. So much so that they carried the engraved sticks with them as they continued in hopes of deciphering the mystery as they journeyed. And indeed they did, when the path brought them to a great divide in the mountain. The rock they were walking on suddenly plunged away in front of them, and only emerged again what must have been nearly ten metres away. Lying flat their two little bodies put together couldn’t have bridged the divide. They edged fearfully up to the brink, and peered down into the deep, terrifying darkness of the crevasse. They quickly stepped back and stared at each other, eyes wide and hearts pounding. Anna looked down at the stick she was holding.

“You must not leap too soon,” she said, calming a little.

“But you must surely leap,” said Cescu, fear heavy in his unbroken voice.

After a moment though his eyes wandered past Anna’s to what lay behind her. A rocky path along the edge of the crevasse, littered with boulders and uncertainty. As Anna’s eyes turned to follow his they both knew what they had to do. This path was harder work than any they had travelled so far, and they lived in constant fear of losing their footing and tumbling into the abyss that never strayed from the left-hand edge of their vision. But they balled up their courage and they kept their eyes on the obstacles ahead. They clambered and they crawled and they kept, anxiously, moving. And as they did, it seemed to them that the crevasse beside them was growing thinner. The far edge was creeping closer and closer until, after many days, many nights, many bumps, many scrapes, many scares and many dares, they looked to their left and saw a gap that looked – though their hearts hammered harder and harder – small enough to jump.

They knew that this gulf – once so utterly impassable – was now small enough for even their little legs. Their eyes and their brains knew this. Their legs and their hearts were less certain. Their knees shook and their hearts raced like the knees and the hearts of the heroes in their mothers old legends. Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. The abyss of uncertainty that had been threatening to swallow them up for days now stood before them – smaller now, weaker, but still utterly terrifying. They looked across to the other side. They saw the new path – still steep, still narrow – leading up and up to the city. To the city of gold. To the rumour of the city of gold. The strange man was nowhere to be seen. The fruits, the shelters, they seemed somehow foolish. They might have been made by animals. They might have been anything. They looked at the note on the sticks in their hands. It might have been a joke. It might have been a trick.

YOU MUST NOT LEAP TOO SOON.
BUT YOU MUST SURELY LEAP.

Anna felt dizzy. Cescu felt sick. They held hands. Tightly. They fixed their eyes on the solid ground beyond the darkness.



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