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The financial crisis continues to wreak havoc across Southern Europe, and the church in Lisbon is not immune. Over the past couple of weeks, we have heard one friend talking of plans to move to Mozambique, another of a job possibility in Switzerland, and another who actually moved to London temporarily last week because an opening for work suddenly came his way.
Young professionals are leaving Portugal in significant numbers as career prospects and job security become a rare commodity. In a small fellowship like ours that can have a major impact. At the very least, it’s unsettling. What about all the time and effort invested through relationship building and discipleship courses. Is it all lost. Well, “lost” is not the right word to use here, because we’re working for the kingdom, and not just for a single church. But you do feel a certain sense of loss, if the person you felt was going to play significant role in the future of the church finds he needs to move on.
But God, is also sovereign, and according to Paul in Romans 8:28, does everything well. So, where He guides one person in a different direction, He will always bring in others. That’s the way he works. Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at “Soul Psalms” in our Sunday evenings, focussing on the intensely personal struggles David and others went through and expressed through the inspired poetry of the Book of Psalms.
Psalm 62 expresses it well. “God alone is my rock... where I will never be shaken. To others, I may seem just like a broken-down wall, or a tottering fence.... but I will quietly before God and hope in him...” Talking about jobs, I’m so thankful that Colin in Southampton at last has a firm job offer. He still has some more interviews ahead of him, but if he accepts this one, he will be starting in Bristol in September. God, you’ve been good, helping him through this time of uncertainty.
I had to speak about Eli, the old priest, in our fellowship on Sunday, and the way he couldn’t manage his family. (We were thinking about the disfunctional family and how to be better parents, as May is the month of the family).
And as I prepared for what I was going to say the words “comfortably numb” came to my mind, that seem to describe Eli and his inability to awaken his sense of hearing to the voice of God. It’s actually the title of a song by Roger Waters and David Gilmour of the Pink Floyd, that quintessentially seventies rock band, (for those of us old enough to have lived through those heady years). There’s even a live recording of the most unlikely pairing of the band with Van Morrison in Berlin in 1990, Van looking like a middle aged grocer from East Belfast among those long haired rock stars.
Anyway the words “comfortably numb” seemed to fit Eli, who, while heavily involved in the religious business of dealing with the divine, had closed off his mind and heart so totally to the still small voice of the Spirit that it took the alive and listening heart of a young guy, Samuel, barely into his teens, to awaken him. Yes, Eli, there IS someone out there, and he DOES have something he wants to say to you.
Is there not a danger that we might somehow become “comfortably numb” also, in all the noise that surrounds us in our twenty first century way of living. Are we not always in danger of crowding God out with our incessant activity and babble.
The last few lines of the Pink Floyd song, reflect something I’ve often thought, that the “Samuel” in us, that spiritually alive component, that is youthful, responsive and sensitive, can drift from us so easily. Lord, keep me spiritually “youthful”, even in my old age.Help me not become “comfortably numb”
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look
but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
the dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGOTJyE5JPM
Yesterday we made our way out to the western end of Europe - the Cape St Vincent, being the southwestern tip of Portugal. The weather for the last two weeks has been a mixture of clouds and rain, cold winds and periods of sunshine, so I expected a wild blustery experience out there on the cliff tops, with nothing but the boiling sea and way off, somewhere out there beyond the mysterious horizon, Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean.
As it happened, by the time we got there, driving out through bare scrubland out to Sagres, beyond the condominia and luxury resorts of the Algarve, the wind had died down to a moderately easy breeze, and the air temperature higher than it had been. So we found a cleft between two rocks to snuggle down in at the world’s end and gaze out to sea. And watch the seabirds swooping down the cragged cliffs to some precarious ledge on which to perch, build homes and bring up their young. Oblivious, it would seem, to the perils of the foam below and their dangerously precarious position above the crashing waves below.
Makes me think about the lines of an old old hymn, that expresses the sense of hiddenness that the person who finds his rest and security in God knows, away from all the turbulence and uncertainty of life.
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life with the depths of His love,
And covers me there with His hand,
Fanny J Crosby was blind from the age of 6, yet managed to see with eyes of faith, and understand the total security that was hers through knowing a God who personally loves and cares for her. Through the course of her life she produced over 800 hymns, many of which are still known and loved.
We met George on the
very first Sunday we arrived in Portugal over four years ago. Or Jorge,
if you prefer the Portuguese spelling. An affable Afro American guy
settled into life here, married with two kids and involved in the life
of a Christian community out to the west of the city which we had
started going to. An odd job man, painter and decorator, always helpful
and practical, ready to do what he could for you, and when we’d sit in a
small discussion group on some Biblical theme or other, he’d often come
up with a word of deep wisdom
So it’s strange to see his story featured in this weekend’s magazine, “Publico” in a four page spread, all about a forty year flight from justice and the case for his extradition to the US. It’s a story, that would have made a great fiction novel, if it were not for the fact that for the most part, it is true. Here’s the gist of it. An armed robbery in a shop in New Jersey, in which the proprietor dies, incarceration in a US prison, and then escape from prison, involvement with the Black Panther movement, and then the hi-jacking. George together, with a small group of activists hi-jacked a domestic US airliner, released the passengers in Miami and took the plane and with it $1 million in ransom money to Algeria. The plane and the money were eventually returned, but the offenders were released by the Algerian authorities and went to ground, only to be one by one hunted down over the following years and recaptured by the FBI, all except for George. 41 years later they catch up with him in the unlikely setting of Colares, Sintra, and all of a sudden he’s all over the media
Interesting to watch how the media deals with someone you kind of know, and it makes me think about issues of justice and forgiveness, punishment and restitution. The US press paint him out as a villain who needs to come back and face the music. For the Portuguese he’s the smart anti-hero who managed to give the great super-power the slip. Nowhere in the media is there the idea that the man may have changed, that his life could now be marked by grace of God. That, ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, he now walks with the God who loves him, values him and, yes, who does not overlook the wrongs that were done, but decides, on the basis of His son’s death on the cross, to freely forgive.
“Therefore, there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus .. through Christ, the Spirit of life has set me free from the law if sin and death..” “For you died, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Romans 8:1, Colossians 3:3)
