Helping people make connections with God…

Captain’s Blog: Stardate June 2010

I’m over in Tiree just now, getting away from the Insistent the Urgent and concentrating, albeit briefly, on the Ignored and the Important. I find this (roughly annual) retreat very helpful in taking stock of the year just gone, seeing where we stand in regard to the Last Plan Made, and setting some personal and church targets for the next year.

Last time I was here, I got one thing right: the fact that I had planned to plan. (Top Tip of the week, BTW: if you don’t plan to plan you never get time to do it.) We had worked through our first Five-year Plan for the church, mostly successfully, and had therefore run out of Plan; both in terms of time remaining and goals left to achieve… with the one exception of church-planting. But I also got something wrong, and that was assuming the next plan would be a second five-year plan. What I felt God actually led me to turned out to be something much more exciting but also rather more vague than I tend to be comfortable with. It turned out to be something more like a wish-list/dreamscape for what I call “Phase II” of KV.  I haven’t felt permitted to put a time limit on the building of this phase. But leaving the time-frame open-ended in this way enabled me to open my eyes to many more possibilities than I would have considered in a five-year plan.

When I did my Police driving course, many years ago, the main thing the instructor had to discipline me to do was to “Lift your vision”. If you are going to drive fast safely, you have to look much further ahead than if all you want to do is potter around town at 30 MPH. (Actually, most of us would also do THAT more safely, if we learned to “Lift our Vision”!)

And that reminds me of something Jesus said to His disciples, one time, (Jn 4:35) in the context of doing His Father’s will, in this case having a chat with the Woman at the Well: “Lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white and ready for the harvest”. John goes on to relate, a few verses further down, how many people in that town came to believe in Jesus because of the testimony of that woman whom He’d taken the time to speak to.

Their conversation, which had such a life-changing effect on the whole town, was culturally highly unusual, taking place between a Jewish rabbi, and a Samaritan woman. It was an opportunity you’d need open eyes and an extremely open mind to see, if you were a Jew at that time. It also took place at a time when the disciples were away in town buying provisions. It seems therefore that the harvest Jesus was drawing their attention to was one of people who would be wide open to the Kingdom message, if only someone noticed the opportunity.

But notice too that He says “Lift up your eyes” and see. The problem is that they are in the “eyes-down” position where they can only see what they happen to be concentrating on at the time: in this case getting lunch! I believe we are all guilty, from time to time, of getting so concerned with our own agendas that we miss the “harvest”. This can include everything from the most self-centred projects, such as providing what we feel we need for emotional survival, to things we are definitely doing for God; like church leadership!

Paradoxically, “lifting up our eyes” seems to involve two apparently contradictory elements. In the first place, if we are ever going to get beyond a purely Reactive form of Kingdom living, where all we do is respond at the last minute to whatever comes up on our screen, then we certainly need to find time to plan. But equally, we cannot live with our heads in the clouds, so concentrating on our wonderful plans that we miss the opportunities that are staring us in the face.

The best drivers have a long-term plan in their heads of how they are going to get from where they are to their destination. But they also remain very much alive to what’s ahead in the road. Indeed they see it in the distance, long before you or I would, and are already making short-term plans to get the car safely through the hazards, into the service station, or whatever the desired outcome might be. (In the latter instance, it means that they also have a close eye on the dials and notice every detail of how the car is performing, but that’s another matter.)

I am trying to learn to plan like this: both to make long-term plans for the next phase of the journey, but also to keep a sharp eye on the road ahead and making good “driving plans” to negotiate whatever comes up. In particular, I’m trying to get better at seeing the unexpected opportunities that arise all over the place for the Gospel.