Reflections on Prayer in Wales

My time spent this summer in Caernarfon, Wales was formational in many different ways. First, it reminded me that people are people no matter what country you are in. Second, it reminded me that God is bigger than my southern, American caricature that often drives my understanding of God. Lastly, the impact that the trip had on my prayer life has been incredible, like the first bite of fresh Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich.
The majority of the trip consisted of prayer walking for half our day. We spent time walking through all the different parts of the town and into the outskirts of the town into the sheep infested countryside. I will admit that pray has never come easy for me. It is something I have wrestled with in attempt to hear the voice of God leading me, though at times I suspect that God's voice sounds eerily like my own. My prayer walking experience opened my eyes to the need that I have for God to be present in my life as well as the lives of people I interact with each day. I was humbled by the power of simply confessing that I didn't know the extent of every individual situation and need but that God did and does.

Part of our experience was an exercise in listening prayer. I am staunchly convinced that most Christians spent time uttering prayers to the extent that we become experts at babbling and seldom practice the discipline of shutting up to listen to God. Each day I was challenged in my faith, encouraged to hold on fast to the God of my faith, and to trust in his will for me, the people around me, and the world. That sounds like, "let go and let God"...nothing could be further from the lesson I learned. It was this deep sense of trust even when I doubted the one in whom I trust. It was something akin to jumping off the trapeze platform with no net and not enough a bar. I am finding that jumping is part of what God is looking for from me.

Chesterton on Life and Faith

I have long wanted to read G. K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy. This summer I finally marked it off my list. One can easily see his influence on another great thinker, C. S. Lewis. Here are few nuggets I found in my reading of the book.

"We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to."

"Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul."

"Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once."

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason."

"For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God."

"Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas."

"But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Wales Pictures

 Prayer walking

 Croeso

 cool cross in a cemetary

 dipping my toes in the Atlantic

 A cool church in an area we prayer walked on the last morning

 5 Americans in a phone booth

 Prayer walking

 church service

Castle Ruins from the 12th or 13th century

Wales Mission Trip 2013

 Our home for the week.

 Getting training from IMB missionary John Robinson

 Group shot on the sea wall

 View of the ancient medieval wall

 Overlooking the town of Caernarfon

 Group debriefing

Beautiful sunset over the harbor

2 Corinthians 10:5

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Some thoughts on Galatians 6

When we boast only in the cross we are…

1.       Reminded of the depths of our sin

2.       Reminded of the depths of God’s love

3.       Reminded that without the cross we are hopeless

Celebrating Master's Week