Free-Runner-Love

Last week, I got a new family. It was only temporary – just for a week – but it was about thirty people big, so I suppose that makes up for it a bit. I was on a thing called a Falcon Camp, which is an amazing invention: basically, a bunch of Christians get together and give a week of their time (or give money or prayer) to run a holiday for kids who maybe wouldn’t get one otherwise – mainly because they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I love Falcon Camp. I love Falcon Camp because while there are various trips and activities and things, fundamentally what you are doing all week is trying to love people. I suppose that’s something I like about following Jesus as well, but on Falcon it’s somehow more condensed, certainly more intense. On Falcon you don’t really expect the kids to return much of your kindness – although it’s beautiful when they do – and you know that you are there entirely for their sake and not your own.

This leads you to go to lengths of love that wouldn’t normally occur to you. For instance, Rachael spent half an hour every evening dressed up in an overcoat, a fake moustache, comedy glasses and a bald cap so cheap and rubbish that it was pretty much just a misshapen condom, playing silly games and talking in a West Country accent in the hope of providing some evening entertainment! My Dad ‘fell’ into the swimming pool fully clothed on the last night because he thought it might be funny. My mate Julie spent about two days patiently combing knits out of the girls’ hair. My mate Elly went through most of an evening sitting and listening and comforting each of the girls in her dorm as they cried for various different reasons. But to be fair, it’s not all about the impressive stuff. I was on the coach with the kids when they went home, and one girl was crying about how amazing camp was and how sad she was to leave, and she explained to me through her tears that my brother was so lovely and so kind, and how he had just sat with her in the lounge one time and he had just listened to her – he had just listened to her – and no one ever listened to her like that. And that made me want to cry too.

My other favourite thing about Falcon is that we get to tell these kids that God is crazy about them, and he’d do anything for them; and we get to back that up with everything we say and do, every minute of the day. I like that a lot. It’s show and tell really – and that’s the way it should be. My other favourite moment on the coach was when a girl showed me the ‘Father’s Love Letter’ that we’d offered them to take away – a little collection of bible verses about the way God feels about them (www.fathersloveletter.com) – and told me she’d already read it five times, and she loves it, because she doesn’t even have a father but now she does.

And finally I love Falcon because it changes me. In fact, it makes me more free. Not free in the Western, couch-potato sense, or even the trippy, hippy sort of sense, but in the sense of a free runner. Because this thought occurred to me last night: in what way are free runners ‘free’? In that they can overcome any obstacle. They have trained – they have sought out the toughest challenges and gone through the hard work and the pain of practice – and now they are strong, and they are fearless. They are free in the sense that they are unstoppable. The idea of free running is that you run straight in one direction regardless of what’s in the way, and nothing can hold you back.

I want to love like a free runner. I want to have the sort of love that Jesus had – the sort of love that will not stop, that will not be put off by its beloved being unpleasant or unlovable. A love that cannot be weakened, even by rejection, a love that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The sort of love that lays down its own life day, after day, after day, after day. And I think that Falcon Camp, in all its beauty, works for me like training for this kind of love. It takes more effort than normal life but that is good for me because it builds my heart muscles. Hopefully, it makes me a little bit more like Jesus. Grows in me a little more of his kind of love. Strong, fearless and unstoppable. Free runner love.

Three Blind Mice in a Sticky Situation: An Unnecessarily Pretentious Fable

Once upon a time there were three blind mice in a somewhat sticky situation.

Some cruel joker had picked them all up, and put them down on top of this strange round island; they couldn’t tell the length of the drop, but it was certainly steep and they didn’t dare to take the risk. Far better to stay where they were. Except that there was no food on the island: they’d looked – well, walked and sniffed as best they could – but there was not so much as a crumb on the whole thing, just perfectly smooth, merciless ground in all directions, all the way to the fatal edge. The agonising thing though – the true torture of the situation – was the thick, intoxicating scent of cheese. The air was dense with it. Their little mousy eyes watered with the richness of it. They couldn’t tell where their sense of smell ended and the sensation of longing began. It was like their tiny, fragile bodies were on a rack – one end anchored mercilessly to their imprisonment, the other pulled out endlessly, stretching them towards their hungry desire.

So they decided that whatever it took, they would find some food. They would be satisfied somehow. They climbed onto each other’s backs so that they could reach up high; and staggering, moved their furry tower to and fro on the island, hoping to bump into something above them. They looked rather ridiculous, and found nothing. Martin, the youngest of the three, walked gingerly to the very edge of the island. He turned. He told the others that he was seriously thinking about taking his chances over the edge. Oswald began to cry. And Oswald crying made Bartholomew cry too. After a while, Martin couldn’t help but join in. And so they sat there, three blind mice, gently sobbing, each tear that ran down their furry faces making them feel a tiny bit more painfully the emptiness inside. They sat there for what felt like several days. And all the time an anger was bubbling up inside Bartholomew – a desperation. It had to be better than this. Things had to be better. It couldn’t be, it surely couldn’t be, that there was all this hunger, all this desire, and simply nothing to satisfy it. The joke would be too cruel. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. And into the days-old silence he let out a startling roar of rage, smashing his little paw with all his furied strength into the ground beneath him.

And it went right through.

Underneath the smooth surface, the ground was soft, almost gooey. And that savoury scent – redoubled in intensity – flooded once again into their noses. Bartholomew drew his closed paw out from the ground, and lifted it gingerly to his lips. His tiny tongue crept out and tasted. New mousy tears moistened his furry cheeks. Sure enough. The whole island, was a giant wheel of cheese.

Bigger Lungs Are Called For. (Inspiration.)

I’ve been thinking about my last blog, and I’ve decided that it wasn’t finished. Because it’s not as simple I don’t think of just deciding to be more disciplined, of just taking a deep breath and re-inflating the bouncy castle of life. I don’t think that my lungs are really big enough for that task. So this blog is about inspiration – which literally means ‘in breathing’. I’ve always liked that. I want to be in-spired in the most literal sense by the massive lungs of God.

I’ve recently developed quite an affection for the poetry of Genesis when it says that God “formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a human being.” I love that it specifies the nostrils. It’s weirdly tactile, isn’t it? Strangely intimate. And its this intimate breathing, this inspiration, that sets the human beings apart from all the other animals and plants, that makes them “in his own image” – the likeness of God comes from the breath of God.

And I think a big part of this ‘life’ that comes in the breath, this ‘likeness’ of God that we have, is creativity. God creates, and then the last things he creates are these people who can themselves create. Because all the very best teachers inspire their students to become like them – the master carpenter inspires her apprentice to carve like she does.

But then later on, after these humans have abandoned God, it’s as if that life-breath gets squashed – dullened. It’s like when we fell from grace we hit the ground hard and we got winded. And to be fair, I think that makes for a reasonable description of ordinary human existence: there’s this marvellous flicker of divine creativity, this spark of genius, of compassion, of courage; but it flickers, and stutters, and gets squashed, and it ends up sort of muted in most people most of the time. It’s there, but it’s shrivelled.

There’s a crazy vision in Ezekiel of this field of dry bones, like a sort of beautiful precursor to the horror-movie genre: God picks up these dry bones, wraps them in flesh, and breathes life back into them. And he tells Ezekiel that’s what he’s going to do for us.

And then that gets fulfilled, as does pretty much every other promise, when Jesus turns up. And he dies, and then is raised back to life, and then there’s this weird scene where he breathes on the disciples. He tells them to receive his breath. (It’s the same word for ‘spirit’, same word for ‘wind’.) And that’s quite an odd thing to do obviously, just walk up to your mates and breathe on them. But what he’s saying is,

‘This is just like the first time. Just like when I breathed into your nostrils and gave you life in the first place. Because you keep dying on me – keep getting winded – and I’m not having it. I want you to have life. I want to inspire you to be what you were always made to be: to be like me.”

Now, I’ve always imagined that moment somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious as a bit like Jesus sprinkling fairy dust on them – all very exciting and magical and tingly. But I’m starting to think it’s more like he’s giving them CPR. It’s not that glamorous a thought really – and it involves admitting that we’re dying – but I think that’s more what he’s offering. Mouth to mouth resuscitation from the living God. And he does offer it to all of us – anyone who is willing to admit that they’re dying and to breathe in when he breathes out. Not just a one off either – every day. A couple of my closest friends have had times recently where they genuinely needed CPR from God just to get out of bed every morning. But he does it – just like he did in the beginning – he bends over, he comes close, and he breathes life into us.

Now I almost feel like I need another blog entirely to talk about how it is that God practically inspires us, and makes it more possible for us to live an impossibly creative life – how he breathes freedom into us – but I’ll mention one thing for now. Fear.

I think that one of the biggest things that holds me back – although I don’t often admit it – is fear. Because creativity – adventure – freedom – these things all involve risk, and risk is scary.

I climbed a tree with my mate Joe the other day. It’s lowest branch was just low enough that he could reach it if he jumped – but he’s about a foot taller than me so once he’d got up he sat on the branch and I grabbed his feet and climbed up that way. It was pretty high, and my heart was beating pretty hard (I imagine he was considerably more chilled about the whole thing, he’s cool like that) but I thought that having just written a blog about the discipline of freedom and adventure I really ought to be brave. And I trust Joe a lot. It was a really good adventure – and inevitably that involved risk. An easy tree would have been boring.

Much more than that though, fear holds us back from stepping out and trying things that we think we might be made to do because we’re worried about what people think of us. We get paralysed by shame, sometimes before we’ve even tried. But Jesus wants to inspire us. He wants to adopt us, and inspire us, so that we can hear him say, ‘Why would you be afraid of what people think of you?! I’m the king of the flipping universe. And I flipping love you. You’re my kid. You could fall off and hurt yourself and look stupid a thousand, thousand times and I would still be dead proud of you.’ There’s a bit in a psalm where it says, “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” Jesus says, ‘Look at me.’ And his smile is so bright that it actually shines off us. He says, ‘Look at me, and your face will never be covered with shame.’

There’s the more practical kinds of fear as well – I mean the tree was a small example, but I remember when I did the bungee jump off Victoria Falls. Honestly, everyone was so scared doing those jumps – it’s the most I’ve ever been asked to pray with people in my whole life! But stupid as it sounds I genuinely remember standing on the edge of the bridge thinking, ‘I’ve got nothing to fear. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” This cord will almost certainly not snap; but if it does, while my mum would be very sad indeed, I would be fine. Jesus, I trust you either way.’ I know that sounds pretentious – but I hope that if I find myself in much more serious situations I will take a deep breath in as God breathes out, and I’ll have the courage that comes from knowing that he’s bigger even than death.

Maybe the biggest one though – in our largely safe, cushty kind of lives – the biggest thing we’re afraid of is love. Because when you really love someone it makes you terribly vulnerable. It takes true courage to invest in another person so much, to care about them so deeply, that you give them the power to devastate you. But there’s really no way around it; there is no way to love without creating the possibility of pain. But the breath of God whispers in our ear and says, ‘Go on, I’ve got you. I can heal broken hearts. Don’t be afraid. I can comfort, and strengthen, and fulfil. Don’t be afraid. If everyone on earth walked out on you, I could still fulfil every one of your needs. Don’t be afraid.’

And maybe there’s one last fear that goes with that one: the fear of ourselves. The fear that realises that when we takes risks of love, of adventure, of freedom with other people, we are asking them to trust us with their hearts and their lives too. So what happens if we don’t trust ourselves? If we don’t think that we’re worthy to love, that we’re not safe hands to place a heart in? We pull back and shrivel up and we are not free. But God breathes deeply, and reminds us that his breath carries his likeness. That we were made to be like him, and when we breathe him in we can actually be made like him. We can breathe out our selfishness, our cruelty, our apathy; and breathe in his patience, his kindness, his goodness, his gentleness, his peace, his joy, his love, his self-control, his faithfulness. We can breathe him in until we’re like him. And with every breath we are less of a liability. Less of a danger to ourselves and the people who love us. He wants to inspire us until we are not afraid of anything, not even ourselves.

Basically, I reckon that my “I’ll do my best and see how it goes” attitude might get me to a few half decent balloons. But if my life is going to be a bouncy castle – or one of those big inflatable assault courses – maybe even a huge 50ft bouncy slide… well, I’m going to need some help from a bigger pair of lungs. I’m going to need some inspiration.

Life is a Bouncy Castle. Inflate it.

A couple of days ago last year I was close to leaving Malawi, and in a blog about adventure I wrote this:

“Adventure: ‘hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory’ – isn’t that what life is?”

And reading that makes me a bit sad now. Not because I think I was foolish then, but because I think that this year I have slowly, gently, proved myself wrong. Life is not always “hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory”. Sometimes it is and we have no choice about it. But other times, which is most of the time, it’s up to us. This thought has been creeping up on me for about a week now:

I have not been disciplined enough to remain free.

I wrote something ages ago about watching a drummer drum – and how years and years of practice and discipline had given him this incredible freedom to express himself on the kit. And the other day I saw a quote that says the same thing about dancing on my mate Andy Mort’s blog:

“The dancer is realistic. His craft teaches him to be. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. No amount of dreaming will point it for you. This requires discipline, not drill, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you yourself upon yourself. … Your goal is freedom. But freedom may only be achieved through discipline. In the studio you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.”

Martha Graham (on sheepdressedlikewolves.com/dont-want-freedom)

Freedom can only be achieved through discipline – and this is the thing that I’m realising – I have got lazy, and it has cost me a big chunk of my freedom.

If I just do whatever I feel like doing, or whatever I need to do, all the time, my life ends up a little bit flat and grey. Not entirely – because sometimes I get restless and I want to do something interesting, so I do, and sometimes the things I need to do just happen to be exciting and meaningful and marvellous. But still, on the whole, my day-to-day existence tends to get a bit like a bouncy castle when they’ve started letting the air out. And what’s worse, I don’t notice that it’s leaking. I don’t notice that it’s not as bouncy as it once was because the air goes out slowly, and I get used to it bit by bit. As they always say, a frog will happily sit in a pan as you boil it to death as long as you heat the water gradually.

Moving swiftly away from that thought, the thing is that I have been alerted to the slight flatulence of the bouncy castle that is my life since I came home for the summer by the necessity of constantly answering the question, “How’s uni?”, and also thinking about this time last year, and how desperate I was to keep living an adventure when I got home.

It turns out that living freely in this country, in this context, requires discipline. I read a really interesting thing the other day that said that we always think of the Ten Commandments as restricting, because they tell us what we can’t do. But actually, even besides from all the stuff about Jesus and forgiveness, that’s a silly way to think about it because freedom doesn’t come from there being no constraints – that’s like a painter moaning that he only ever gets to use red, yellow and blue, or a songwriter complaining that she’s forced to work with these same twelve notes every day. Instead, freedom comes when we achieve mastery over our constraints. Creativity is discovering the utmost potential in the combination of our limitations and our materials’. And in the same way as creativity in art only comes when the artist has the persistence, the commitment and the self-control to master her materials; creativity in life is only possible when we put the effort in to master our materials, our constraints and limitations, and choose to use them to their fullest potential.

They always say about writer’s block: just put something on the page. Every day. That’s the way to be creative. It’s not some magic spirit that you need to catch, or that is mystically out of your control. As that dancer says: “freedom may only be achieved through discipline. … you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.” And I’m convinced that that is true of life. It takes discipline and obedience and effort to become finally free. I have to keep putting something on the page even when I can’t be bothered, pushing myself to live more lovingly, more creatively, more intentionally.

So, I suppose, let’s see how this year goes.