|
onceuponatime
http://20six.co.uk/nimoi
powered by
20six.co.uk
|
chapter 4 - solitude
I think this is the first time I have felt at peace with solitude. 
I mean, not in the sense of time in the day spent alone - over the past year it has been so freeing to get to know my own rhythms better and to be able to make the space to be on my own without feeling guilty. But coming back here to Toulouse - I am still asking God why exactly I am here again when I have some not-so-good memories of the place - it is strange to realise how much has changed. It's not like I suddenly don't need people any more after learning the value of church and community all year, it's not like I don't miss those who I am normally around. But there's something oddly good and alive about this time, especially this week where mostly, I really am on my own, on the roam in Toulouse.
I think it's like pulling off a plaster, solitude. You suddenly come into raw contact with the real world, after not realising you had been cocooned by a buffer layer. You become more aware of your needs and the things you have come (perhaps wrongly) to depend upon. You realise how much you value and need the people who are important in your life and you realise your love for them more clearly. You face your own bad habits more starkly, and what you are like to be around! If you are me, your overanalytical and thinkadelic tendencies can go a little haywire and have to be curbed sometimes. You are more open to passersby and to the unexpected. You notice thousands of tiny things that you normally might not notice. Conclusion: not an easy thing but solitude, like fasting, I think is vital in small doses to find balance and to make room for God to speak and change us. Big up to my brother the monk... who absconded in the night for a week to pray and fast after feeling stuck in a rut. Worried mum to death and drank out of a fertiliser tank so not necessarily entirely recommendable, but I think a definite leap in the right direction for him.
Somebody kick me if I haven't 'retreated' for a while and am getting stale...
|
29.7.05 22:46
|
|
chapter 5 - nomad
nomad noun a member of a people who have no permanent home but move about according to the seasons nomadic adjective mobile, nomadic, peregrine, roving, wandering (of groups of people) tending to travel and change settlements
frequently; "a restless mobile society"; "the nomadic habits of the
Bedouins"; "believed the profession of a peregrine typist would have a
happy future"; "wandering tribes"
A few years ago, I randomly (I thought) chose the screen name
'wanderingnomad.' It stuck in my head, and now comes back again and
again. Every time I hear the word it sends a shiver down my spine. People who write their addresses in pencil... mobile like the wind... slaves of the hurting and the dirty and the dying... that's what I long for - for me, for us. Not to be anchored in a place or gelled into a cultural box, not to be fixed into a social hierarchy or cemented into stasis by time, money and commitments, but FREE to move as God speaks.
A people who belong to the nations. A church without walls. Walking
into dangerous places and 'the valley of the shadow of death' but not
fearing evil because God is with us. Leaving our loved ones and taking
up our cross to follow him because He is worth it... I hear stories of the bedouins, of Afghan nomads and Somalian tribesand I like to dream one day I'll be there, listening to them tell their stories. I am not sure but I think that I will never have a permanent home. A nomadic mssion maybe - I think some of us are going to go back from Bristol with refugees from all over the world to their homelands, and gateway cities thousands of miles apart are going to be opened up by this international traffic.
But most of all my dream is that we, our generation would let the nomadic, cross cultural 'restless and mobile' spirit of God infect us
to 'move about according to the seasons' ourselves. In the beginning he chose a nomadic people; God chose a nomad without roots or hope or a future, and he gave him and his descendants a Name and an inheritance. All Abraham had to do was to listen to God, obey him, and GO, and God used him mightily to bless the world. Now he's calling us again, as he has through every generation, to stand up and be counted as his people, his nation; to be ready to move and leave all that we know, for the sake of being a light to the generations to come and the nations of the world. Same mission;new generation.
|
29.7.05 23:24
|
|
|
