Diaspora: Scattering the Seeds of Promise

In my journey more recently, I have felt prompted by God to not just write about the pictures and insights He gives me, but to also put them into picture form. The material for this blog comes from two such incidents with the Lord.

The first was reading James 1, where the word “diaspora” jumped out at me. Its root meaning is to scatter, and the painting is a representation of what I sensed. The second situation was making marmalade from some grapefruit I picked up from a food swap. Three small grapefruit were full of more seeds than I’ve ever seen, in fact, by my reckoning, there were probably around 100. As I have sat with these two messages about seeds, this is where I have landed.

DIASPORA – The Scattering

Many of us have felt scattered in the last couple of years. However, I believe the Lord is within the scattering, and if we are willing to partner with Him, He is using it so His people can take the DNA of His Kingdom out with them to wherever they land. It may be uncomfortable and not what we would really like, but it is time to let go, just like the seed in the seed head. To stay is counterproductive.

We may have thought we were blooming where we were planted, but this was just the beginning. That season has ended, and now a new one begins.

And the seeds we are carrying are abundant in number and extremely fruitful, “bearing one hundred, sixty or thirty times more”, (Mark 4:20). The growth in productiveness will be exponential. The words He gave me were that these were “Seeds of Promise”. Romans 8:24 also came to mind: “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” The promise will come because “He who promised is faithful”, (Hebrews 10:23). The seeds are not the end product, but hold promise for what will come (the fruit) and these seeds (His blueprints, ideas, new placements) come with a promise of great fruitfulness, if we are willing to step out into the new.

So, don’t fight the scattering, little seeds, but go out, knowing He is with you and He is for you, and where He takes you, He will provide. He is expanding His people explosively. The stretching can feel painful and scary, but in the stretching there is multiplication. And while you might feel like a little shrivelled seed, and while it might feel like dying, remember two things. First, our Lord Jesus said “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it bears no fruit” (John 12:24). Secondly, while we might be able to count the number of seeds in a piece of fruit, no one knows how many fruit are in each one of those seeds. His call to each of us is, “Go forth and multiply!”

Preparing the ground: A message for the Church (Part 2)

I often sense God speaking to me through spiritual parallels of what I see going on in the natural world around me. A little while back I felt Him speaking to me about the Church as I overhauled a section of our garden.

We live in a cottage that is over 100 years old, situated on around an acre of land. Although the garden is well-established, it ended up in disarray as the previous owner aged and was no longer able to keep up. It has taken much time and effort to restore and rebuild, as has the house. Although there are some “good bones” to it all, including some amazingly beautiful specimen trees of great height and strength, there have been many areas which ivy, blackberries, wisteria, “weed trees” - those growing in the wrong places - and a myriad of other weeds and pest plants had overtaken. Some plants lacked proper tending or pruning and have grown crookedly or in an unbalanced way. While we have been able to salvage many, others have needed complete removal.

In the past, my gardening had consisted of merely adding plants to fill the gaps just to keep the garden going and provide less space for weeds. It gave me little overall satisfaction. More recently, I have felt energised to make a fresh start on some areas.

I began completely revamping one of the garden beds removing many weeds and unhelpful or struggling plants that were in the wrong place. Much of the area had very little growing in it, and those things I had planted were generally quite unproductive. As I started digging over the soil, I found the reason:

The soil was choked and hardened by masses of tangled roots from previous plants long since gone.

It took a great deal of work to get it ready for re-planting. This was the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

As I removed new plants from their pots and placed them in the hole in the garden bed, which was now very easy to dig due to our excellent mountain soil, I thought about how much joy there is in planting:

Most of us love to plant, but how little do we enjoy the hard work preparing the soil for the planting.

In the past, I have often been in too much hurry to see the end result of planting without doing the preparation. I had really not put in the effort to establish a good environment for the plant to grow well. Sometimes I have put plants in inappropriate places simply because I like them, not because they are right for the environment or position. Subsequently they have really struggled and not grown well, or simply died.

What I felt from God was something of a caution, or advice.

We are living in a season where many are sensing a great move of God. Things are stirring and shifting and the hunger for revival is rising. In among all this, I sense what God is showing me through my garden is not only what He is doing in the Church, but also about how we need to cooperate with Him if we want the change to be lasting.

Preparation is an essential beginning.

For at least the last decade or more, there has been a sense for me that God has been pruning, removing, digging up, stirring up, relocating His people. It has came with the feeling that the time for us to get on board and work with Him in this had a limit: if we refuse to move, or to allow the pruning, we will get left out/behind in what He is going to do next – such an important part of preparing His Bride. Just as with my garden,

God wants a Church that is well-prepared so it can grow well.

I believe church communities must be prepared to reassess what they are doing, to be prepared to rein some activities in, to prune them back and decrease the focus on them. Others simply need to go completely – they are either total weeds, taking over a distracting from God’s work, or they are in the wrong place – might be lovely somewhere else, but not for what God is doing in that particular community.

There are other places where there are still roots from things long gone. These are more difficult to remove. They might be belief systems about “how church works” or structures within church systems that no longer feed anything, but simply cause a blockage and prevent further growth and sustenance. They may have once been good, but are now simply a hindrance to further growth.

In a nutshell, I believe that while there are aspects of our faith communities that are like my strong, beautiful trees, that give structure and form, there are many aspects of how we “do church” that are past their prime and are no longer functioning or productive to our purpose. They may have simply been “place fillers”, or even worse, weeds; things we did to look productive or fill our space. Some of them were things we just wanted to do because we liked them, or they looked good in another church community, but in the long run they have either had no purpose, or not been productive in the way we might have wished.

As I mentioned in Part 1, we really need to reassess how we “do church” as a whole – come back to our true vision and calling, as The Church and as church communities and even as individuals. Along with the previous questions, we might ask these:

What is our calling in the community we are part of and how is the best way to do this with our resources, both human and otherwise?

Are we prepared to scrutinise every aspect of our church life in partnership with the Holy Spirit to determine our best way forward to be the most effective we can for the Kingdom?

Are there areas of our community life that we declare “untouchable” – sacred cows that tolerate no reassessment? These are often the areas in most need of change!

How many apples in your seed?

This summer, lobelias have miraculously appeared in my garden. Their pretty blue and white faces greeted me by my backdoor over a period of days until I finally recognised the irregularity of their existence there. I hadn't planted any for at least ten years.

Obviously, these plants did not grow out of thin air. The previous plants left their seeds behind. But why did they decided to grow right now? The weeds have not had a problem growing in the intervening years - why didn't the lobelias grow?

Two things stood out with the potential to suddenly spark new life from these old seeds. 

The first was that my husband replaced the retaining wall last year. Soil was shifted around, turned upside down. There was disturbance in the environment of the seeds.

The second was that we have had an unusually wet summer - more water to make it more suitable for these flowers to grow.

As is common for me, I felt God reveal something, to even give me a promise through what I see in my garden. It has a few parts.

The first is that we can feel as though we sow seed and sow seed and rarely, if ever, see much fruit or result from our efforts at times. I felt Him showing me that even when seeds we sow don't immediately produce a harvest, they are not wasted, that they can sit dormant in the 'soil' for many years until the conditions change - maybe someone's world is turned upside down; maybe there is a deluge - and then, suddenly, the seed grows and produces beautiful flowers.

Secondly, we are not the ones who can make the seed grow. The season needs to be right, the timing and situation need to be in the right order. We don't always know what this looks like, nor what will bring it about. 

Finally, I didn't need to do anything to bring about this growth. I may get to sow seed, or even water it, but it is God who makes it grow (1 Cor 3:6).

All of this tied into a sense that has been growing in me over the last months. It started in Spring with a promise of greater fruitfulness; that the season of working hard for little fruit was over. We are starting to see that happen in the ministries I am involved with (and further afield), along with another promise - that it will not seem like work at all, but fun! Do you want to play too?

"This is my prayer in the harvest
When favor and providence flow
I know I'm filled to be emptied again
The seed I've received I will sow"

("Desert Song", Hillsong United)

Take a big breath, we're going deeper

When I was a kid, we had the joy of a backyard swimming pool. After learning to dive, my next favourite activity was seeing how far I could get underwater. However, I quickly realised that if I was too close to the surface I would pop up out of the water, limiting the distance I went. I could get much further by diving deeper, even though it was scary being too deep when you really needed to breathe!

Fast forward to more recent times...

One of my favourite songs of late has been Oceans (Where feet may fail), by Hillsong United. Singing this recently, though, I was confronted by the limitations I had put on what I would like this deeper to look like.

In many ways, my experience and faith have grown deeper. Doors of opportunity have opened and 2016 had many moments of joy and excitement; the blessing of being part of ministry to others where we saw God powerfully changing lives, bringing much healing and freedom. It looks as though this will keep expanding in 2017. (Hence my lack of presence here!)

However, in our personal life at home, there are a number of fronts where it seems that the breakthrough will never come. Some things just don't seem to want to shift. We keep hoping, keep seeing signs, and then...nothing.

As I have been seeking out what I need to be doing in this space and what the way forward is, I have been challenged anew by Father God. 

A friend had written that at the beginning of the year, she likes to seek God for a word that might be significant for the year to come. I thought that this would be an interesting activity, and as I wondered what word might come up for me, the word "Resilience" popped into my mind. 

I knew it was from God, as it was not something I had been thinking. And besides, I really didn't have a particularly happy response to it. After all, resilience has high association with difficulty and struggle, with hardship. I feel like we have been going through this in a few aspects for a number of years, and, quite frankly, something like fruitfulness or acceleration would have been more to my liking - can't we move on from resilience yet?

As I have reflected further, as usual more has been revealed. Looking up the dictionary and word origin, resilience comes from Latin meaning "to spring back" or "rebound". The picture I have with that is the idea of bouncing on a trampoline - even as you fall back on a trampoline, you can use it to bounce higher, to go further. I sense that this is what God is challenging me with: rather than just holding on, or remaining upright, to use those situations that come up in life to press back into Him, so He can 'bounce' me out further.

Which brings me back to the challenge from "Oceans". Even as I talked with God about those things in our life that are not moving at the speed I would like, He explained to me that my disappointed hope was because I was placing parameters around events that were not the same as His parameters. I was setting time frames and outcomes that I wanted, that didn't quite match up with what He had in mind. Hence my disappointment and weariness. 

So, as I sang those words, "Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander, where my faith will be made stronger", I felt a gentle nudge.

"What if going deeper is not all about 'exciting, life-changing stuff', but just about normal, everyday life, even the harder aspects of life? What if that is the deeper I want to take you?"

Gulp. Not the direction I was looking for. 

But I do have a sneaking suspicion, that, as with all the paths Father God takes us down, it is one that is important, necessary for my growth and development, and perhaps even survival. Resilience, the ability to bounce forward, in tough situations enables us to continue to move ahead even in the worst scenario. Just like my ability to travel underwater without taking a breath increased with practice, maybe He is calling me to practice greater resilience in life.

In further reading*, I came across two pointers for the way ahead. The first was the idea that if God asks me to do more than I can (or feel I can), when I feel like I am at the end of my strength, He steps in. The example was used of Ezekiel (from Ez 1-2). When Ezekiel was confronted with the glory of the Lord, he found himself face down on the ground. He had no strength to rise. In the midst of this, God told him to stand on his feet. He had no ability to do this, but at the same time, the Spirit came and lifted him to his feet. I am to have confidence in His enabling, His grace me to get through.

The second pointer is closely aligned. The idea is that we are often so focussed on the final outcome we would like that we miss the seed that is being planted and growing. We are so hungry to see the whole result at once (and yes, sometimes that does happen!), that anything less is a disappointment. Instead of being grateful for seeing the beginning of the process of change, we complain or get bitter about what is not.

If I had set my goal in the pool as three laps underwater from the start and given up because I didn't even make one, I would never have gone any further. By celebrating the little signs of growth or change, I gained confidence and was energised to keep doing more.

How much more would we be encouraged if we focussed on the growth and change that is happening, rather than our failures and struggles?

Staying safe and comfortable won't stretch me to grow, won't increase my ability. Re-framing my understanding of the struggles into growth means I change my attitude to what is going on. Going deeper into Father God can be scary if I am trying to hold on to me and my wants. I have to let go of my desire to breath on my own, if I want to get closer to Him. The goal and pleasure is that the deeper I am found in Him, the safer I am, the stronger I get and the further I can go. Time to take a big breath and dive in!

* Experience the Impossible, by Bill Johnson - I highly recommend it!