Every Day with Jesus

In the wee small hours is often when we find it impossible to sleep. The mind switches on and all our anxieties awaken, bringing us stress. Answers are in short supply, solutions elusive. The more we seek to focus on God, the more pressing inner panic becomes. Why is it that the middle of the night intensifies our inner fears?

We don’t enjoy disturbance in our established routine. Life can deliver crushing disappointments that radically alter our perspective. Our assumptions tested, we must choose between rigidity and flexibility, holding out or learning a new life rhythm. We study all the available information and find we’re now part of a minority data set.

Scripture reveals the wilderness is our teacher. Isolated, left alone to converse with God, here’s our personal pilgrimage to learn from Him. Learning leads to a changed character and behaviour as we master the way of the disciple. Life’s essential purpose is to become more like Jesus, and so better equipped for our eternal future.

One critical problem with suffering is when we become the centre of our own universe. Unsurprising, since our pain, physical and psychological, blinds us to anything other than our immediate situation. We base judgments on experience, assuming no one can possibly understand our reality.

Answered, or more importantly unanswered, prayer is important to us all. We often glibly quote God’s promise to hear and answer prayer, yet we’ve little encouragement to offer those whose faithful petitions appear to pass God by. It’s too easy to assume there’s a simple formula; we pray, God grants our request.

Three short words, ‘I love you’, birth and sustain all successful relationships. Spoken with authenticity they deepen trust and affection. Even when frequently said their value doesn’t depreciate. Love is the elixir of relationships. Love is dependable for, ‘love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres’ (1 Cor. 13:6–7...

Gratitude means gratefulness. Ask a Brit how they are, and they typically reply, ‘Can’t complain’, apparently disappointed! God encourages us to develop a gratitude reflex, giving thanks in all circumstances.

Not only must we forgive, but we too are in need of forgiveness. We regret many of our inner battles with ego and insecurity. We can hit out in our attempt to create sufficient smoke and distraction to prevent our human frailty and fracture from being seen. We unkindly blame, then shame others to protect our own sense of self and value.

Our attitudes determine who we become and influence our health and ageing.* Good attitudes are beneficial. God invites us regularly to audit our attitudes since they affect our spiritual health too. This resonates with Bycock’s first essential words for a healthy life: ‘I forgive you.’

Words disguise as much as they reveal. Growing up, Miriam heard family friends comment on her pretty face. ‘Pretty’ encouraged her and her confidence grew. Slightly older, she heard comments about her ‘chubby body’, which challenged her self-esteem. She asked herself, ‘Is my body shape wrong?’

We often long to step into our tearless eternity (Rev. 21:4), but this unrealised future removes us from our present. What’s more, God is always present with us in the now, wherever we are. Whilst we can’t imagine trouble away, we can imagine just how our God of grace and truth (John 1:14) can be found in the everyday.

In the movie Avatar , the Na’vi greeting means, ‘I see you’, because ‘To see… is to open the mind and heart to the present’.* Someone who is present in time, struggles to recall the past whilst placing little focus on an unrealised future. With its limitations, this approach ensures undivided attention in the moment.

Political correctness presents a challenge to freedom of expression, for opinions can be taken as perceived as criticism of someone. For mediators, the most intransigent cases are always values based, because human identity is intricately woven into our internal belief system of the world.

There are so many ways to communicate God’s glorious deeds today. The difficulty is the extent any such communication will be noticed. Forced to compete within an ever-expanding mountain of garbage, even if amongst the detritus gold can be found.

Our mind is always busy with ‘self-talk’, a personal commentary on all of life. Often defensive, seeking to justify ourselves to the world we think is watching us, it is often highly critical. Science has shown that this ‘self-talk’ affects our wellbeing and physical health.* A negative internal commentary will limit both my effectiveness and performance throughout life.

Scripture presents us with the possibility of change. We’re given the fruit of the Spirit by Him, fruit that bears witness to His character and purpose. Yet, we all experience resistance to effective change in the shape of our perception, habits, and attitudes. In a nation obsessed with obesity, weight offers a useful illustration.

Change requires choices, which then present challenges. Here we face the reality of sacrifice in time and energy to press on with everyday life. Most startup businesses are undercapitalised. The product is good and viable but cashflow runs out before sufficient revenue is secured for survival and profitability.

Change demands choices which give insight into our Christian understanding, and which then shape our discipleship. We can struggle with personal choices, preferring to critique those of others, easier to point the finger.

Change is feared because it interrupts our familiar routines and the comfort they give us. Neuroscience tells us that change offers us uncertainty and the brain interprets uncertainty as an error code.

Context changes regularly but it doesn’t mean we lose our confidence and hope. It demands changes in our perceptions. Ageing is something society is slowly coming to terms with, with many lessons learned and truths gathered over the years. We need never stop becoming more of who God created us to be, despite physical and mental limitations.

Revelation, or encountering God, is to fill our hearts with joy, placing all our struggles in perspective. Difficult to accomplish, revelation alone presents us with the way forward. If only it were delivered in a single package, like a software patch.

Communion isn’t a casual event. This may be because of anxiety that a formal breaking of bread might reinforce a Catholic view of the real presence, a view that changed during the Protestant Reformation. However, breaking bread together was introduced by Jesus. There’s the fellowship meal, such as the feeding of the five thousand, and pursued by the early Christians as they broke bread together in...

Every journey has a destination, even if it’s provisional with a fresh start ahead. Our life journey will enjoy many destinations, many chosen but some enforced on us. Sometimes we will go a good distance in the wrong direction as the only way to discover something about ourselves and our true destination.

The despondent disciples had the reports that Jesus was alive, not only from the women, but also confirmed by those who rushed off to check this unusual report. However, knowledge is of little use if we don’t know what to do with it.

Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’* is a favourite painting. The dramatic moment when two disciples recognise the risen Christ breaking bread. Their walk offers a metaphor for Christian life.** Two disheartened disciples, believing their hopes dashed, set off home. Dashed hopes can lead to despondency; literally to give up one’s soul. The Church Fathers prayed for God’s deliverance from despondency,...