Today is Sue and I’s wedding anniversary.
On a warm sunny summers Saturday 16 years ago Sue and I were married at Crosthwaite Parish Church in Keswick. It was a fabulous day, but only the start of many more fabulous days which have followed it.
Sue and I have been through all sorts of good times and bad times – together. And that is the purpose of marriage – together. Not as individuals, but as a couple.
We have known what it is like to be absolutely penniless, and to see God provide.
We have known what it is like to experience child birth.
We have known what it is like to watch children grow and mature.
We have known what it is like to be hurt by those we thought were our friends.
We have known what it is like to buy and to move house.
We have known what it is like to see God move in ours’ and other’s lives.
We have known what it is like to make dramatic carrier decisions.
We have known what it is like to struggle with sickness.
We have known what it is like to have money.
We have known what it is like to have been married long enough to need a knew bed.
And many many more things we have known – together.
Every year about this time the Keswick Convention draws a few thousand Christians together. Tomorrow, Sue and I, Jonathan and Emily will be getting into our car and heading there again. Each year that we go it’s a bit like a renewing of our marriage vows because it occurs so close to our Anniversary, but also because it expresses in so many ways what Sue and I are about.
Tuesday in our church is prayer day. That doesn’t mean we pray all day, but it does mean that we set times aside throughout the day to pray. Personally I’m a morning prayer and join with a number of others at about 7:00 on some weeks. I say ‘about’ because this morning I slept in so didn’t make it until about 7:15.
Prayer for a Christian isn’t about sitting down and going through a ritual. It’s about a conversation between us and God. It’s about communing with God. As such I don’t just pray on Tuesday at 7:00, I pray at all sorts of times, most days.
I also try to dedicate times specifically to prayer during week. There is a catch-phrase for these times in Christian circles – “the quiet time”. When I first became a Christian (when I was 17) I soon got into the routine of ‘quiet times’. I’m not sure who suggested that they were a good idea but someone did and it worked – for a while. But over time they became stale and dry and definitely a ritual rather than a conversation. Rather than being a time of communing they became I time of guilt and regret. I soldiered on for a while, but eventually they became so dry that even the ritual fell away.
From time to time I would listen to preachers who would say that I should be making time for God. In a sense they were right, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to go back to the stale ritual. All those preachers managed to do was to build guilt. But God is much greater than any regret or guilt.
Over the last 12 months or so God has been showing me that I don’t need to feel any guilt and that the ritual of a ‘quiet time’ is as deadly as no ‘quiet time’ at all. What God wants is relationship and I am free to find that relationship in any way. The key message in this being ‘free’. There wasn’t a formula or a process; it was about relationship in freedom.
Since God has written that on my heart I don’t have ‘quiet times’; I have times of intimacy. I may be quiet, but I may not. What I don’t have it ritual; I am learning to find freedom. Since starting to move in freedom I have discovered that prayer is a blessing.
Sometimes I become grateful for things in strange ways. Today was definitely one of those days.
I am in Amsterdam, away from my family, and today a set of bombs have been triggered by a terrorist group in London killing over 30 people. This isn’t the first time that something dramatic has happened when I have been away from home. I was away from my family on September 11th, that time I was visiting a customer.
I can’t truly say why the thought of bombs in London got me thinking about war and conflict, but it did. It got me thinking that I was very fortunate to live in a country which hasn’t seen a major conflict for a very long time. I thank my grandfather’s generation that I have never had to go to war, something that almost every generation of British young men has had to do before me. I also thank those young men and women who daily expend their energies keeping it that way. Today’s event have highlighted what a tremendous job they do in a world which is not free from war and conflict.
I’m not here in Amsterdam looking forward to death on the battlefield and my family isn’t living in fear of nightly bombings. For that I am very grateful.
Events like today’s should make us realise how precious our peace and or freedom are, and make us value them even more highly.
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