Right from the start let me say I am refusing to give up social media for lent but it doesn’t bother me if you do. At all. And if you have given it up then you probably won’t be reading this anyway!

Also this isn’t an anti “giving-up-social-media-for-lent-rant”

I have previously fasted from social media before and I found it incredibly helpful to put aside distractions and make sure that I actively spent time with my bible when I would be otherwise engaged. But this year feels different.

In fact this lent I’m making an active decision to engage more with these forms of media than I have before.

I have on many occasion struggled with social media. I have been told to keep quiet and stop tweeting so much. I have had to unfollow people who have been abusive and block people who I know “report back” what I say to others. I’ve been ignored (or so it seemed), unfollowed and misunderstood.

Yet it is a place that I have found the most beautiful friendships, ones that have moved to an off line level that I wouldn’t swap for the world. People that I speak to over Skype, on the phone (some a few times a week (you know who you are!) I’ve met people at conferences, over a beer, curry, spoken to some in Scotland, America (thank you FaceTime). I’ve brought families together and even have someone who I met on twitter who is, I hope, going to be a trustee of Our charity.

Twitter, Facebook, Skype, FaceTime, iMessage, WordPress, Path, foursquare even pinterest.

Through all of these various networks I have built up an amazing group of friends. This is on top of those people I knew already and had in my life.

And the thought now of giving this up?

I’m made to be social (although I am in truth quite an introvert). The father, son and holy spirit are separate and yet are one in the same. And we were made in His image.

Gen 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness

We are made to be in the likeness of God in His triune state. “made in OUR image”. To me this speaks of community with God but also with others. If we are made in THEIR image then we need to see how they operate. Constantly we see God wanting to draw his people together, Jesus responded to people when he saw their need and the Holy Spirit ministers to his people. People, people, people.

Like I said this is not a bashing of silence/fasting and solitude. They are important. But this lent I am choosing to engage more, learn more, be fed more, be welcomed more and enjoy more the company of my fellow travellers.

For the first time in a very, very long time for me, and the first time ever for Esther we went to an Ash Wednesday service. Firstly, for this particular church it was a break from the norm. As a baptist church I don’t get the impression that they regularly embrace liturgical practices or indeed silence.

Quite simply, I loved it.

The part that really stuck out to me more than any other was at the end during the Blessings of the ashes:

May these ashes be to us, O God, an acknowledgment of our wrongdoing and our acceptance of your forgiveness. In these ashes are our prejudices, our impatience, the times we have turned our backs on the suffering of others, our neglect of the environment, our indifference, our materialism, our greed, our hypocrisy, our envy, all of our sins. In these ashes of repentance are the seeds of our forgiveness and our transformation. For God always accepts us and forgives us. Through our repentance and forgiveness comes transformation. May God create within each of us a clean heart and a new and right spirit.

If perhaps, like me, you don’t go to a church that uses liturgy, then you will not be fully used to some styles of language, or a certain type of structure in worship. Quite often we can use words that spring into our head, or use prayers that follow a pattern that we are comfortable with or are just part of our every day language.

What I appreciate during times like this is the use of or pattern of language that I wouldn’t normally use. A prayer that is thought out. A prayer that challenges by firstly making me listen and then secondly makes you think about your relationship with your creator.

One of the first decisions that I had to make was a very sad one indeed. To step down as a trustee of KORE.

I had been a trustee since its early days and from the start loved the creative spark of the founders Matt & Juls Hollidge. They explored faith, culture, media and engaged people in a blend of these in ways that I just had not seen before.

It was clear that these guys thought differently from other people, not content to recreate and contextualise existing ideas but to think in an original way expressing sometimes complex ideas in such a way that was not just accessible but also made you wonder why no one had every done it in that way before!

Being there to support Kore as they developed was not simply a privilege but a joy and one of the most creative environments I have been in.

A very happy bi-product of this was also to have worked with some amazing trustees whom I now count and dear friends.

Thank you all for allowing me to be part of your journey and await with eager anticipation to see what Kore does next.

If you want to check out Kore (and I have no idea why you wouldn’t) check them out here:

Kore website
Unrelated Sources
Worth the ask
View from the office
Twitter
Facebook
A head in the clouds

And finally:

The Kore creative directory

It’s been nearly a year since I “put my back out” Or as I now know it by, discovered I have a bulging disk! After months of waiting I’ve now started to receive treatment. Something I am very thankful for. One thing that I have been told by my physio has been that yoga can be very beneficial to the back if done correctly. I.e. following some cyber character on the Wii fit does not exactly count.

So this evening I tottered off to the gym for my first session on the beginners yoga course. Essentially a lot of middle aged, overweight people trying to not only contort their bodies into odd positions but then hold those positions steady as a rock for a ridiculous length of time while being told that all our concentration had to be focused on our breathing. Cue lots of falling over, swearing under breath and a realisation that perhaps doing it incorrectly in the comfort of our own home (with the curtains drawn) on the Wii perhaps wasn’t such a bad idea after all!

Anyway, I was surprised at how my back coped and actually how good it felt after the fact. (perhaps the morning may be a different story).

On finishing I tweeted something to the effect that I was surprised how much of a work out it had been and received a cautionary tweet back from a friend questioning the spiritual wisdom of yoga. Is this something that as a Christian I should be involved in? Isn’t it rooted in something a little more than a fitness regime? I’m thankful for these questions that in no way were accusing me but simply poking me to think. (for that I am thankful).

The truth is that the only Christian argument that I have ever heard about yoga is simply that “it’s dodgy”. Sorry not good enough.

So before I troll through Thousands of interweb pages on the subject I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Is Yoga something to be steered away from with a perfectly balanced barge pole or something that be simply used as a way to strengthen the body?

1. Bracketing: Where we put aside our own beliefs, assumptions prejudices and expectations and we force ourselves to explore the experiences of the client as if the first time of encountering it.
2. Description: Where it is not for us to interpret the clients experience but to paraphrase. Putting in your own words their experience.
3. Equalisation: Where it is important for us to not choose what we think is the most important part of the clients story.

Anyway, this really got me thinking about the way we approach people on their journey with God. I’ve seen people messed up leaders who have an agenda to make “mini-me’s” or by churches who have their agenda to get people acting in a specific way of fit into their mold of being christian. So here is my version of Spiritual Phenomenology. What are your thoughts……..

1. Bracketing: Where we put aside our own faith, assumptions of where people are on their journey with God, prejudices of how they should behave and our own expectations of what they should become and we force ourselves to explore the experiences of their journey into faith as if the first time of encountering it.
2. Description: Where it is not for us to interpret the experience they are having with God but to Journey with them in their experience.
3. Equalisation: Where it is important for us to not choose what we think is the most important part of their journey with God but to allow them to discover this for themselves in the timing of God.