In with the new

One day my days of starting new blogs and webpages will be over, I always think. One day I will settle down to one single blog, write it regularly, and be done with this process of uphauling myself from one little space on the Internet to another.

But this is probably silly.

I'm young and I keep changing. I'm growing, my beliefs are changing, my outlook on life is swinging every day. My eagerness to write varies depending on my mood and my mood is certainly not something which stays steady over hours - let alone weeks, months or years. And I'm finally okay with that.

This last month, I've been working on a project with my best friend. We called it Anointed April*: a series of devotionals, prayers and challenges; one for every day throughout the month. Most of these we wrote, some we took from devotional books and Bible studies. We used the wonderful social networking platform that is Facebook to broadcast them to sixteen fantastic sisters in Christ, who we've come to feel so close to in the past weeks, despite little two way communication between us.

Anointed April Day Two was a devotional called Create a Pure Heart In Me (cowritten by the two of us leading the project), in which we discussed the realisation that starting again - and again, and again, and again - is not a bad thing. On the contrary, God calls us to renew our spirit in him day after day. There is no shame in saying "I want to come back to you, Lord". There is no shame in admitting you've wandered off the path and desire to come back. There's no need to feel guilty about the amount of times we might have returned to God, no need to have our tail between our legs as we turn to him and ask to accept him into our hearts again.

Wandering off track could mean marathons in the wrong direction or centimetres off course, but in either situation, God rejoices in our repentance, just as in the parable of the Prodigal Son (see Luke 15:11-32).

There have been times in my life I've had to return to God having indeed been marathons in the wrong direction. I've taken actions which God has told me clearly and directly not to take, and made decisions which I've known contradict God's best plan for me. And I've suffered the consequences for my decisions.

My faith tells me that my God is not one who punishes. However, situations like these one are times I've really experienced God as a father in terms of discipline. A speaker came to our Christian Union not long ago who spoke on the topic of discipline gave us the example of his relationship with his young son. He does not hurt his son, yell at him for no reason or punish him, but if his child were to be playing with a sharp knife, he would take the knife away from him. His son might not like having the knife taken from him. In this moment, his son may be enjoying playing with the knife, but as a father, the speaker knows that, sooner or later, his son will hurt himself.

Just like this young son, we are naive. There are so many things we don't understand - most of which we don't even know we don't know, but God knows. God knows the situations which will help us and which will hurt us, and he will discipline us in order to help us grow.

Small children tend to know when they have done something wrong from a very young age. Even at two years old, a toddler will display guilty behaviours when they've done something they've done something they know their parent would not like. Often they go very quiet. Dogs can be the same - if you haven't seen Denver the Guilty Dog, do YouTube it. It's very funny.

As children of God we have a tendency to do the same: when we're living in a way we know is not pleasing to our Father, we reject him. Just as it's hard to look in the eye of the person to whom we're lying, it's hard to look into God's face when we're not living his way. By rejecting God's love like this, most of our discipline is self-inflicted. We experience more pain. We're pushed farther yet from God. It's a vicious cycle.

However, it's a breakable one. Because it's always okay to turn back to him, where he is waiting with his arms wide open. And he's so excited to have you back.

[Anointed April: Hopefully will have all of Anointed April up online for all to browse before too long! Updates to come.]