TEARS AND UNREST

I have such admiration for those who are able to write drafts, edit them, and produce something that is amazingly coherent - and yet I seem to have been blessed with only the ability to fill up with thoughts and feelings that eventually spill out on to a page in a somewhat incoherent manner - how amazing that anyone ever bothers to read those thoughts - it is a source of constant amazement, and high esteem for those who are so patient!

Today is another of those restless days of walking around feeling like a huge well of unspilt tears. The slightest jolt or rocking of my world is likely to bring forth a flood of Noah-like proportions! What I would like to know is where have they come from, and why are they there, and why do I fill up like this? Crazy stuff isnt it?

Every now and then there is a kind of wave that rolls through. Would they be called waves of accumulated grief?

Wave of grief at having experienced and looked at the end results of man's inhumanity to man, woman to woman, man to woman, woman or man to child, it rolls on and on doesnt it.

What went wrong, where and when did we miss the message that love is patient, kind, loooooong-suffering, endures, lays down its life for its friends? Was it when we took up our RIGHTS? Rights to what? To behaving as we please, or feel like at a certain time? Rights to be what I am, and in the process of all that destroying all that someone else is or is meant to be? I thought when we became Christian's we gave away our rights, handed them over to Jesus, so that He could be in charge and draw us up to something higher and of eternal meaning.

Were we meant to become a Body, or a Church, that was so busy keeping all the rules, making the programmes work, managing all the people so well, growing to such impressive and immense proportions, that anything that put a ripple in the pool should be disciplined or even removed? What well built and maintained white-washed tombs.

Where did we lose our radical and beautiful Jesus Christ. The one who healed people on the wrong day, overturned the money-makers tables, ate with the sinners, walked with a bunch of ordinary folk on dusty roads, and did what He saw His Father (the creator of all things!) doing. The One who refused to judge and had the good sense to leave that to His Father, the only One qualified to do so!

The only building blocks he used were people who had been shaped and strengthened by His love and His presence. When did the presence of the Lord rise up to the threshhold and leave the temple? What will it take to entice Him back into the midst of us - into our lives, into our churches, into our communities and nations?

There are pockets of life - precious pockets or places where He is willing to come and have fellowship with His friends - how incredibly important are these precious pockets right now - they speak to me of the righteous men God looked for in wicked cities, willing to spare them because of the righteous. We read in the prophetic books of those who will be marked by the Lord as righteous and spared in the days to come.

Lord, I pray life into the pockets of life, increase and expansion in their number, that more and more homes and cities would be spared for the sake of the righteous who dwell in them.

As I pray the wave moves again, the desire grows, and the well of tears continues to fill.