This morning was a bath kinda morning. Those of you who know me will know I hardly ever take a bath. That’s not to say I don’t wash by the way. I most certainly do, showering fulfils this task. The art of bathing and the delight of time wasting, however, seems to have dropped off my ‘things I do’ skill set. Where once I could waste many an hour reading a book with the warm steamy waters lapping around me as the pages grew wrinkled and plugs got pulled so that fresh hot water could replace the tepid, has been replaced with a more ‘McDonalds drive through’ attitude to taking a bath. What I once considered to be an opportunity to pause, and be still with a good book, has now become something I do, if I’m honest, rather reluctantly.
Baths are usually taken at the end of a particularly trying or difficult day, week, month or year. When I reach the end of myself and my entire body aches from prolonged muscle gritting, then do I acquiesce and run a bath. As I run them I tell myself that this time I’m going to manage to stay in longer than 3 minutes. I’ve tried sheer will power to stay in them, gritting my teeth - ironic considering I’m taking the bath to relax my body, as I’ve attempted to stay put in the warm oil scented water and simply be one with the steam rising. More recently I’ve added a mirror to the wall facing me in the bath, which allows me a view out of my skylight. This, I thought, would be the thing that might cause me to wallow in the waters. Watching the clouds scurry past in the mirror or catching a glimpse of the colours radiating from the setting sun. Certainly it gave me something to look at for the 3 minutes or so that I spent in the baths, but extending the time it failed to do.
Yet this morning I woke with a body ache that craved enveloping itself in warm water. It seemed weird running a bath at the start of the day. On the rare occasions I do take a bath it will be just before bedtime, never in the morning, yet run one I did on this morning. Grabbing my phone to multi task as the tub filled by checking my Instagram feed to see what was on it. I dropped oil scented bath salts mixed with dried flowers into the water and as they swirled around plugged into a talk from Pete Greig and his wife Sammy recorded at their recent Belfast 24-7 conference.
For over a year God has been talking to me about being still and knowing that He is God, whilst also reminding me that Rest is a weapon.
I neither lie down beside green pastures easily nor do I find being still and seemingly doing nothing easy. However, lying in the waters I listened to Pete and his wife Sammy talk about handing over the operational day to day running of 24-7 Prayer.
The talk lasted beyond my limitations of taking a bath. It accompanied me as I got dressed for the day and then came down in to the kitchen with me as I made porridge for the family.
As I slowed down to focus and listened on what turned out to be almost an hour long recording, I found myself moved deeply by what they had to say. I joined them in their journey, I laughed and felt viscerally moved by what God had done for them as well as through them over the last 20yrs of 24-7 Prayer and celebrated with them at the handing on of the movement as they step in to the ‘what’s next’ season for themselves. Aspects of their journey resonating with moments of my own, events you wouldn’t choose that turn out to be life altering and the faithfullness of a God who cares and hears.
Slowing down and not rushing headlong into my day my body relaxed and my soul could feel the soft still voice of God. Encouraging me, nurturing me, giving me a vision of what some of the past 12 months have been about.
The start of December 2018, getting ready to go to a Lauryn Hill concert and suddenly knowing in my bones that God was asking me to go back to New Zealand, without my children. Going back to a country that I had fallen in love with and left in 2004, thinking it was a short travel break that turned out to be a permanent departure felt tricky and painful. I always imagined when I did go back I’d be going with my children - to revisit a land my eldest and I loved, and together show my youngest all the places we had seen and travelled; sharing with him all the memories and stories we had, whilst making new ones together as a family. I certainly didn’t think my first time back in almost 15 years would be a two week trip over Christmas, without them. Within two weeks of that Lauryn Hill moment I was sitting on a plane feeling the very opposite of excited, with no capacity to deal with the numerous conflicted emotions raging around inside me. Going because I knew I was being asked to go, with no idea of why other than I was to trust Him and go. It may sound like a delightful request, but it felt like a tough gig at the time. A really tough, painful gig.
New Zealand turned out to be a time of repositioning, reconnecting, transitioning, growth and new birth. Where my heart was repositioned to see God’s hands and grace across and within my life. Returning to the land of the long white cloud allowed my heart to let go of a grief I didn’t even know I had. I knew I was grieving for the loss of my sister, but I wasn’t aware I was mourning the loss of returning to New Zealand, the only place I had ever thought of as home. Day one back in NZ and waking up in Queenstown, I drove my friend who I was travelling with, to show her where we had lived. Driving away down the mountain from our old home, that grief I didn’t know I had surfaced. All the subsequent 15 years of loss and longing, of feeling as though I’d been denied something by God, rose up from my inner hidden depths and with them came deep wailing groans and rivers of tears. An interesting sensation when driving down a twist and turning mountain track.
Pulling the car over to stand looking out over Lake Wakatipu in order to “sort myself out” and take a moment. I could feel God untangling my heart strings. Showing me that it was His kindness taking me to NZ in 2002. It was in NZ I really learnt how to be a mum. NZ where I connected to the landscape of mountains, sky and sea. Where I discovered my passion for eating local seasonal food, looking after the environment and ourselves by not using petrochemicals. It was His kindness that brought me home to the UK, to heal old wounds within my heart from family pains and causing me to re-discover a God I’d given my life to as a small child. A God who by my mid-twenties had become known to me as Universal Energy or Spirit and who had waited patiently in His timing to show me His heart for me and call me home. No judgement just patience, deeper than an ocean and so much grace.
That unwanted and unasked for trip, at the perfect time of year to add pressure to crack open the wounds inside me, repositioned NZ as the birth of something not the death of something. NZ was moved out of its box labelled ‘things I’ve missed out on and will never have again’ and got re classified as ‘a prototype for where I’m heading and infinite possibilities yet to discover’. Pure genius on God’s behalf, not only did my vista suddenly get widened exponentially but my experience of how intimately God knows me grew too.
I’m aware beyond any doubt that staying put in the UK over the subsequent 15 years has grown and challenged me. I’ve been pruned, squeezed and slammed into God’s amazing love for me again and again. I may not have liked most of it, or even been in agreement with it, but it has changed me, widened me and grown deep roots in the soil of my soul; roots firmly planted in the soil of God’s garden. It has grown my character and refined my relationship with my spectacular, steadfast, faithful Heavenly Father.
New Zealand is one marker in this process of re-defining my perspective, New York certainly is another. A city that God seems to like to use to refine my view.
2019 a new year and one that is largely marked by my numerous trips to New York. A sensation I’ve come to fondly talk about as ‘experiencing NYC on steroids’. Multiple visits to a city I had no previous affinity with, out of which has birthed a deep love in me for the underbelly of the metropolis and a sense of being at home when I walk the streets now. NYC that God took me to for space to process my sister’s death. NYC that God is using to show me just how much he loves me and wants to abundantly bless me. NYC where I’ve grown muscles in spiritual warfare and NYC where I walked a woman into freedom, as she gave her life to Jesus on a subway train heading to Coney Island. NYC and the Hamptons more recently where planning for my second book begun, at God’s request, surrounded by sand, blue skies and the ocean. Oh how he knows me. NYC that, this Christmas, God is taking me back to with my children, to wonder at the delights of the city and where I will share the past years explorations with my children. Shared memories and new ones to make together as a family. God’s goodness, nothing more or less, running through every request, ask, trip, step I’ve taken over the last 12 months. Each moment taking me deeper, calling me out into the stormy seas, trusting Him further, wider than I have before.
Through it all God’s hands have surrounded me, held me, called me in to the waves and never once left me on my own.
God is far more able to bring about the desires of His heart for us than we could ever give him credit for. When we slow down, take a moment to pause from the relentless pace of our day, step into a Selah moment with God, He shows up and everything changes.
At just the right time, His time not ours, He moves, reveals, heals, restores, reconciles and brings beauty from the ashes.
Be encouraged, if God is this invested in the details of my life, then He’s just as invested in yours. Today God is not just willing, he’s able. If you feel a nudge to slow down, or maybe even cease from striving and just stop today, why don’t you? Go for a walk, let your eyes wander out of a window, play some music or maybe just sit and ask God to show you where He’s been in the moments of your past 12 months? I promise you He was.
