Suddenly I see....

After an amazing few days spent in Luton with the church plant team, and then a trip to portugal for a camping extravaganza in Gav's mansion tent, I am here in our new house in Luton. Everybody's out; so its just me and this crazily new-fangled digital TV affair in the living room. Today I watched a programme that was recorded on the digi thing, and that I could stop and rewind and stuff. Crazy.

My favourite thing about the last two weeks has been that they have been so teeming with richness that I can't get a handle on it. Which is really good for me, one so adept at weaving imaginative and perceptive narratives out of my experiences. Such weaving is inherent to our humanity; our lives are ones of endlessly reframed experience and storytelling...and I think its wonderful. Perhaps the point where its not so wonderful is where we tell the same story, over and over and over, never allowing our experiences to breathe fresh life onto the storires we tell, or indeed, refusing to acknowledge that when we tell a story we are always imaginatively reframing reality in the most dynamic way, and that even as we tell stories about 'who we are' (as if, even for a moment, we were static) we are changing.
Its not inauthentic to realise that I am choosing who I am becoming. My life is not the discovery of some beaten-out track that is my 'essential' self; the one that God has carved in some horrendously immovable rock somewhere. Rather, I am moving and growing and popping out and around everywhere in the most unexpected ways because my life is ever on the most wondrous collision course with everyone I ever meet and best of all, with my God. And in all this, I choose how I see these relationships, how I am in them. And I choose to see that nothing is irredeemable, nothing is fixed except that Jesus defeated every thing at the cross and that in doing so he opened up every redemptive possibility ever. And maybe in my chatter about 'choosing' I sound like a bit of an existentialist; but truth be told I am not one of these idealogues, because in my God there are many unfathomable paradoxes to be found, which means I don't have to anchor myself to any idealogy or theory or theological standpoint. I believe I am choosing what my life becomes in the most dynamic way, and yet I also believe that God knows the future. My future. Which is utterly irrational. Nonsensical even. But this is it, this Christianity.

So like I said, I can't get a handle on 'what's going on with me'. And I feel light and free in it, which is good. But there is something, something deeply forged and I can feel that I am able to choose it if I want, but also - cos like I said, I ain't no existentialist - it is going on in all other kinds of ways like at the heart of God, and in the Holy Spirit which lives inside me, and in the way that people are around me, both my friends and new acquaintences and even strangers on the street, and maybe even in the prayers and longings of my friends for a long time now......And it is something like, a strength...a letting go of, I don't even know what. Fear. Hmm. And this place....this Luton, is the site of the gathering storm in my heart. Once upon a time, I chose it. And now it has shaped me. I can't be anywhere else right now. God talked to me about it, and others felt it too. And I chose it. And now it has chosen me and I need to do this thing. Plant this church. In this moment. And tomorrow; who knows? There maybe a time when this isn't the thing, and I go, somewhere...