Catalyst

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We are going through retrenchments at work. This morning we were all called into the boardroom and it was made official who was getting the chop and who not. Fortunately I am lucky enough not to be affected, but various friends of mine were. Them going also means we have so much more pressure on us to perform.

As I left the boardroom I was feeling hurt and angry, and just generally disappointed. When I got back to my desk I put on my headphones and started listening to music as I worked. When ‘Jesus Blood” by Delirious played, something I haven’t listened to in a long time, the penny suddenly dropped. Why am I surprised when the world and the things of it fail to deliver? This world is not my home, heaven is, and until I get there I will continue to be disappointed. Buying into the lie that my job is my security and my career will fulfill me will never satisfy me. God is my security and only He can fulfill me. He made me that way.

This is just part of the journey of trusting Him till I see Him face to face.

I haven’t been posting for almost a year now, which is shocking, I know. I suppose I could say I’ve been busy, but then, nobody is ever that busy. Lazy, maybe… In any case, I’ll keep posting updates about what’s been happening in the past year (it’s just too much to cover in one post).

First off , I’m busy doing my master’s degree in information design and had to deliver a seminar in January. I did it about consumer identity and nostalgia in packaging and advertising. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia and the nature of it. I suppose as a result, I’ve been thinking about my childhood and what I remember as special or key moments.

Here is something I wrote about it: “There is a sofa in my room. It’s the colour of old bone and the cushions have grown shapeless with age. When I lie on it I feel the fabric pressing patterns in my skin. The sofa smells like me, my hair and my skin, since I’m the only one using it. Sometimes I turn on my side, press my face into the cushions and open my eyes. It’s like being in a cave, completely dark, with only a faint suggestion of light coming from the side. It reminds me of going on holiday with my parents, sleeping under a blanket in the back if the car, hearing the humming of the engine through the seat. In a way I think my whole adult life has been a search for moments like this, trying to re-capture the feeling of safety that I took for granted in my childhood.”

Do you agree? Disagree? What do you remember?

Just a few short words too let you know how I’m doing. I’m apologising in advance, this is not  a very positive post. But I’m tired of plastic people wearing plastic smiles, so either bear with me or leave now, your choice.

Firstly, I’ve now been at my “new” job for a year. It’s been very hard but satisfying. I’ve had to learn to work incredibly fast and also cope in a very critical corporate environment. I’m doing okay, apart from the fact that I feel I’ve become moody at work and swear like trooper at work. Not good.

Secondly, I’ve been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Basically, what happens is that you stop breathing during the night for several seconds at  a time. Your brain then wakes up your body because of lack of oxygen, although you are unaware of it the next morning. The result is severe sleep deprivation, resulting in exhaustion, memory problems, metabolic problems and also depression.  I’ve got a CPAP machine that I sleep with now, making sure there is continuous positive airflow coming through my nose.

I really hope it helps, especially for the depression. If I think back over the last few years the dominant emotions I recall are sadness and hopelessness. I’m tired of feeling like that. I’m thankful to God that there is something they can do.

Thirdly, what I’m having problems dealing with is that so many of my friends are emigrating. The situation here is South Africa is far from ideal and people want to make a better life elsewhere, which you cannot blame them for. Unfortunately, it means  that the people you are close to are moving out of your life, which is incredibly hard to deal with. It feels like things are falling apart.

Fourthly, how can I describe my faith life at the moment? I haven’t been to church in months and there is not much going on. I want  a real relationship with God again, I know he hasn’t given up on me, but I just cannot work up the energy to make the effort. Plus, my personal issues seem overwhelming at the moment and it just feels as if God must be so tired of me. Which I know is just me being emotional but it feels real.

Anyhow, that’s me in a nutshell at the moment. Apart from the fact I’m doing my Masters degree this year and I have an exam and seminar coming up.

This is a poem by Pablo Neruda, one of my favourite poets. Reading a poem of his is like entering someone else’s dream, or lying on your back, slowly drifting down a river while looking at the branches of the trees above. He speaks to a deep melancholy inside me. No-one else can write about loss the way he does.

And now you’re mine (Love Sonnet LXXXI)

Now, you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream.
Love, pain, and work, must sleep now.
Night revolves on invisible wheels
and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber.

No one else will sleep with my dream, love.
You will go; we will go joined by the waters of time.
No other one will travel the shadows with me,
only you, ever green, ever sun, ever moon.

Already your hands have opened their delicate fists
and let fall, without direction, their gentle signs,
your eyes enclosing themselves like two grey wings,
while I follow the waters you bring that take me onwards:
night, Earth, winds weave their fate, and already,
not only am I not without you, I alone am your dream.

It’s almost midnight now and I’m actually quite tired. I’ve had a mad day at work; two designers off work and two of us picking up the slack. Rushing to a birthday party afterwards.

I want to write about the party. It was organised as a surprise for the birthday girl by her partner, a photographer I’ve come to know very well. They’ve been together 10 years and they have all those little habits that longstanding couples have. They plan on getting married in December and want to have a baby soon after. I love spending time with them. Plus, they’re both women.

I was thinking tonight about what a “Christian” response should be to their plans for marriage and children. I think I know what I ought to feel, but I just know what I feel in my heart, and that is that they love each other. They will be great parents and will give a stable home to a child.

It makes me think about what Phillip Yancey wrote in one of his books about an abortion rally and the pro-choice vs. pro-life protestors there. I can’t remember whether these were his words or whether he quoted someone. In a nutshell, he said that on principle he supported the pro-life group. But if he had to choose who to have dinner with he would choose the pro-choice group.

Why is it that we, as Christians, are so hard to like sometimes? And why is it that the values that we profess, like love, patience, fidelity and compassion are often more evident in non-Christians?

It’s my first day at my new job. It’s lunchtime now and so far so good.

Everybody is being incredibly polite, obviously because they don’t know me yet. It’s also quiet, no-one talks to each other. I’m hoping that’s just because they feel akward with new person in studio and that it will change.

I am still not sure whether I should be writing this, but decided to give it a shot anyway. In order to get to my worry I need to tell you a little of my history and where I come from.

I grew up in Johannesburg and still live here now. Traditionally South Africans, especially Afrikaans speakers, used to be very religious. This was also the case when I grew up. Everyone I knew belonged to a church, usually one in the Calvinist Reformed tradition. My church, the one that my family went to, was the biggest one in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. It had the most progressive programmes and was generally seen as ahead of its time. To be a church member or to be on staff there was a kind of status symbol. Looking back I can see that there was a lot of pride.

After I finished school I lived in London for a few years and drifted a way from church. Coming back to South Africa eight years ago, I felt that I couldn’t connect with my old church. I subsequently joined a Pentecostal church that a few of my friends attended and am still there now. I felt for the first time that someone explained and applied the Gospel in a way that had relevance to my life. I could take what I learnt on a Sunday and apply it to my life during the week, trying to live a life where I knew God and tried to please Him.

A short time after I joined my new church, I heard from my parents that my old church was going through a hard time. There was a split in leadership, a big part of the congregation left, and there was great deal of disillusionment from those that stayed. To great extent they had to rebuild from scratch. Recently I attended a few services with my mother and what struck me was an almost tangible attitude of humility when you sit there. Their focus seems to have shifted from trying to build and maintain a church organisation to trying to find ways to please God. I think that’s beautiful.

That’s the background. Now for my worry.

My current church, the Pentecostal one I talked about above, has since grown into one of the big mega-churches in Johannesburg. It has programmes covering anything and everything and is known for it’s strong visual arts focus in the services. It regularly hosts international conferences and bring renowned speakers out here.

What worries me is that I see a lot of the danger signs that I saw in my old church. Sunday services are more of a discussion of postmodernism in a biblical context than anything else. The focus seems to have shifted from God to being a good organisation. The leaders are not available to the congregation and when you try to raise concerns you are ignored. When you do manage to reach someone, you get told that you don’t understand the vision. And there seems to be an incredible amount of pride about the church and its achievements.

I worry about my church. I believe you commit to church and stick with it, through the good and bad. But I find the arrogance and pride hard to stomach. When I attend a service and I see all the glitz and glam, and listen to the slick musical numbers, it bothers me.

Give me your feedback. Have you experienced something similar?

I saw this great article on Christianity Today’s website about why people ask spiritual questions. The article says that it’s important to look at the heart of the person asking the question, rather than at the question itself. 9 times out of 10 they’re not looking for more information, but relief from uncertainty, fear, and pain.

This struck a cord with me. I love debating and can get really stuck in the nitty gritty of some theological conondrum. Perhaps I’ve been missing the forest for the trees.

Click here to read the article.

On my way to work this morning I phoned a friend. We chatted about a few things and just before he rang off he asked “And how are you doing now?”

For a split second I had no idea what he was referring to. Then I remembered. I had asked him to pray for me a while back, as I was going through a tough time in terms of faith. The scary thing was, I had become so used to having an empty, unfulfilling faith life that his question caught me unawares. I’d started to see this broken spirituality as the norm and was only half-heartedly still chasing after more. I had settled for mediocrity.

This scares me, even as I’m sitting here writing. How can it be so easy for me to be satisfied with such a hollow excuse for a spiritual life? During this time, as I drifted farther away from God it became easier and easier for me to justify my sins and just to mumble a “please forgive me” before drifting off to sleep at night. I kept thinking of grace as the big blackboard eraser that made sure things weren’t completely hopeless.

For the rest of the drive to work and for big parts of the day this kept milling in my head. And I realised a thing or two about myself. I am a very proud, self-centred person. It’s all about me. My faith, my beliefs, my forgiveness, my comfort. Even the words I use. Words like “believer”, because it’s easy to believe. Words that change Jesus and Christianity into an abstract idea that you can either take or leave. But phrases like “serving God” comes hard to me, because of the humility implied in it, the relationship and the fact that I’ll have to surrender my will and agenda. All of a sudden I’m not that great.

There is a song by Steven Curtis Chapman called Magnificent Obsession. In the song he yearns for God to capture his heart again, to become his consuming passion. I listened to it again today and just realised that it describes the life I want, the relationship with God that desperately need.

So I’m thankful for friend who cares enough to follow up.