I am not normal. At least, not if so some the Christians I have been reading stuff from and talking to lately are anything to go by… Maybe I am just one of those people who have checked their brain at the door on the way in to church. You tell me…

In my heart I know I do still have a brain, maybe it is just that I am more forgiving than most, or, at least, not the type to hold a grudge, and not the type to let my expectactions on people in leadership get so high that to have them disappointed ruins me for useful ministry or any kind of effective life…

But, I go to one of those crazy looking pentecostal churches where the prosperity gospel is preached , where people get prayed for and then fall down, some genuinely and some not, and where, quite frankly, people do get burned and hurt sometimes, where expectations are sometimes frustrated. Yet I really don’t think it is any more dangerous or risky than any other church where human beings are in charge.

I have been a member in other churches and think it may be different things that hurt, different expectations that are not met… So I go to church where I am now, serve, and love and worship God and I take the knocks when I have received them. In those times I choose to look more closely at God and what he says rather than let the stuff people say or do upset me…

Is that so naive?

I only ask because I had dinner with a good friend tonight who has been disappointed at a lack of support she has felt at church, and I don’t deny that her criticism is genuine but it has been her criticism for the last 12 months so I do have to ask sometimes when it is appropriate to stop waiting for someone to change things for you, and when it is time to get up and take matters into your own hands and start being an agent of change.

Enough Said.

*we intterupt normal transmissions of trivial nature to bring you this rather thoughtful message.*
[Note to non church going readers: regular mention made of God… (the one in the Bible)]

As I mentioned yesterday we are in the middle of our annual ‘chickfest’ at church. There are around 2000 delegates and crew wandering around the premises and 99 percent of them are chicks. The place smells great, sounds great and looks pretty all in the name of making them feel welcome! I love that about our church.

That’s not the point of course. The point is that there are a whole bunch of totally brilliant speakers here to minister to the masses and I am stoked to have had the opportunity to go and hear a lot of what they brought with them to say.

Something one of them said has caused me to do some thinking… That’s the way it ususally happens, I will hear all this brilliant stuff but one thing always sticks out or challenges me.

It’s this.

My God has a string on my heart. I am wholly in charge of how far I take the string away from him, or how close I get. I can look for all the world like the string is short but in reality can be a real long way away from God… You know it right?… your hands are raised well high in church… you are serving coffee and tea after the service… you are at every meeting and event… but you know inside that the string is long and all the flitting around is for the sake of everyone who sees you, not for you…

*ouch*

I realised how easy it is for me to make the string look short… Let’s face it, I work at church and am here ALL the time… but when I am distancing myself from God I find I am less available to sing… on a break… less inclined to go to services… less inclined to turn my heart and ear towards him and pray or put down my novel in favour of my Bible.

So, here’s me …I’ve been on a long string – for a long time… It is easy for me to do life alone – I am an independent, single minded, capable woman of the world!

But here’s the thing…

I actually miss having him (you know… God) around. I mean, not that he ever leaves but that awareness of him, and his pleasure and his favour fades. And it makes church and church life become a ritual not a pleasure.

So, the chickfest, inspite of it’s total girlyness (and we all know how I feel about that!! (See post from Oct 20) has been a real cool thing. It made me shorten the string and I am very happy about that.

*resume normal transmission of trivia*

I met up with Bet tonight, my German friend who is very new to the things of God. I took her to meet a Group of German speaking people who are from, or loosely connected to our church. It was eye opening for me to be sitting with a group of Christians looking at them through her eyes. I nearly died… No wonder people think Christians are weird.

Don’t get me wrong the leaders of the group are dedicated, genuine believers and the nicest people but the evenings events were cheesy in the extreme.

We had, as instructed, brought fruit to exercise the new juicing machine so were making all kinds of weird and wonderful combinations of fruit and vege juices… and thus began the evening…

We then played an ice breaking game – sorry, no offence meant to enthusiastic game players – But Bet and I could well have done without it… (it was right up there with silly baby shower games…)

Then we each spent some time meditating on things we would like the group to pray for, shared those things with the group and then sharing one thing with the group that we would like to see happen in our world in the next 12 months. Finally each person took a turn to pray for the person on their right and the group nodded and Amened in agreement. (All of these activities took quite some time to complete and were done so with great hilarity and guttural consonants)

Remember, I am sitting there with a girl who is not a Christian… I am thinking any minute now she is going to ask me to take her home… I am also thinking this is not even normal behaviour for me and I can do the Pentecostal two step with the best of them… However, Bet appeared to be unawed by the proceedings and so I was happy that I was the one allotted to pray for her. Her request? She is in the process of waiting to hear if her current employer is successful in their application to sponsor her so that she can stay in Australia and so I had the opportunity to pray that the application would be approved as was her desire.

In her turn, Bet offered to pray for her alloted person, and made amusing remarks to the effect that she was new to this talking to Gott stuff so could Trill, the man she was praying for keep it short! It was great!!! She is a real laugh and her sense of humour is very well suited to Australian culture. She prayed confidently, at least I think so, she was praying in German… remember… of the 11 of us there I am the only one with no more than 3 words of German… so spent a lot of the eveing observing.

I dropped her off home and we laughed about the interesting people we had met… Happily there were a couple of slightly normal people there and Bet exchanged phone numbers with them…

Tomorrow she is coming to stay the night and watch romantic dvd’s with me. I think we are going to be in for a great night – might be worth getting a bottle of wine in (hmm wine… lovely stuff).

God is a bit of a crack up – at lest some of his people are… But I have to tell you this business of making a difference in a person’s life feels great even if it means a laugh at our own expense some time…

Well, the scammed scanning was all over by 11 – My babysitting job got canceled this afternoon so I went out … quite against my plans to do so.

I returned books (5) to the libraries (2) and got more (4).
I spontaneously decided to go to the movies and saw Connie and Carla – loved it. (It’s ok… I know that I am a tragic loser who loves show tunes and romantic happy endings and I’m ok with that.)

I now need to decide what to do with my evening.

I think I will go to church. The meeting goes from 6-7.30 and is therefore the shortest meeting of the week except the prayer meeting. Our Pastor is back from 3 weeks overseas and so will be on fire. I love a good homecoming message and if I go tonight, I don’t feel compelled to go tomorrow morning so I can sleep in.
It has been a few weeks since I have been to church and to be honest, I am in that, if I don’t go this week it will be even harder to get back into it next week… I guess spending all week there makes the weekends extra precious…

Anyway, I will probably go and put paid to the internal argument. Of course if I drink another beer before I go I will be in trouble. I can imagine the little police type person at the random breath testing asking me where I am going … Can you hear him?? “What???? You’re going there??? In that state??? Hmmm probably best place for you love …”