Asking myself all of these questions about who I am…and why I do what I do…and why I believe what I do…is a scary thing to do. More times than I can count, I have stared at the ceiling at three in the morning  wishing that I didn’t think as much as I do. Thinking perhaps that it would be easier all round if I shoved the stuff whizzing around in my head back under a rock and continued on to have a safe and quiet life that involved going to church on Sunday, working hard and enjoying my family.

But what am I afraid of? What are some of the things that I am likely to face and have to decide…will I fight or will I take flight? Here are some of the things that have the potential to derail my adventure if I choose to keep going:

• spiritual opposition
• people not understanding and thinking that I’ve lost the plot (I’m a recovering people pleaser)
• that I will lose friends
• that I might be asked to make sacrifices that will be too hard
• that I’ll be required to do something really difficult
• that I might take a wrong turn and end up at a dead end
• that my life may be transformed to the point where it’s almost unrecognisable.

So what could happen if I don’t take a risk and jump into this adventure and give it a red hot go?

• I would have a quiet, safe, controllable life
• I would miss out on fulfilling my life’s purpose
• I’d have to explain myself at the end of my days when I have to stand before my Creator and give account for my life.

Is it worth the risk to go on this adventure? If I am to have a victorious and exciting life following Jesus…I can’t afford not to go on the adventure set before me! I don’t want to be safe! Jesus wasn’t safe…he was a rebel, a stirrer, a risk taker! I MUST follow his lead! When I am faced with the things that frighten me I will need to keep my eyes on the goal and trust that I am on this adventure because God wants me there.

Over the past couple of months God has whispered in my ear over and over again…What I have planned for you is so much better than you can ever imagine! I have a pretty good imagination, so I’m excited at the possibilities!

What risks are you willing to take to do as God asks? Do you like to take risks? Or do you avoid taking risks at all costs? Have you taken any risks for God? Share your stories!

Michelle

This is the part where I need to make sure I am aligned with what God wants for my life. I want to strip my belief system right back to the fundamentals and make sure the “skeleton” is all aligned…sort of like taking a trip to the chiropractor I guess. In the same way that the skeleton is the foundation for keeping the rest of the body in shape, so my belief system is what keeps the intangible parts of my life in shape and on the right track. There’s no point hitting the gym to build up my “muscles” if my skeleton isn’t up to the task of supporting the extra stuff that I’m adding to it. I’ll end up hurting myself!

So…I’ll be asking myself all sorts of questions like these ones…

• Why do I believe what I believe?
• Why do I act the way I do as a follower of Jesus?
• What if the way I’m doing things isn’t the way God intended it to be? What if I’ve turned someone off God because I’m not living the way I’m supposed to?
• What if some of the things that I hold to as truth are just traditions and not really biblical truth?
• What if there’s something else I should be doing with my life that would be more effective in making God’s love real to people?
• How do I live with a Kingdom building focus?
• How am I supposed to understand the Bible? Do I have to go to Bible College before I’m ever going to understand the context it was meant in?
• Why does it hurt so much more when you’re hurt by a fellow follower than when you’re hurt by your regular everyday person?
• Why is there so much hypocrisy in the church and am I contributing to that in any way?
• Why isn’t my life that much different to my non-Jesus -following friends when I know it should be?
• How did I get to the point where I was too busy doing church that I didn’t have time to connect with people who needed to see God’s love lived out in action?
• Why is it so much easier to sit and be a “church person” than to get out there and make a difference for the Kingdom of God?
• What is the purpose of the church and why is there so much division, particularly between generations and even denominations? Why aren’t we working together to build the Kingdom instead of having turf wars?
• What is Christian community supposed to look like in modern times and in our western culture? It’s not like we can all live together and share everything like the first century believers did.
• How do I balance serving believers and fulfilling the command to go and make disciples?
• Why are Christians so intent on making sure the world knows what we hate and what we stand against rather than making sure people know that God loves them with no ifs, buts, or maybes?

My close friends think that I think too much…and that might be true in some cases …but sometimes you just have to ask yourself the hard questions if you are going to grow and be effective!  Asking these kinds of questions doesn’t mean that I am questioning my faith. And it doesn’t mean that I am a heretic simply because I am choosing not to idolise tradition. I want to be a REAL follower of Jesus…not one that plays at it… and to do that I need to explore and question and strengthen my beliefs. I know people are going to think I’m losing my mind, but that’s OK.

You’d better believe that God is not going to crumble under close scrutiny…there may be some other things that will…but not God!

I think this phase of my adventure may well last the rest of my life!

Do you ever ask yourself questions like these ones? What sorts of questions do you ask?

As far as I can tell at this stage of the adventure there will be at least two phases. I’m guessing that the phases will be somewhat parallel after the first little bit. The first phase is the restoration phase. Anne Jackson’s book  Mad Church Disease outlines four areas of a person’s life that need to be healthy in order to follow God and approach  this lifelong adventure in a sustainable way. They are:

• spiritual health;
• physical health;
• emotional health; and
• relational health.

When these four areas intersect, we find out sweet spot for sustainability. God built us as whole people whose whole lives are supposed to be dedicated to this grand expedition of following Him…we can’t just look after our spiritual health and neglect the other areas if we’re going to make it to the other end in one piece.

For me, I can’t get moving on this adventure until I address each of these areas, and I can tell you now that I’m in need of some serious work to get healthy.

So where do I start? I haven’t got a clue to be honest. Baby steps…obviously…too much all at once and I’ll get discouraged and crawl under a rock. One step at a time is the way to lasting health in each of these areas.

My first step will be a weekend of solitude, prayer, meditating on scripture, fasting and working through the examination steps in Anne’s book. My lovely family bought me a long weekend away by myself for Mother’s Day, so in a couple of weeks I’ll trek up to Jindabyne and take a long hard look at myself and see what needs to be dealt with in order to get healthy.

I am so excited to be on this adventure, and I want to know what God’s preparing me for, but I also know that I’m not ready yet.

How’s your overall health? Are you fit for the adventure you’re on? Have you been there, done that and bought the t-shirt? How did you start?

To borrow the immortal words of William Shakespeare…..”now is the winter of my discontent.”

Six weeks ago I stepped down from a role that I loved doing. Even though, humanly speaking, I didn’t want to…I decided to step out of my role as  a worship director at my church after three and a half years for four reasons:

1. to preserve unity in the church;
2. to submit to my leaders;
3. to be obedient to God; and
4. to focus on my family – my primary ministry.

This has been one of the single most difficult and painful decisions of my life. I am the kind of person who loves to serve, I like to be active and to be doing something. It is difficult for me to not be serving in what I perceive to be an active way. But over the past couple of months God has been telling me through a variety of ways that it’s time for me to rest. To take a sabbatical. And I’m not going to lie to you. It’s a struggle. Of the 25 years I have been at my church, I have been a part of the music team for 20 years. And God has told me to REST. I am the kind of person who takes a week to unwind when we go on family holidays…and even then I have “stuff” to do.

To be honest, I guess at one level I got a lot of affirmation from being up front, and you certainly find out who your friends are when you stop attending church regularly and its for a reason other than you’re leaving town. Not one person has called or emailed (without wanting something else)…I have been at the church for 25 years. And yes, it hurts. I feel like an utter failure. It’s a lonely path.  I have followed God and done as I felt I was directed, but I am feeling alone in a human sense. And I  think that God is probably stripping things away that could be taken by my human brain to be attributed to my activity. I have to come to a place where anything that happens can only be through the power of God in my life.

But God is good. Slowly but surely over time He has been showing me that He wants to take me on a journey. I have a chronic case of Mad Church Disease and the next phase of my life is dedicated to healing. I am taking a complete sabbatical from the institutional church to do two things…the first is to go though a phase of restoration, and the second is to go through a phase of reaffirming my foundations. Both of these things are consistent with the biblical concept of the sabbatical, and I’ll be sharing my journey with you as I work though stuff.

When I say complete sabbatical, let me be very clear. I will not be participating in any regular scheduled church service activity. I will not be involved in music ministry, and I won’t be signing up for any other activity. I will be seeking a broader Kingdom view of the Church (sorry for the jargon, I will be blogging more about this in the year ahead) by exploring other arms of the body of Christ. I will not give up meeting with believers. I strongly believe in the value of the Church, but there needs to be a time of separation in order to gain perspective.

My next two posts will cover what I think will be involved in the restoration and reaffirming phases of my sabbatical. I also REALLY want to share with you what God is showing me about Biblical rest. I’ve been a follower of Jesus for 30 years and this is the first I am hearing of this?? Wow!

Now…where does the winter thing come into it? God has been speaking into my life through the guys at Swerve …they posted a series of articles a little while ago about the seasons of ministry. I am in the midst of a period of Winter. There might not be a  whole lot going on above the surface – the branches are barren and the ground is covered in smothering snow, but beneath the snowy ground the roots are straining and growing and forming a solid foundation for the explosion of growth when God decides it’s time for the Spring to come and the harvest to start.

I am currently so discontent with the status quo. I want to know what God has for me…what is there in my life that is just church tradition that has been passed down and absorbed, and what does God really want for me? I MUST know.

This is the winter of my discontent…I am going to find the answers to my questions. I am tired of being so busy doing church that I can’t be the Church. Will you pray for me on my journey? Will you step out and join me on my journey? Do you have any questions about why you believe the stuff you believe about God and the church?

Friday was one of the proudest days of my life. Those of you with school age kids will understand the feeling…you know the one…it’s the one where you  get all teary eyed when your child is up on stage doing a school performance. Friday was like that for me…except it was my husband that was in the limelight.

After four years of part time study, Alastair finally graduated with an Associate Degree in Forestry Management from Melbourne University, and he scooped up four out of the available five awards for his group. He won:

• the Forests NSW Forest Protection Award
• the Hancock Victorian Plantations Award for Academic Achievement
• the Department of Sustainability and Environment Forests Service Prize in Silviculture, and
• the Willmott Forests Award for High Achievement by a part time student.

We weren’t going to travel down to Melbourne for the ceremony because of Al’s work commitments, but the lovely people at the Creswick campus emailed and hinted that he had won an award and encouraged him to try and make it down….we had no idea that he had won FOUR awards! He absolutely blitzed the course, receiving HDs for all bar one class (he got a D for that one).

The terrific thing about all of this is that when he first went to university, straight out of high school, he hated it! He didn’t get his first preference, and wound up doing a computer science degree. He scraped through with passes and the odd credit. This left him with the concept of himself as a poor student. He lacked a passion for computing, and he wasn’t motivated to study, and ultimately that reflected in his grades. Fast forward 20 years….following a random conversation with his dad about the diminishing supply of cabinet-making timbers, and the purchase of a block of land to start to grow a small stand of our own, Al decided to head back to uni to learn more about how to manage what we hope will be our retirement nest-egg.

Two or three times a year for ten days at a time, Al made his way down to Creswick in the middle of Victoria. Several times a day I’d get phone calls or emails  telling me about all the different kinds of trees, and about chainsaws, and about herbicides and about the characters he was meeting that were so different to the people he normally hangs around with. He was so excited! Like a kid in a candy shop. He was so passionate about what he was learning each time that it was no longer a chore to do the assignments or to sit through lectures. It was a breeze!  He was having fun at school and doing well without the angst and “pain” he’d experienced when he was at uni the first time. And it was refreshing for me to see him so excited about something!

When we’re passionate about something, our perspective changes so much! The workload does not decrease. The complexity of the information doesn’t change. The length of time you have to spend doing you assignments doesn’t change (in fact you’ll probably take longer because you want to keep digging to learn more about your subject). The shift happens in our heads – in the way we think about things. When we are passionate about anything — whether it’s work, or sport, or study, or our hobbies, or family, or faith — it stops being about putting in hard work, and starts being about revelling in the thing that we love to do. It’s natural and organic. It’s about having a life that’s fulfilling and a life where we are fulfilling the purpose we were created for — which is where our passions are born!

The challenge for me as a parent now is trying to guide my sons towards choosing an educational path that will let them work within their passions rather than working against them and making life more difficult than it should be. But how to do that? I don’t know yet. If you have had any experience with this, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here are some photos from Friday:

All robed up and ready to graduate

He said he felt like Harry Potter with his robes on

Al with the perpetual trophies that will go back to the Creswick campus

Well done my tree-hugging-lumberjack :)