YOU DONT NEED A LICENCE TO LOVE

This week has been filled with glorious opportunities to meet people and touch their lives with a little love and care. It has reinforced things I already knew - reminded me of the primary motivating things in my life and how quickly they get submerged under the weight of expectations and rules that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything useful!

You dont need a licence to love people. You dont need permission to pray for them. You dont need a theological qualification to show something of the life of Jesus Christ to people who are hurting, broken and in need. You just need to be a follower of Jesus, living out the example that He set such a long time ago. We dont read of people sitting in lines of seats, staring at the back of the head on front.. We read of someone who dined with the tax gatherers and prostitutes, prayed for those who were lame, or deaf, or blind, and gave them sight in every way. We read of someone who sat with the ordinary people and talked with them face to face. Someone who walked long distances on dusty roads and needed a drink of water from the local well.

When did we last walk on the streets of our cities? When did we last sit talking face to face with someone who is not our regular acquaintance or friend or fellow church-goer? Have we done any of those things in the last little while. Have we, by not doing these things, missed out on the exceptional joy of knowing that another human being has been encouraged, lifted up in their heart and mind, given hope for today and the future, by doing something simple that costs us nothing but time?

In most work you need some qualification or experience, job interviews, training, or a degree. But to touch lives, to pray, and love, and encourage, you just need time and be willing to give it. How wonderful to know that it is still true that the best things in life are free. What can we do with the free gifts we have been given and the time we have - perhaps just pass them on that others may share in our rich inheritance!

BEAUTIFUL DAY

This is an amazing day. There is a lightness in the Spirit as He comes to lift and carry and yet even in that, it increases within me the deep longing for even more....the more of Jesus, the One for whom we cry out and long, the One in Whose presence we find fullness of joy!

It feels like a new day in the nation. Something has moved and changed, like a large tree that had fallen across the road has been removed, and a way made that was not previously accessible.

I see a nation lying motionless in the sun, like a person sunbathing on the beach. The sounds of creation are all around, and yet the sunbather lies motionless, senseless, oblivious to all that surrounds....the very things that surround are dangerous in their peace and beauty and sense of well-being.

ARISE O SLEEPER! As I look over this nation, full of the joy of the closeness of the One who lifts and carries, I feel like a deep well of tears.

The tears well up to overflowing. The heart fills with them to breaking point.

ARISE O SLEEPER!

The heart cries out before the One who in an instant can awake us all with His beautiful presence.

COME, COME, COME to Aoteoroa New Zealand.

COME with your beauty,

COME with your presence,

COME with your power,

COME with your great love....

ARISE O SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS WITH HEALING IN YOUR WINGS

COME, COME, O please do come..............

SEPARATION INTO THE NEW

Here we are moving into 2006 with a sense of freshness, newness, and the edge that comes with that. It felt as if we were sitting on the dull edge of the old as 2005 drew to a close, and now something is opening up that brings with it a sense of quiet excitment.

Many of us have known challenges and have had to change or adapt accordingly over the past 12 months or so. Change is ALWAYS for a purpose, even if we cant see or feel it at the time. Change brings it's own challenges and insecurities and the terrible possibility that we will be caught up in the tyranny of the familiar. Changes are made so that we can move out and into new pastures, but sometimes just when that should be happening, something familiar and comfortable out of the past shows up and traps us. It is not always immediately recognisable but can come in the form of an old habit, an old way of relating or living, that is so well-worn we just pick it up and put it on.

The edgy freshness of this new year indicates that even if we have picked up something old we should take it off and throw it away! We have to take our faltering steps alone and unencumbered into the new. Once we are established on the 'other side of the fence' so to speak, then we can begin to look for what might be added to our lives there.

The bible says that we are to first seek the Kingdom of Heaven and then everything else we need will be added to that. Guess that is a pretty good measure for whether we have perhaps added things that are more of this kingdom/earth than the other. Have we picked up things, or do we have the sense they have been giving to us as a gift and blessing?

Is it worth holding to the old, when suddenly we are facing the possibility of longed for dreams and visions coming to pass? Things that seemed too bold and outrageous at the time, but over the months we have edged further into God and therefore closer to them.

God bless us all in 2006!