No Limits

Hello dear friends.

Today there’s something I’d like to share with you that I think not enough people think of, about praying to God.

I pray. I’m not that great at it. I tend to get distracted in the middle. But I like it. Having a chat to my Father in heaven – He’s right there, looking out for me, always, and He knows. He knows because He made the very bones of me and loves them.

I heard a pastor say praying is like, if you haven’t spoken to your child in a while and then they come in all excited and want to tell you about their day, you’re not going to say “Hey, why haven’t you spoken to me for ages? I’m not talking to you. You can go away and think about it.” The parent would be excited and say, “Oh hello my darling, come sit with me, tell me everything, I’m so happy that you want to talk!” and this really helped me.

So, praying. I think people have this thing where they’re like, “Doesn’t God have more important things to worry about?” And I get it. When you’re praying for your kid’s homework to get a good mark, or that a date goes well, or even that you find somewhere to park in a hurry – well, I don’t know about you, but I’m apt to have the image of an earthquake or a terrorist attack pop up in my head and I go ‘I am SO selfish, God has better things to worry about!’

But then I remind myself: that’s not true.

See, I’m all for praying for those situations where it seems hope is void; because where there is darkness, only light will help, and we aren’t all equipped to give it, and sometimes only the Lord can help, or He certainly guides us – with a LOT of guiding – to where we can be useful. But we in ourselves feel helpless. Here, pray.

But in our own lives for ‘little’ things. Never believe God does not have time for you.

When we think that, we are imposing our own limits on God. But God has no limits. It’s like trying to imagine a new colour; when something is completely beyond our perception, we will try to fit it onto our horizons to make sense of it.

When we, as humans, try to solve problems, we have so many boundaries. We have to prioritise, because we have finite time and energy and resources. So if we had a day off and a list of chores, you are going to prioritise buying food over cleaning the dustbin, because you are human, with all the wonder and faults and limits and joy that brings.

However, God does not have these limits. As strange a concept as it may be for us to grasp, God’s infinite presence and time, omnipotence and mercy and goodness and kindness, and the love of a father to each and every person in the world means that if something matters to us, it matters to Him. God has time, because He is time, and makes time, and is everywhere, and has infinite capacity to love and to help and to heal. And not only that, but this actually renders the concept of priorities kind of useless.

See, if you had a child, and your child came to you crying with a broken toy, you wouldn’t dismiss them and say “I have more important things to do – don’t you know there is someone in the next room who is far more important?” You would help the child because at that moment, your own baby is upset and it’s within your power to help. That’s how God feels – we’re his little children and everything we care about is important to him. AND God has no ‘priorities’ because He does not even need this concept.

Now if that same parent had it within his power to help all of the children, at the same time, with problems ranging from broken toys to broken friendships to – anything at all! … That’s like God. He can help everyone. He has no limits. He is infinite, with limitless power and love and empathy to warm all hearts and take all hands.

God always has time for you because He loves you, and He cares. Even if, to stick with the child analogy, he chooses not to fix the broken toy – because there is something to learn from it, or because there is a better one coming, or because you no longer need it, and He sees this where the child does not.

Trust in God is what gets me through life, and knowing His unlimited capacity to care for me no matter how ‘small’ my worry sustains me through every struggle I may have.

And this, in a way, is a prayer to You my God, of thanks and hope. For being there for me no matter what. And I hope that anyone reading my prayer can understand even a tiny bit better.

‘God is my strength and refuge, my present help in trouble.’

And ‘He’s got the whole world in His hands!’

With love from me X

In Other News, Graduation

It’s not a funny ‘in other news’ sorry – just a piece of life news! Got back together with my maties at the weekend, had a smashing silly hat parade, told my favourite lecturer that she was my favourite lecturer and she gave me a kiss, went out for lunch, had dinner with my bezzie S in our sexy campervan, made her a love note, went on a night out and lost my voice, drank neat schapps on a bus like a teenager, S knocked a glass off a three-tiered stone balcony and smashed it on the stage below, the camerawoman fainted during the graduation ceremony and fell off the rig with an almighty crash (we think she was OK), umm… Basically I just had an awesome time and it was SO good to see my superhero friends again. Love you all.

 

 

Life

Good evening, readers, and cheerful greetings to you. Welcome to my musings on the subject of Life.

I know so little of Life. The night before my twenty-first birthday and I seem so old to myself. How strange that I should be here, after twenty-one years. Twenty-one years is a long time.

But what can twenty-one paltry years give me on the subject of Life? When men and women three, four, five times older than me are unsure of Life and what it should, and does, bring? The truth is, I know nothing about anything, but like anybody and everybody, I like to think that I do.

In my lifetime I have seen and done many things, travelled widely and had the most loving, caring upbringing by the most wonderful parents. I am a competent human being in taking care of myself, in learning, in building relationships – friendships  –  and functioning socially. But that sounds so sanitised, detached, as though my life would be a list of destinations and achievements rather than an ongoing journey based around emotions and discovery.

Studying for my degree, I learn about what defines Life, where it came from and started, and yet I (and everyone else) remain unsure.  I do have a deep fundamental faith that God began, is and ends Life, and bestows it upon the faithful as Jesus bought our lives with His blood. But where does that fit in with my studies on evolution, primordial soup, genetic drift, speciation? That is so factual, but in being so, dehumanises us from the faith and love that has brought us to the place where we are able to study such things. In one of my lectures, discussing speciation, my lecturer asked if anyone believed in intelligent design. I raised my hand, but he didn’t notice, and I was the only one to do so. I felt very lonely, surrounded by all those immobile people, their hands firmly by their sides or clutching pen to paper, eagerly awaiting the wisdom being poured out from the human mouth. Do not misunderstand me: I have great respect for the science of Life, my teachers, the learned scholars, the investigators; I am fascinated by everything we discuss and it makes sensible arguments. But where is the love, which is so central to Life? When Jesus died to save us – when a man and woman love each other, rather than speaking of procreation or sexual reproduction – when ‘natural selection’ is discussed, do we think of those who lost family to genetic disease or cave-people, who had dependent families, starving …  No. Everything is desensitised. Even the Black Death of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is looked upon as a blessing in disguise, because otherwise the earth would have exceeded its carrying capacity by now. There is a heartlessness to scientific analysis, the coldness of which could be useful, and could be dangerous. There is a bordering disrespect for Life at the same time as a contradictory reverence (almost religious in its pedestal-setting) and investigation to what, truly, comprises ‘Life’.

But is all Life of equal value? When we love our pets so much and eat animals as snacks at the same time, destroy creatures indiscriminately for short-term economic gain (something we have invented – an utterly man-made machine of artificial comparative ‘wealth’ – where did this come from? And how did it escalate like this? Why don’t we still trade pottery for wheat?) and indirectly slay our fellow man by oppression and preventing the increase of wealth, so people still starve to death and die of preventable disease. How could this happen?

We are selfish. Something religion and science agree on is that we are usually fundamentally selfish – is this an evolutionary trait or Original Sin? – with the possible exception of caring first for our nearest and dearest when suffering really is on the tipping edge of unbearable. But even this could be said to have an evolutionary benefit in kin selection, desensitising the only selfless act we might perform under this strong a pressure. So this selfishness has advantages if you care only about passing down your genes; but in this day and age, in countries of great wealth, when there is plentiful food and fertility treatment and no competition for resources, where not passing on your genes is a lifestyle choice, when we are humankind capable of sentient thought, decision-making, and mitigation of the consequences of our choices … Why then is it here, of all places, that our staggering selfishness is all the more apparent, indulged, and even encouraged?

Is Life an anomaly, then, a blip in science, a quirk of the universe, insignificant, lonely and unstructured, as we tiny beings try to create some sense out of chaos? Or is it the animation of love? Does this apply only to humans? But how, then, are humans capable of such atrocities towards each other while still returning home at the end of the day with a wage packet and a cuddle for the children? Love comes in many forms, but only with life. You cannot have love without life; but while life without love is possible (perhaps?), would you want to live that way? And what about sponges and centipedes and crocodiles? Do animals love? Or do they see a potential mate and, again, the innate need to further their genetic line?

So twenty-one years have taught me some things about Life, perhaps. However long I live, I will never understand Life, but you can love without understanding and appreciate without knowledge. By the time my life comes to an end, I may only know a little more of it than I did at the very beginning. But hopefully I have much of the joy of living a Life before that moment. At that moment, perhaps I will remember my young self, sat here in the early hours of the morning, thinking about the puzzle of Life and how nobody knows the meaning, or the way, or the why. The faithful may have some inkling, perhaps? But the whispers of Life are few and far between, as she is not ready to give up her secrets just yet. And I think that is wise – for what is our short life really, apart from a tiny journey of discovery, insignificant maybe to the universe, but in our own little bubble, the most fundamental, crucial gift of all, and a responsibility as well as a gift. To me, Life is senseless without faith, which goes back to a non-believers’ sanitised, short-lived accident. But this miracle, this speech and movement of atoms and molecules and polymers and cells and organs and systems and bodies – Life is the animator. Tell me about chemical reactions all you like, my dear – but who could do this, but for Love? Life is the ultimate Love – a chance to discover for yourself.

Discover what? Well, I suppose Life is a journey, not a destination. It must be lived.

Georgie

In Other News, I will now ruin my own carefully crafted atmosphere…

I shall tell you the Slurry Story from my last week at work. You know, slurry – goopy liquified shit, basically.

Well, we turned up to this farm and before we got out, my supervisor said “This farmer’s quite grumpy, so can you suppress your natural instincts and keep a straight face?” She was tongue-in-cheek, but the warning was valid.

The first thing we did was walk over a gravel path surrounded by a lake of mud. “Don’t go near that mud, it’s all slurry,” said the farmer, who wasn’t really that grumpy. Fortunately.

Because of course I fell in! How could I not, after being warned?

I was buried up to my knees, completely stuck, with shit oozing right up to my waist as I wriggled. The farmer and a colleague had to pull me out by the elbows, my friend getting in deeper herself as we both squiggled about trying to free ourselves. I thought it was bloody hilarious, but I tell you what, I was the only one laughing! I had to hose myself off back at the office. It was most charming.

Health warning: Stay away from slurry, kids. It ain’t good for ya.