Birmingham…

I came across the following short films in connection with Birmingham, which I think are worth a watch.

The first is just some shots of the city centre and just reminds me of the privilege of living in such a diverse city…

Birmingham City Centre UK – Caught in Time from Simon Smith on Vimeo.

The second captures the change that goes on, Birmingham is a city that continually redefines it self. Sometimes this is good and sometimes not but we now get to a play a part…

Birmingham timelapse from 7inch cinema on Vimeo.

coffee mug…

This is my favourite coffee mug, it may seem a bit strange to have a favourite mug, but there you go I have one!

The thing is, up until the new year this mug would have exposed a terrible habit I have. Though I enjoy drinking coffee from this mug I would often leave it on my desk waiting to be discovered a few days later. The problem was when I discovered the mug, outwardly it would continue to reveal its pristine white exterior, however on the inside it would be a different story. Inside one would discover a brown sludgy potentially mouldy mess!

The outside, what you could immediately see looked great but the inside told a different story. But I’m talking about my coffee mug aren’t I?

I wonder whether sometimes, if I’m not careful, there is a danger I can be more like my coffee mug than I would like to admit. I wonder whether we can all be? I wonder whether we can find, that the public appearance of who we are can sometimes tell a different story to the one our lives are telling on the inside, in our home, amongst certain groups of people or internally in what we are thinking and feeling?

I watched the BBC four dramatisation of Enid Blyton recently, as I watched it I couldn’t help be in awe of her prolific writing ability and gifting to capture children’s attention. However as the drama unfolded I became more and more struck by the way who Enid was in public was vastly different to her she was in private. Probably the most striking portrayal of this was through the relationship she enjoyed with the nations children who read her books and her two daughters. To the nations children she was a dream Mum who could transport them to magical worlds and fill their lives with joy an laughter, however her own Children really experince none of this and were limited to seeing Enid for an hour a day. This uncomfortable reality was best expressed through a scene where Enid entertains a number of children who have won afternoon tea with her in own home. Enid send her own daughters away so she can entertain the other children. The daughters and listen in enviously to thye fun being had…

Though it was uncomfortable viewing I found myself  wondering how am I like Enid in respect to how I live my life?

Perhaps you and I can be more like Enid or my coffee mug than we would like to admit?

Maybe to admit this is a starting point!

Jesus confronted this inconsistency in living when he walked the earth. Stating, we can look like white washed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead peoples bones. He then gave a simple and direct remedy, make sure that you are clean on the inside and outside.

There is a need to ensure that who we are on the outside in public is who we are on the inside in private.

Sometimes its hard to admit who we can be in private, however until we do we can never become who we want to be!

Since the start of 2010 I have resolved to not leave my mug on my desk but rather to ensure that it is clean inside and out.

The start of a new year presents an opportunity to not allow there to be a difference between who we are publically and who we are privately. An opportunity to be clean inside as well outside, to live a life of transparency! An opportunity to start a journey of admiting who you are in order to become who you want to be.

It’s Christmas…

…well two days to go!

I hope you have a fantastic Christmas!

Though it is slightly cheesy I hope that you are able to enjoy the ‘three r’s’ of Christmas…

…rest: within all the different elements of Christmas that you are able to find time to relax

…reflect: Christmas season leading up to the next year can act as a great time to reflect on what has been.Tto celebrate the good, come to terms with the challenges and to look forward to what is next

…remember: a time to be reminded of how God out of His love for us, gave us the greatest gift of a life, in his Son Jesus coming to earth in order that he could offer us the gift of life!

I do hope and pray that you have a fantaic Christmas and and amazing new year!

With love and peace,

Adrian

noise…

I went to one of my favourite cinemas recently and was struck by the slogan they run at the start of each film. It is designed to discourage the use of mobile phones or talking during the movie. The slogan?  ‘Silence is Golden’. For some reason, I have found myself thinking about this phrase.

Is silence golden?

I love noise, I love living in a city because there is noise! I enjoy being around loads of other people, traffic. There is always a background sound, there is a buzz, a buzz that gives me energy, a buzz that causes me to feel part of something. In the age we live in, I enjoy the fact that when I make a journey in my car I can listen to the radio or to music. That when I walk I can speak on my mobile to anyone anywhere or listen to music on my MP3 player.

I enjoy noise. So, in what way is silence golden?

Silence can feel lonely, uncomfortable even vulnerable.

But maybe silence does actually bring with it an opportunity…

…an opportunity to connect with ourselves. Without the noise we start to hear how we are doing, what we are feeling, the decisions we are facing, how we see ourselves. Maybe this is why I can find it unnerving. Noise can be a distraction. Maybe sometimes the fact that we find silence uncomfortable says more about us than we would like to admit.

Maybe we need to face the silence!

I don’t know what this looks like for each of us, maybe we need to face how we’re feeling, to forgive or be forgiven, to enjoy the silence for our own wellbeing. Maybe we need to face up to how we see ourselves, to talk to someone about it. Silence does not mean that we have to be alone…sometimes facing the silence and connecting with ourselves means we have to talk to someone else.

…an opportunity to connect with God. There’s a story in the Bible of man called Elijah. He found that as he faced his silence he felt completely hopeless yet within the silence it gave him an amazing opportunity to connect with God. There is a wonderfully poetic part of the story just before Elijah encounters God. Elijah first encounters the noise of a violent wind, then an earthquake and finally a fire but we are told God was not present within any of these. Finally a gentle breeze comes and it is here that Elijah encounters God. Without the distractions of noise, silence also offers the opportunity to connect with God, to hear from God, to consider who God actually is. The question is, will we take it?

I still love noise but I am increasingly enjoying silence and the opportunity it affords me.

How about you?

Why not turn off the music, enjoy some journeys without making calls…enjoy the silence…who knows you might hear something, or someone, worth listening to.

And maybe then, silence is golden.

signpost…

Last week saw the announcement that President Barack Obama would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. This announcement has been met with a mixed response and I am not seeking to add an opinion to this debate, rather I wonder whether it acts as a signpost pointing to something else…

In their reasoning behind the awarding of President Obama, the Norwegian committee stated,  “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

You see, I wonder whether the awarding of President Obama, says as much about you and me and the world we live in as it does about him. That it points to the fact that we need to know HOPE!

You only have to pick up a daily newspaper to realise that we are living in a world that needs hope. And if we are honest we know it to be true as we feel it ourselves, we need to know that there is hope!

This need for hope makes me feel awkward as I know at the core of what I believe is a message of hope.

A hope based not in a philosophical idea or mere human effort but rather in God.  A hope that promises peace with God, peace with one another, that death is not the end and the fact that this isn’t how it always has to be.

Surely this a hope worth pointing people to?

Therefore I am thankful for the hope President Obama is revealing, however his example challenges me to the core of my being as to whether I will be a signpost of the hope I know!

So that’s me how about you?

Do you know this hope?

If you don’t, then I want to say there is hope! I want to encourage you to investigate it for yourself…

If you do know this hope, then you are left with the uncomfortable question I am left with, are you revealing it?

Am I, are you willing to stand up, to stand out and become signposts pointing to God who is hope?

Alone…

Last week I watched the compelling yet harrowing program ‘Alone in the wild’. This is a not a cheesy horror flick but rather a series being aired by channel 4, where camera man Ed Wardle is dropped in the Canadian wilderness alone for 12 weeks. The series then follows his video diary of his experiences. They are brutally honest, exceptionally emotional and worrying sometimes of being ALONE.

As I watched the program, at how desperate Ed becomes (at one point he cries out “I wish someone would help me”), of how hopeless he becomes, of the effect it has on his mental and emotional health (in one of the video’s he explains he just starts crying whenever he films),  everything within me wanted to jump into the screen and say YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

The thing is as I watched the program powerless to do anything about Ed’s situation I realised that the reality is, that there are people much closer to me and you than the Canadian Wilderness who feel this alone!  It could be as you read this you know exactly what I am talking about as it is you!

YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

When we feel alone it leaves us feeling desperate, hopeless it impacts our emotions and our mental health – how do I know this because I witnessed it through Ed’s program but more than that, as I watched Ed it resonated with me because I have known times like it myself.

It is because of what it results in with everything within me I want to say, You are not alone!

For some of us we need to here this. The bible states that God is always with us , that even if we feel like we are in the darkest of places, God is there. We are not alone. For some of us we need to know the fact that God isn’t out to get us but rather to find us, to allow us to know we are not alone. For some of us we need to take a huge risk in our aloneness and reach out!

We need to reach out to God who is there and we need to reach out to the people around us and say HELP!

I know this is risky, but it works!

For other’s of us, we don’t feel alone but we need to be those who look out for others who are and be quick to shout out in our words and actions YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

A voice

Presidents Obama made the following eulogy at Edward Kennedy’s funeral: (This is an edited version written by the observer newspaper)

“”Today we say goodbye to the youngest child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy. The world will long remember their son Edward as the heir to a weighty legacy; a champion for those who had none; the soul of the Democratic party; and the lion of the US Senate – a man whose name graces nearly one thousand laws, and who penned more than 300 himself.

“Ted Kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch; the restless dreamer who became its rock. He lost two siblings by the age of sixteen. He saw two more taken violently from the country that loved them. He said goodbye to his beloved sister, Eunice, in the final days of his own life. He narrowly survived a plane crash, watched two children struggle with cancer, buried three nephews, and experienced personal failings and setbacks in the most public way possible.

“It is a string of events that would have broken a lesser man. And it would have been easy for Teddy to let himself become bitter and hardened; to surrender to self-pity and regret; to retreat from public life and live out his years in peaceful quiet. No one would have blamed him for that.

“But that was not Ted Kennedy. As he told us: ‘Individual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves.’ Through his own suffering, Ted Kennedy became more alive to the plight and suffering of others. His life’s work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections. It was to give a voice to those who were not heard; to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity; to make real the dream of our founding. He was given the gift of time that his brothers were not, and he used that gift to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow.”

As I read this record of one man’s life I was struck afresh by the power of our voices and the way Ted Kennedy used his to great effect. As I pondered this, the uncomfortable question I was left with was, do I use my voice effectively?

The painful truth is I am not sure whether I do!

There are many ways we can speak of voice but I want to just ponder the most literal way of our voice as the words that come out of our mouth.

Do I, do we use our voices to empower others or to draw attention to ourselves!

To have a voice is an immense privilege the question is do we use it?

Jesus said “that out of the overflow of our hearts our mouths speak”. Jesus hits the nail on the head that the way we use our voices, the way we speak reveals who we are and what is at value to me and to you. This is an uncomfortable truth.

Does my voice, does your voice, seek to build others up rather than tear others down, does it seek to speak the truth or seek to deceive, does it offer kindness or sarcasm, does it seek to speak for those who cannot be heard.

You see, I know that God loves me, with an outrageous, scandalous love that is unconditional. A love that is not determined by who I am or what I do but out of the fact that God is love and He loves me because he loves me and showed his loved by sending his Son Jesus to die for me. (The question for some of us is do we know that God loves us). However the bible also states that I in turn can love because I am loved, in other words that at the core of being because I know that I am loved by God like this it should cause me to love others like this, therefore  my voice should be entirely motivated by love.

You see love means that when I speak, when I use my voice I will leave others built up, I will tell the truth, I will offer kindness and will seek to speak up for those who cannot be heard.

But the reality is I sometimes forget the privilege of having a voice. Therefore the late Ted Kennedy provokes me to ensure I live up to the privilege I have in my voice to reveal the love of God to all I get to speak to and on behalf of.

I am not perfect so please be patient but this what I am pursuing this is how I desire to use my voice. So this is me but how about you?

What does and will your voice say about you?

The proof of the pudding is in the eating…

It has been some time since I last blogged about ‘rest’, however all that I blogged about I have had the privilege of tasting over the past month.

A few days after I blogged, on the first day of my annual leave my wife fell and broke her right wrist very badly, as she is right handed this was not good news. For her care and being in a reality about my abilities, our planned family holiday trip camping in Cornwall was a definite no brainer! I was therefore thrown in to the definite reality that rest is found not in getting away (though that can be good) but in daily pursuing time with God and entering the rest he has to offer of knowing complete satisfaction, completeness and total acceptance that he promises. This is not an easy thing to do but is something that I had to make time to do but I can honestly say whilst life has looked somewhat different to what we had planned, I know I have known and know rest!

I guess why I wanted to quickly blog this is just to say if you are reading this why not try it for yourself as the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

Rest…

…Well I am about to go on holiday which as James Brown said “feels good”. I enjoy holidays as they allow time to live at a different pace, to relax, to get refreshed…to ‘rest’. However, I know when I speak to others they agree,  that often the rest we enjoy through a  holiday is quickly forgotten within a couple of days of being back to normal life. We can then find ourselves pining after our next holiday as life just seemed better then,  but surely this isn’t how it is meant to be! Surely we are not meant to live for the next holiday!

The truth of the matter is holiday’s are good but we need to know ‘rest’ throughout our year.

God understands our need for rest. When Jesus walked the planet he said that he had come to give us rest, elsewhere in the Bible we are told that anyone who believes in Jesus can enter God’s rest. But what sort of rest does Jesus offer?

I listened recently to talk by Tim kellor on ‘work and rest’ that brings understanding to what is on offer here. In essence Tim reveals that we need to understand first what God’s rest look like, which we discover in the creation story at the beginning of the Bible. In the creation story we discover that God rested on the 7th day not because he was tired but because he was pleased with all he had accomplished.

To understand  ‘rest’ like this begins to shed some light on why it can feel so elusive. If we are truthful at the core of our being that however hard we work we just don’t feel like we have accomplished enough, there is always more to be done, we need to try harder. We may know moments of satisfaction when we have completed something but it never lasts for long. What if we could know that deep sense of satisfaction in the core of our being, of achievement, completeness, of total acceptance regardless of all that we have yet to achieve, now that sounds like ‘rest’.

Jesus therefore invites us to enter this sort of ‘rest’. A rest where we understand he has accomplished everything and we get to know the satisfaction of that, the sense of achievement, completeness and total acceptance that it promises.

What an invitation, more than just a holiday an experience of ‘rest’ to be enjoyed daily.

This isn’t an invitation to do nothing but rather an invitation that amidst all the deadlines and never ending to do lists we can know at the very core of our being that our achievements are not what make us acceptable, Jesus is and that is ‘rest’.

So, if like me you are going on holiday I hope you have a great time! But whether we are going on holiday or not let’s make time to discover or remember the true ‘rest’ that is being offered by Jesus that is to be enjoyed.

My first album was Thriller

We were staying with my wife’s Uncle and Aunt when I was told the news that Michael Jackson was dead. When I was told the news I immediately remembered the Christmas when my own Uncle bought me my first 12inch Album, ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson.

My guess is all of us can think of a personal memory that comes to mind when we think of one of Michael Jackson songs. For many of us we have grown up with his music and influence whatever we have thought about how he has lived. Therefore the fact Michael Jackson has died impacts us. Suddenly someone who has just been there in the background of our lives maybe even the periphery is gone and it reminds us that we are fragile beings that we are mortal beings.

The truth is we are mortal we are born and though we don’t like to talk about it we will die and when someone dies whether it is someone we have known personally or someone we are connected to through their influence we have a very real sense of lose but also a very keen sense of our own mortality.

Death creates a level playing field for all us whether we have global fame or feel like we live unnoticed, whether we have immense wealth or live in absolute poverty we will all die. The question is, are we willing to face up to this fact?

At the heart of the Christian faith is a promise that there is hope, that death can be faced with confidence that death is not the end! I would encourage us to remind ourselves of these facts or maybe to investigate them to see if they have validity.