These Lively Oracles

There were times that I was stuck. I hadn’t a clue what to do next. I had reached a certain point in a job, a church, a friendship, and everything had come undone. Things fell apart. And I didn’t know what to do next. I believed that I had carried everything out properly. I believed that I had tried my best. But things just ground to a halt and I didn’t know what to do next. And the age old question always arose – What do you do when you don’t know what to do next? When we lose a job, then we start to look around for another job. When a relationship ends then we rebuild our lives and adjust everything to suit. But, when it comes to our church life, our testimony and our relationship with God – What do we do when it all grinds to a halt? How do we rebuild that? I believe that this was the same quandary that Abraham had when God told him to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 22 v1-19. And if I didn’t already know the final outcome of the story the only question I could ask Abraha...

While I have spent these last few months thinking about christian faith in older friends and people, one recurring thought that kept coming up over and over again. I was remembering all the other people and occasions that I had been involved with over the years. There have been so many friendships that I moved through, and so many christian events that I attended. And I sit and ponder now about how God has worked through those other people’s lives and built His own   relationship with them also. Many have gone on and grown into deeper, more meaningful relationships with Christ. Others are still moving in the same social circles that they moved on many years ago. And that is all good stuff because it is God who works through us all to build His relationship with each and every one of us individually. By coincidence I came across a little podcast lately where the speaker was speaking on the Old Testament book of Joel. It’s not a book that I have studied deeply at any time...

I have found throughout my life and christian experiences that when a calamity falls on a person or society, sometimes some people’s thoughts turn either away from God, or turn again onto God. A lot of people question God by asking “What sort of a God allows these things to happen”? And invariably, the people who ask these questions never really followed God in the first place. However, some people who follow God will just sit quietly for a while and not question things. Only then, to find that a small glimmer of spiritual hope and light grows up to restore and strengthen God’s Children once again. I have found that after some form of troubles in my life, and after all the predictable reactions of my frustration, anger, and dissappointment that a small glimmer of Christ’s love will soon start to appear again. Not with a blinding flash, but with a tiny shimmer. Which will soon grow and draw my attention back into himself again. After their exile out of slavery in Egypt the Child...

I suppose that as we start a new year the tradition for many thinkers is to turn their thoughts to the analogy of a gateway. Gateways are always used as an analogy for something, or someone, who is transitioning from one state to another. And New Year celebrations are sometimes thought of as a gateway, or a threshold. I shared in an earlier post about our visit to the Tower of London this year to witness the Ceremony Of The Keys. It was the nightly ceremony of the closing up of The Tower of London and the locking of the gates. And has been performed religiously every single night for over 700 years. And the bible has used the metaphor of the gateway many times. Aside from there being guards to defend the gates, gatekeepers were also thought of as guides who helped people to go in the right direction on their journey as they left a city. Sometimes Gatekeepers are not the ones to do God’s work. But sometimes they are merely the one who stands on the threshold and inspire someone ...

As children a lot of us would have got some playing cards of some sort and started to build one of those little structures that involves stacking the cards in little triangular shapes one layer on top of another. I used to love doing this. And I found over the years that it was the older, well used playing cards with their frayed edges that built the best stacks. Because the newer ones were still too new and shiney. Or maybe we would get a set of domino blocks and stand them all on their ends one behind the other to watch them topple. There are plenty of videos on the internet showing these activites, all of them very entertaining in one way or another. It was while watching some of these videos online that my thoughts made a connection between these activites and the sequence of bible studies I have been following lately. The studies were mostly about me getting myself into trouble and then Jesus having to teach me a lesson on the way out of them again. And that has been my re...

So often we have heard sermons preached so much about a certain subject or incident in the Bible that we forget some of the other things that occurred alongside these incidents. We have heard countless sermons and talks preached about the Israelite’s journeys through the Sinai Wilderness – The crossing of the Red Sea, The building of The Tabernacle and the Ark Of The Covenant, The fiery pillar by night which was seen as a cloud by day, The giving of The Ten Commandments, etc. But there was also another ancient artifact that was solemnly carried through the desert that we seem to have forgotten about. The coffin containing the body of Joseph. Genesis Ch50 v22-26 tells us of Joseph’s death, and how he was embalmed and put into a coffin. But his body was not taken to the Promised Land until after Moses had risen to power. There he was kept for approximately 140 years before Moses was raised up and ready to challenge Pharaoh to “let God’s people go”. The events of the plagues of Eg...

While letting my mind wander through some old thoughts and memories lately I came across a memory that I hadn’t thought about for a very long time. It was the day I did my driving test. And an incident happened that day which was to come back to me in later years as a cherished lesson in faith. I did my driving test as a teenager and it was done on a Friday mid-afternoon. The location was one of the busiest main roads in our city and the roads were filled with works traffic, school traffic, buses and other commuters. I don’t think that there was any part of my test were I drove any faster than 20mph. During the course of the test I made every single mistake known to be made. When asked to turn right I indicated to turn left. The examiner reminded me to turn right and off we went down into the leafy streets of suburbia. When it came to the bit where we “make the car face in the opposite direction using only forward and reverse gears” I did everything wrong during the maneouv...

Back in the early 1970's, pop music was moving from one certain style into another. Gone were the old styles of Rock'n'Roll and sweetheart ballads and along came Glam Rock and Heavy Metal. It was a transitional time for music lovers and it divided many friends and fans as they explored these new styles and genres. But it wasn't all plain sailing from a musical point of view. There were some occasional terrible songs that made it through the cracks of the musical styles and ended up being uncharacteristically popular. And they were woeful. One such song was a comedy song called "Ernie. The Fastest Milkman In The West". Musically, it was awful. A simple musical tune with some tongue-in-cheek lyrics that told the story in a rhyming, comical way. And it should have been nowhere near the musical hit parade. But there it was soaring up the popularity charts. I wouldn’t even have been mentioning this song at all except that it was played on the radio ...

There has been a strong wind blowing outside these last few nights. I could also hear the rain against the window. It has been cold and blowy. And it brought back a memory from my childhood of another windy night. But this time the gales were moaning and howling. Literally moaning and howling. They reminded me of the banshee scene from the Disney movie Darby O’Gill And The Little People. I was frightened. I curled up on the chair beside my dad and he explained to me that is what happens to wind when it is forced to change direction. You see, we lived on a street where the houses on either side of the street formed a funnel like shape and faced toward the sea. Sometimes the wind blew in from the sea and up the street. And when it reached our house it had to change direction and it was forced between the other houses. This strange quirk between buildings and nature caused the howling sound that had frightened me all those years ago. To further reinforce his explanation, my fa...