The Head Office

Jesus asked a lot of questions—even though He already knew all the answers. Instead of just giving information, he challenges people to reflect on what they truly love and desire. What do you want? Are you hungry or thirsty? What drives you?

As Christians, we ought to shape our discipleship around asking questions rather than just handing people a set of beliefs. Or at least find a balance. It is usually better to set aside the catechism books and actually listen to people. That’s what makes the Alpha program, which started years ago at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, so effective—it begins with honest conversation. Like any meaningful project or legal process, it starts with a discovery phase before jumping to conclusions.

This morning, I read a passage where Paul speaks to the Church at Philippi:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to test and prove what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Phil 1:9-10.

Many therapists, particularly those who use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, operate on the principle that you are what you think—change your thinking, and your life will improve. But Paul’s prayer suggests a different perspective: you are what you love. Jesus challenges the assumption that humans are primarily thinking beings, proposing instead that we are first and foremost seekers of love and acceptance. What if, rather than defining humans by what they know or do, we defined them by what they desire?

How would this change how we approach Christianity, and particularly how we promote our faith? Determining 'What do you love?'—not what you are buying, how you are spending your time, and what you are addicted to—these are the lowest-hanging fruits of our cultural dance. Distractions. Instead, we eyeball and drill down to questions of first loves and desires. Think about love as the starting menu, with knowledge only as a vitamin supplement.

The ballooning levels of anxiety and depression are a result of expectations that often have no bearing on what we truly want. This amnesia towards our natural, deep desires causes grief inside. Social change, gender issues, sexual expectations, success models, and the like have made mental pathways very complex, thereby clouding our real desires.

Knowledge doesn't teach us how to love. Everyday distractions grind away at destroying or at least distorting our love meter.

Love is built in by God—just covered in worldly lard. Love gets lost in life's fat roll and our Instagram feed.

Before you say it, I know this gets very loosey-goosey and feeds right into the 'do what feels good' mentality of the day, but maybe heart feelings are a better starting point than a desk and a bible and a concordance. I should have followed my heart more during the 30 or so years that precede this narrative. Instead, I bought way too many shares in the Head Office concept of faith. i.e., Christianity as a successful ‘business’ model and life choice. Now I want to deploy a more Augustine way of love: 'You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.'

The Long Night in Malaysia

Our typical Malaysian break comprises of a mixture of R&R – rest and religious activity. We have travelled to the Island of Penang perhaps 20 times over the years. The year of this particular sojourn is 2018, and we feel a stronger sense of missional purpose. Some years, we only want to hide, swim, and eat Laksa. This year, we come flaunting our pastoral badges and agree on a plan to be ‘available’ – cue appropriate worship song – we are ready for whatever and whoever comes our way.

This night is typical—a quickly organized trip with few details. We don't know where our friends are taking us or what to expect. We have been friends with Pastors Ann and Antony for many years, and we trust their judgement and respect their expression of faith. It's not exactly our expression, but together we make up an eclectic team. Earlier we taxied from our hotel to a hawkers style restaurant where we met up with our friends and shared coffee and Roti Canai. Most events in Penang begin and end with food. We are surprised they bring their grandsons, and we all pile into their car. Antony explains they are planting a church up north and tonight is a gathering for prayer and fellowship as a first step. 

We should have known it would be a long night when we stop at a Caltex gas station for snacks after an hour on the road. The little boys return with sweets, and Master Chef sips on a cup of coffee from a gaudy paper cup. Think 7-Eleven Malaysian style, except those vile rolling sausages are replaced with chilli-flavored rolling wieners. Same all over the world. It is already dark, and we are en route to a house church meeting. We veer back onto the four-lane highway northbound towards the Thai border.

We arrive about 2 1/2 hours later in a small town. We are welcomed into a home sparse and barely furnished. The walls appear to be newly painted in a light blue-green, and the ceilings are high. A fan stands in one corner, working to keep the room cool. We are led to the kitchen where a few women hover around the stove, cooking up a big pot of Bee Hoon noodles as well as some sort of sticky fruit jelly dessert served in plastic cups. Master Chef connects with the cooks and offers encouragement. Lots of laughter. We recognize the mother and kids that live here. She leads the music team at Antony's church in Penang. With newfound respect, it dawns on me that she must be travelling so far to join that service each Saturday evening. What commitment.

We start with worship led by a couple of the children on a keyboard and bongo drums while our host receives calls on her phone and races off to collect neighbours on her scooter. She returns now looking nervous as the room swells with families and children. Pastor Anthony scolds her for not providing enough chairs.

An obviously disturbed woman and her mother join us. The daughter periodically cries out and rocks back and forth while her mother comforts her. A sick older man has to be carried in from the car. We meet neighbours, family and church friends. Most people stand around the edges of the room, and children sit cross-legged on the floor. Sort of awkward in a typically Malay kind of fashion.

We are asked to 'bring a word.' Be ready, in all seasons.

Chef chose to wear his Cargo shorts and a tank-top. A culturally dumb choice. Pastor Antony introduces him with a joke about the attire, and the crowd loves it. He probably tells them that this big white man can be trusted even though the tattoos, shorts and shaven head are not the standard dress code for pastors. Antony warms up the crowd as he can do so well. We see the faces recognizing that this is one of their own. He is loud, direct and engaging. He translates the message that Chef shares. At the conclusion, we pray for all those that come forward for a blessing while the songs from the beginning repeat. We feel welcome and respected despite the tatts and our whiteness.

We worship. We pray. We eat Bee Hoon. And the jelly cups.

As we depart, the woman, who had demonstrated such disturbing behaviour, motions to me by patting her head. 'She wants you to pray for her,' urge the others. She is calm as I pray. Fear leaves her just for a while. Within a few minutes, she is rocking and screaming, and the host struggles to place her and her mother on the back of her small scooter to drive them to their nearby house.  

We pile into our car, weary after the service. The noodles sit heavy in our bellies, and I regret drinking three tall glasses of tea. The children are exhausted. The youngest boy, Jordan, has been coughing all night. He doesn't seem well. Already the life of service and ministry is being built into the young boys. They don't complain.

Our friends drop us at a huge McDonald's near their home in Penang. I had suggested stopping there for the free Wi-Fi. This causes confusion. Why here? Do you want fries? A thick shake? No, I just want to get home now! I need the Wi-Fi so I can call an Uber to get us back to our hotel. Everyone is cranky with me, including Chef. I can’t see the point of Antony driving us 45 minutes out of his way with a sick child. It is already after 1 a.m. I get my way and Hännes and I Uber back to Gurney Drive.

We enter our hotel at about 2 am as a Chinese wedding is just wrapping up. The gaudy Christmas snowy castle in the huge marbled foyer looks even more out of place than usual. Wedding guests in black tie dress wait for their taxis in the lobby, and the band is loading up a minivan outside. I am greeted with a sincere 'Welcome Back, Mrs Hannes.' The handsome bellman is sporting a red cap with gold trim, his uniform clean but showing signs of its hundreds of washings. His hand moves to the white gold buttoned jacket in a chest salute as he welcomes me and opens the big glass doors to the lobby. I wondered where he thought we had been on this Saturday evening. He probably imagines we were coming back from a flash restaurant in one of Georgetown's hotels, or perhaps we had booked a car and driver to go across the bridge to sample the seafood delights at a remote restaurant outside of Butterworth. How could I explain the long journey up the coast to speak to a group of locals and the noisy ministry time? Even I found it peculiar.

The lobby is cool and spacious. It would have had a sense of luxury about 30 years ago, but now the dark wood everywhere makes it heavy and dated. The latticed doors of the British-style pub are uninviting. We love its slightly off-prime feel, and the nightly price is excellent. The marbled atrium with a never-used grand piano creates a feeling of quiet and a reprieve from the still, humid air outside and the noise of traffic moving along the Drive.

The brown leather couches and the centre glass table topped with a giant urn filled with fresh flowers flank the Front Desk. The evening staff have their heads down, most likely looking through check-in data for the following day. It is a familiar and restful place for us. We have been coming to this same 3-star hotel for many years.

We are exhausted.

We are still doing this stuff. Acting it out. The big white Evangelists. After all these years and the prodding of the gentle ghost. After all the changes and the misgivings, all the re-evaluations, and the denials. After all the hurt and tossing. The book burning. We remain true to this. True to a message. Now it is many years hence, and I'd do the same thing all over again. The Bible remains relevant. Amidst all the damage to that book, it is a good read. The Good Book. Remarkable.

It remains to be seen how I will view this story of the long night in Malaysia, let's say, in another five years. 

I put my faith to bed that night. Washed off the daily grime. Moisturized with self-respect. I knew that by dawn, I would be refreshed and ready to meet the new day. The failures and heartaches are not gone but quietened as God does his work, and I breathe the cleanse of another night's sweet rest.

Pin the Tail on The Donkey

I have spent the past 20 years or so playing a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You know, the party game where someone is given a mock-up of a donkey's tail, blindfolded, spun around and around until they are dizzy, and, then, has to try and find the right place to attach the tail to the poster of the Donkey in front of them.

It's been a time of reconnecting myself to reality so that my spirit, mind and body can better synchronize.

For a large swath of my time as a believer, I was obsessed with this notion of 'you are in the world but not of the world .' I viewed myself as an alien. A citizen of heaven rather than this world. I was set apart for great things. I knew that as I was living and breathing, catching buses, painting toenails, and eating hamburgers, I was in the world. But, I was determined not to succumb to its profanity. Wow. What a trip.

Recently, I took time to contemplate and rethink the passage in the Gospel of John.

Jesus says as part of his farewell speech in Chapter 17:14, "I have shared your message with them, and the world has shown hatred towards them because they belong to you and not to the world. They are not a part of this world, just as I am not. While I do not ask that you take them out of the world, I do pray that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it". Later, Jesus commissions them to be sent into the world just as he was sent.

So there we have it. I get it. I didn't make it up.

I had attempted to follow this to the letter and live my best life in two partitions - two zones.

One, the world, inherently suspect and possibly evil. I considered the actions mentioned earlier as worldly, never sacred practices. The other side was my spiritual world of worship, prayer, mission and engagement with God.

I was forever trying to discard my humanness and wriggle into my Jesus clothes. I strived towards perfect status. I didn't look for places of connectivity. There was a dividing line separating the profane and the sacred.

Now, I have become so fascinated with the places where my humanness and my spirituality can mesh together. Indeed, that's the sublime part. Dancing and twirling and then having a go at stabbing my pin into the real world and finding my place. Enjoying the mix.

It is as if I am sitting at a sewing machine with different types of cloth before me. I am trying to piece together outfits that will not only be pleasing to God but also make my sojourn in the world more enjoyable and purposeful.

The Bible has something to say about patches - and possibly donkeys tails. Matthew advises in his gospel that you can't easily tack a piece of unshrunk cloth onto an old piece of cloth. The integrity of the fabric will be compromised. This confounds me now. The God that redeems all things makes my humanity and my spirit hold together despite the awkward joins. We are perfectly imperfect and supernaturally natural.

We can applaud, laugh, and cry as we whip off the blindfold and find we either are way off the mark or have performed the consummate party trick!

The patch is usually visible – only the expert seamstress can make the place of the patch invisible. Nevertheless, God sees the seam and delights in our attempt to marry up the sacred with the everyday things.

We wear our human garments as designed and our spiritual fashions together. A good life can make them cohesive and functional – and beautiful! This task demands authentic behaviour - to act genuinely and sincerely and have a shameless acceptance that people will notice the seams. – the tag will be exposed - and occasionally, I'll wear something inside out and display all the messy seams.

Lions dressed up as lambs. Lambs with giant pink bows on their tails. Elephants in tutus. Donkeys with no tail.

We are only human, after all. Right?

Selah

The Giant Pause – Selah

The word selah is mentioned 74 times in the Hebrew Bible, and the meaning has been a hot topic for theologians. I think of selah as a pause between what has been revealed and what is yet to come.

A moment of reflection. A meditative bench.

We are in such a time right now that demands a giant pause.  It offers pause to reflect on the past and to dream about what will be—our chance to reset in order to thrive in a future time.

Now that the shock of our new status quo has subsided, this is the time to ask some critical questions. 

What can I do from now on to flourish?

 Where can I find meaning and satisfaction?

What does connection with others mean to me?

 What counts as a good relationship?

 Selah

Who am I?

Selah

God is gracious. He allows for this breath. This selah. This tremendous opportunity.

ANOTHER VOICE

First light 

Covered by noisy blether 

Whispered defeat

Coaxing shy despair

With deceit

Take THIS pill

Swallow

wait 

Numb head

But there is another voice

Aroused from sunny sleep

To punch the darkness 

Slap the sadness 

Goodness named by God 

Wrapped in me

Alive, say, to rise again 

Returning the Smile

Imagine a new mother holding her newborn, just minutes old, gazing into the loving faces of its parents. The new parents coo, rock, feed, and smile at their baby, loving the child deeply from the very start. This is the essence of first love—the pure, selfless love that exists even before anything is given in return. It reflects divine love, the kind that is present before we are even aware of it.

This first love—this love from God—was there for me before I even acknowledged it; He was always there, loving me just like those new parents love their child. It takes a few weeks – usually between four and six weeks until that little one returns the smile. As parents, we just love that.

Like God – how he must love that first reciprocated smile.

 We would do well to act the same. Loving, caring, and nurturing others and allowing people to find their own time to smile back. Don’t force it. Like the mother, we win over those around us not with rules or dogma but with patience, kindness, and steady love.

Grafted

I am the Vine John 15,5

The greatest thing we need rescuing from isn’t the world around us—it’s ourselves. Left to our own devices, we become like branches broken off from the vine, disconnected and struggling for meaning in a society of endless noise. We chase identities that wither, leaving us restless and unsatisfied.

But Jesus offers us something radical: a way to be grafted back onto the true vine, to find our identity in Him. We’re nourished, grounded, and whole when we're connected to Him. The chaos of the world doesn’t go away, but we find calm, peace, and safety in the steady rhythm of His love. To be grafted onto Jesus is to truly live—and to finally belong.

The Prosperity Burger

Right now, we are in Malaysia. Spend any time in Asia, and you can’t miss how everything’s charging ahead—Progress with a capital ‚P‘. Building cranes dominate the skyline as new projects thrive, the food and fashion scenes are prominent, designer brands find their spot, neon signs light up the night sky —it’s all next level. At Kuala Lumpur airport, I spotted this sign in the women’s bathroom: "If you have an accident, let someone else clean it up." Big, bold red letters right above the sinks. At first, I just thought, “Classic Asia. Service is everything here.” Then I realized—it was actually an advertisement for a local insurance company. Ha! Got me good.

This same prosperity push was, and perhaps still is, a thing in the church. It blew up in the '80s, riding on the Word of Faith movement with big-name evangelists like Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland. I remember tuning in to Creflo Dollar on TV show, Changing Your World, on a daily basis for a few years. He was one of the go-to guys for this prosperity stuff. His message? God wants you to be healthy, wealthy, and thriving. If you nailed the "right" faith moves, prayed just so, and were super generous, you'd unlock those blessings. Material and especially financial success is seen by many as a sign of divine favour. Don't settle for less than what God wants to bless you with was the vibe.

“
Maybe I needed to dabble with the gospel of prosperity in order to even out my poverty mentality, somehow like gold sharpening hessian.


”

I needed to wrestle with the idea of wealth. I brought into the faith  a tendency to believe that people with money were toxic to my faith walk. I was a Mother Teresa lover, and it didnt compute that Christians could be wealthy. It just didn't seem to add up. I was seriously affronted by the message of the prosperity gospel. It reeked of triumphalism. ‘We got this’. To have everything under control is the drug of the developed world, and the prosperity themes of those Christians seem to tie into that. Scriptures like ‘I can do all things in Christ who gives me strength’ were often featured in my faith circles. I preferred the call to surrender all!  

This has been part of my journey. I hope I have found a balance. I still find suffering somehow spiritually alluring, if that’s the right word.

Day Eighteen

An uninvited Instagram post pops up, making you mutter, "How did they know I was just talking about my hair falling out?" The ad pitches a hair growth formula for men, starting with the claim that most men don’t notice their hair loss until 30% is already gone. 

Yes, we are masters of denial, often ignoring the obvious until it demands attention. The scale creeps up 5 kgs before we consider dieting. The cat is missing for two days before we start seriously searching. The laptop gets plugged in only when the blinking orange light warns us it’s dying. Like frogs in slowly warming water, we remain distracted, oblivious to the signs around us.

Back to the hair. My hair. Years ago, in 2010, I was given an early warning that my hair, my beautiful, thick, wavy hair, would begin to fall out on a particular day. On the 'eighteenth day after your first chemo treatment, your hair will fall out,' decreed my lovely, kind, funny, generous oncologist. 'In clumps,' I added with an almost indiscernible quiver in my voice — just so she knew that I knew.

It sounded like a line from a Grimm Brothers fairytale. A medical prophecy.

Hear ye, hear ye…You will be injected with poison, causing your roots to die, and on the eighteenth day, the hair will fall out.

On the positive side, she added, after six blasts of chemo and five weeks of daily radiotherapy, the hair would begin to grow again. It was grim, but I had already confirmed the news via Google.

Ever since that awful day of reckoning, when a small screen revealed an unwelcome visitor and his minions were inhabiting my left breast, I knew that, unless God performs one of his magic tricks, 'damn it, dem hair is gonna fall'. Both mammary lumps and a few wayward lymph nodes were the first to be sacrificed.

And the church family prayed. The prophets prophesied. The days passed.  The prayer team made a smooth transition from `Heal our sister Lord so she doesn't have to have surgery or chemo` to the 'Save Her Hair' campaign alongside Myra's custody battle, Dennis' job search and the need to find someone to take on the Sunday flower roster.

Day Eighteen came. On precisely the day my doctor had predicted, I held my first fistful of fallen hair. In a moment of singular courage and without premeditation, I summoned my second youngest child, our fourteen-year-old resident barber. I stood resolute before the mirror, playing an imaginary version of the theme tune of 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' in my head — Da Da, dada. Bring ye the shears! Standing in that ugly blue and white tiled bathroom that had seen decades of baby bath times, mirror-gazing and preening, Pascal skillfully shaved my 50-year-old head. The other kids, my adoring audience for this unwanted performance, hung around the bathroom door frame silently in fascination. And then it was done. The wait was over. What had been prophesied was now fulfilled.

Revealed – a head of spikey hair growth, soon to become totally bald.

They waited, my offspring of witnesses. They watched. I moved past them and walked up the narrow, yellowing walls of the bedroom corridor. I began to gain speed and lightness as I circled the dining room and the kitchen, almost knocking over the drying rack full of autumn clothing set before the bookcase.

I ran back to the bathroom for another look.

I shrieked. I laughed. "It's great. I love it."

The crowd breathed. She likes it. It's OK.

The pile of dark brown hair lay on the small tiles. I swept it up, buried it without ceremony in the kitchen waste bin, and closed the cupboard door.

It did look much better than I had expected. That evening, during our phone call, my mother reassured me with a smile in her voice: "I knew it would be okay. You had such a beautifully shaped head as a baby." Those simple words wrapped around me like a warm blanket, offering a comfort I didn’t know I needed. Whispered words of wisdom: let it be.

This death, offered perhaps a chance to get it all back. Chemo, a last ditched affair to save me. A chance of resurrection. Like Jesus coming and getting to the root of our disconnection. First comes death. Death in order to bring us life again.

The hair was to be the barometer of my inward and outward journey – the sacrificial lamb.

May bald. June bald. July bald. August bald. September bald. October bald. November signals regrowth. December more. January growth. My faithful wig is sent onwards to be recycled in February. The headscarves I swore I'd never wear are banished to the suitcase under my bed. By March, I have a decent head of hair.

The alchemy of cancer. The awful truth is told through the loss and the regrowth.

And, now, on my Emmaus road, strangers never recognize me as one returned from the dead. No one sees me as a survivor. The one resurrected. I'm so normal now.  My treasured secret. Like Jesus, I am transfigured—returning to life the same and yet different.

I'm not too fond of the word remission. No,to be honest, I hate it. My auntie asks me years later, 'Are you still in remission?" as if that is of comfort. Such a painful journey if it’s only for a temporary fix?

No, I rejoice in the resurrection, the regrowth.

So much of our faith hinges on the dance of loss that reaches out to the hope of regrowth. The sweet assurance of resurrection.

Searching for More

“But who can be bothered these days, with the kinds of gods, who would sucker punch you when you weren't looking or stumble in drunk halfway through Thanksgiving Dinner and demand sacrifices?  We want dependable deities, a god whose love you can sing pop songs about. We want benevolence, mercy, white light, guaranteed two-day shipping”.  *

 Anjali Sachdeva is right. That’s what we want, and when the idea of God gets overly mischievous and unpredictable, we turn to other things that might allow us to keep our spiritual Disney alive. We follow those who offer sweet poems that rhyme with ‘everything's going to be alright’ and show us angelic photos of their children doing artwork in children's church or just the look-at-me selfies in the mirror.  

I don’t have many memories of my childhood. The smell of a warm meat pie in a white paper tuck shop bag at school. The delicious aroma of the yellow and white frangipani blossoms lining the laneway on my walk (usually run) to the morning school bus.   

My earliest memory is of the sound of grief. John F Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963; I was barely four years old. It was just a sound. The noise of my mother sobbing.  

I also recall an April afternoon when I snagged an unexpected invitation to our eight-year-old neighbours’ birthday party in place of my elder sister.  Tanya was stung by a bee as she skipped up the driveway to the party. I was moping around, disappointed that I had not been on the guest list. The stung sibling returned home in tears, hobbling on her damaged foot. Without any concern for my sister, I saw a golden opportunity.    

“ Can I go now?  Instead of Tanya.”  

“No’. Said Mum,  “ Just run over and tell Mrs Davis that Tanya will come later.”   

My lucky break. I enjoyed the party.  

Ever the hustler - church ministry would suit me well.  

Mine is a story of going to parties and losing myself and finding and grieving and stopping and running, and innocence lost and then found.  

 I was groomed by privilege into the life of a hustler - selling right and wrong, hanging up achievement certificates, measuring ambition and success - which became only more natural and more accessible as one learns the tricks.   

But in that marketplace somewhere, I got muddled up like a toddler separated from Mum in the dairy section up the back of Aisle Five.  Lost. 

The child stands mute for over a minute or two and then begins the growing wail, starting with a quivering chin and ending in a red-faced yell. Fear and sweat mix into one as the first available shopper rescues the child.  The staff make an announcement. ‘Attention shoppers, we have a small child at the Service Desk who hopes to find her Mum. Please come to the nearest cash register so we can reunite you with your child.’  I must add that I am always the one who first sees these abandoned toddlers. It’s a curse and a gift, I suppose.  

But as adults, we don’t know who to ask - where the flipping information desk is, and if I find it, how do I formulate my question? I lost myself. Can you see me? I don’t even know what I seek.  

My quest is to find the information desk, announce that I am lost, and hope that someone will collect me and take me home.  

It might sound like fun as you or I search for lost things like peace, beauty, rest, practising the presence of now all the usual suspects of our time - but it is excruciatingly painful.   

I endeavour  to strip back layers of paint with a small, sharp tool. I have to do it well. I`m trained to do things well. So the scraper becomes like a scalpel in the hands of an oaf hacking away at the heart. I don’t know what I’m doing really.  

I expect that the discomfort will ease. The hardest part of painting or heart surgery for that matter is the preparation. This is just the preparation.   And I’ve always been this way.

 *Sachdeva, A., & Campbell, C. (2018). All the names they used for god: Stories. Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. 

HEARTBURN

A BOY FROM EMMAUS

A MEMOIR

Start the flow of oxygen

Pull the mask towards you

Place it firmly over your nose and mouth

And breathe

Sorrow is our grindstone, our teacher

Wearing us down to thin reeds

Then we can dance in the water with muddy feet of faith

Sustained by wind

By whisper

By tiny weeny victories

You were there

Didn’t our hearts burn

Comforted by companionship

A Road trip

Then running back

Running til we were out of breath

Heaving

Breathing

Damn it

“I am an Artist”

Gold plated mop and bucket

My art?

Mystery teases knowledge

Where kindness became the healer

Smashing Fear

Seeing not seeing

And didn’t our hearts burn

I dreamt you came back

I was laying down in Victory Square

On a grain-fed mattress

This time I knew you straight away

Unreasonable Hospitality

I am obsessed with the work of Will Guidara and his new book, Unreasonable Hospitality : The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than They Expect.  This New York restaurateur, provides a recipe for making customer service and the workplace environment zing with goodness. His methods aim at transforming regular interactions and setting a high standard for hospitality. It starts with listening and then following through with creative ideas in service. One of his sayings is we should be living in a ‘one size fits one’ world and offering services that make people feel seen. Wowza. I love it. Jesus works on the same principles when he deals with us. 

Suppose we work at increasing the pressure at the source of our compassion and see it flooding the atmosphere. Surely, we will have a greater chance of witnessing miracles. I am confident of this. If we linger on the outskirts, too frightened or self-absorbed to engage in others' lives, we will miss these magnificent moments—the stories that add colour to life.

People often find God when they're going through tough times. Our part in that transformation is a sticky point for me. The "how" of evangelism is a big topic. Minimally, we should learn to listen and become curious about the lives of people we meet. We offer people time and space to wait with them until they find their way. Too often, instead of giving people the space to rest and reflect, I’ve answered questions they weren't even asking. I don´t give enough time to think about moving toward God because I´m impatient for change. I throw everything on the table. God, however, shows patience and restraint. Like the slow food movement, perhaps there is something to be said for ‘slow salvation’? Evangelism is a service-based job. We are the waiters offering unreasonable hospitality because we care.

The Changing Room

The store fitting room scenario is one most people know well. It is quite a challenging excursion beginning with the arrival at the Fitting Room desk. An assistant appears from the back somewhere, distracted with the twenty or more plastic hangers she is trying to balance on one arm.  She greets you pleasantly, 'How many are you trying on today?' As if I do this every day?  Like I'm a regular at trying on things. As if I'm ordering my regular Café Misto with almond milk.

 I have three items.

She is trained to count them herself, so even though I tell her I have three garments over my arm, she checks.

OK, one, two, three

Cubicle Number Six. She hands me a giant plastic orange Number Three. Like huge. Maybe people steal the tags ?
I enter the cubicle, hoping the lighting is flattering and the mirror has been adjusted to make everyone look thinner. It benefits both the store and me. I've already spotted a jumpsuit left by a previous customer behind the door. It looks promising, so I try it on first. What do I have to lose? And so the struggle begins. The jumpsuit, seemingly made for an ultra petite mechanic or astronaut, turns into an exercise in sweat. Right off the bat, I'm losing. The first pair of pants won't even make it up to my thighs, and garments lie in a puddle at my feet. I regret wearing my black and white sneakers, which make everything look odd. I have to summon a couture imagination that I simply don't possess.

About five minutes into the routine, I start dreading the task of turning all the items right-side out and getting them back on hangers. Nothing fits, and I feel ugly. It's like a furnace in here. The only relief I feel is that the cubicle assistant hasn't come to check on my wellbeing. I've been spared the quintessential "How are you doing in there? Need anything?"

I exit, handing the load to the assistant, before running back for the enormous orange '3' token left inside the cubicle.

To the friendly question,

“Find anything you like?”

 I mumble something like, ' No, not today. Nothing fitted very well.'  Now I'm using the ‘today’ word like I will be back again tomorrow!

I scurry off. Finding the nearest exit to breathe in some fresh air.

Finding a faith that fits is equally challenging.  Over the years, you gather up possible faith garments that may be a good spiritual fit. One day you get serious about determining what might be a path to God. You enter a well-lit church. Ready to test the sizing.

I entered a church over thirty years ago, assuming nothing would fit. I was accompanying Master Chef, hoping he would find an outfit to energize his resolve to quit drinking. Nothing else had worked, so maybe God could give him a nudge into sobriety. I thought my cynicism and baggage would act as a vaccine against any possible spiritual predators.

So when it suddenly and surprisingly became an intimate experience, in my own dressing room, I was shocked.

 It was a fitting room experience - awkward, messy - but I made a good purchase. I’m still wearing the faith outfit over 30 years later.

Doubt

Doubt often poses age-old questions: "What if?" "What happens when?" "Maybe?" However, doubt serves a purpose by prompting us to pause and reassess.

Since childhood, we've been urged, "Don't just stand there. Do something!" But now, perhaps God can only capture our attention when we pause. It's like a parent wanting to have a serious conversation with their child, who is constantly glued to their phone. She seems immune to danger and engrossed in other things. Only when the child finds herself in a place of weakness does she run to the father.

Sometimes, God needs to take away our phone. This disorientates us. He does this to truly connect and cause us to run to him. He longs for that!

So, faith hack, embrace the now, cultivate questions and lose the ‚phone‘.

easter cadence

Life, from my perspective, seems to be a story of getting and losing and finding and getting stung and stopping and running and hustling and losing again. It is a rotating drama as we catch the waves of goodness and grief. The best lives are those that can manage that rhythm.

My narrative is not a sob story at all. Born into privilege, my radical faith conversion in my late 20s was just a lucky break. Right place at the right time. Brightly lit neon lights. Many of our narratives have peaks and troughs and meander through various traditions, practices and philosophies. Mine is no different. The questions I ask are the same as everybody else’s: Who am I? And who is God? What is this life all about?  I have been interested in things of the spirit for my whole life.

Our mostly mundane stories,  complete with a mix of the divine and the human, of religion and spirituality, exhibit the longing of hearts desperate to find significance and an adult home.

The Bible tells us that what we sow must first die in order to bring forth life. John 12:24. Paul, in his message to the Corinthians, later acknowledges that this sort of thinking is considered foolish. He says that 'Jews demand signs and the Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.'

In a world looking for the serum for eternal beauty and long life, to preach denial and death is indeed foolish. But undeniably, there is a movement of loss and renewal at work in our lives. The best of us can hold this together in our minds and emotions. For others, it can never be reconciled and is a constant challenge and worry. To be alive means to surrender to the inevitability of this cadence. 

God could have gifted us with an innate faith at the moment of birth, perhaps as a sixth sense, but instead, He deemed that we would have to seek it. Through Jesus, He made it much easier to make that decision, but even that's debatable.

When spotting an old boyfriend across the room at a party, there are typically two feelings: relief with a smug 'I dodged a bullet' wink or a more whimsical thought it could somehow have worked out. Similarly, reflecting on our faith journeys often brings either cringe-worthy moments, regret, a sense of loss, or memories of how better it was when I was a child or fresh in faith. Imagine taking an emotional inventory of all the people who attend a church service only once a year—perhaps Easter or Christmas. Seeing that old love or nemesis on the altar. The polygraph readings would be all over the page! 

 For me, it became a sense of loss. It became about reclaiming lost ground—lost love, lost innocence, lost potential. Memories of how it felt to be newly in love with Jesus were hard to reconcile with the mature and scrutinized faith of my latter years. This dissonance troubled me.

Yet, now I feel more expectant, hopeful, and perhaps, more faithful. It's been unplanned, unexpected, and possibly undeserved. I'm taking inventory and taking back some lost land.

A new Psalm - The Lord is My Pilot

The Lord is my pilot and I shall not want

When I surrender to his command I lack nothing

He makes me comfortable and secure in my seat either in the aisle or by the window - even in the middle seat he looks after me

He takes the aircraft higher and higher

Into safe air spaces and he restores my soul

He navigates the best way through the air for me - choosing the altitude that suits me best

He does this for his names sake

And even though I might encounter some turbulence which seems like the shadow of death

Especially then I trust in him as my captain

Then I don’t fear because I know he is in the cockpit and he knows what he is doing

His skill and his sovereignty

It comforts me

Even in the darkest of times when it seems like the clouds and strong winds are going to cause me to crash into the sea, He anoints my head and I feel safe

Because when I surrender to him, my pilot , his goodness, his mercy, his love go before me and make safe passage

All the days of my life

As I dwell in the safe place with Him

In the clouds

And as I put my feet on solid ground

Wherever he flies me, I am with him

Forever