Minister Blog 11

Anyone for a cat update?

This week Spartacus has been let out, allowed to roam free. The problem, we discovered at 8.30pm on Tuesday night, in the dark, is that while he is able to leap onto a bin and get over our fence, into the wide world, he is so small that there is no way for him to get BACK over the fence, should he choose to.

A bit of a night time rescue mission ensued and we now have made a little passage way through the bottom of the fence! But it got me thinking about committing yourself to something, and not being able to go back to what you knew before.

I think this can be a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes there are sins we leap into that are difficult to get out of , it's difficult to get back to who we were before they happened. But with Jesus there is always a way back. If we really want Jesus to help us out of sin, we must be prepared for it to be costly. You couldn't pull an arrow out of your side without it hurting, but once you'd done it, you could start to heal. It is the same with sin, you do what it takes to get rid of it, for the long-term, then things will start looking up.

Then there are good things we do in life that you don't come back the same from. Taking a 'leap of faith' (or a leap of fence...) can sometimes mean putting ourselves forward for a challenge that we really need to trust in God for. But if God has asked us to do it (perhaps through our prayer or our bible reading), then we can trust him to sustain us.

I'm not talking about silly risks, I'm talking about weighed up, prayed through, talked over, God-risks. Because in fact the safest place to be is 'risking' your own desires, because you're smack bang in the middle of God's will, doing what HE wants. Then you will start to find your desires becoming aligned with Christ's. And yes, you may find you've changed and grown, and you can't go back to how you used to be, but you'll also find it was a risk worth taking.