Treble for Northgate team - Sport - Dereham Times

Treble for Northgate team - Sport - Dereham Times

Secrets, Lies and Grace - Part 2

We even lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves that the day isn’t long enough for us to do all the things we need to do. But is that true? Isn’t it more likely that we need to review all the things that we do and measure them against the time at our disposal, rather than the other way around. God is an all-knowing and loving father. He would never expect us to do more than he had created us able to do. And in truth he doesn’t need our efforts, so he would never hold unrealistic expectations of us. And this lie becomes a stick with which we beat ourselves and that, sadly, we allow others to use to beat us with.

FB and other social networking sites are wonderful inventions but they do allow us to fall into the trap of another lie: if my circumstances were different, I’d be different. We look at our lives and our failures and weaknesses and measure them against the apparent successes and comparative happiness of those with whom we connect. And now our connection circles are much larger because they extend far beyond our geographic locality; now our circles include our social network and, for some of us, the friends of our friends. We admire their successes and envy t heir happy smiles and then we hide our failures and weaknesses, consoling ourselves sometimes with the lie that if our circumstances were different, our lives would be too.

The writer of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull once said: the worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial. We do this because we’re afraid. We fear we will not find love, and when we find it, we fear we’ll lose it. Our greatest fear is that we will never be good enough for God or anyone else to love us if they knew the real us. So we hide our failures and weaknesses because we think that these keep us from being loved.

The good news is that God will never abandon us. In fact, in Chapter 1 of Isaiah (v18), he calls us to him and he offers us hope. ‘Come now and let us reason together  ... though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool’.  I love the Daz adverts because I know how ridiculous they are. My boys play sport and it never ceases to amaze me that they make sports kit white. One wear, and that’s it! They will never be white again. And heaven help you if there’s red in the kit with the white. Yet this is what God offers us. He says that even if our sins are as scarlet, he is able and willing to make us clean.

And there’s more good news: a bruised reed he will not crush and a smouldering wick he will not put out. This is what our Heavenly Father calls us to embrace: like an artist He stands before the canvas of our lives and He longs to embrace and transform us. Grace isn’t cheap – it cost Jesus his life - but it’s free.

The challenge for us is to stop running around frantically because we can no more make ourselves beautiful or make our lives perfect, than you can teach an elephant to fly, never mind the pigs. But we don’t need to and we shouldn’t want to. For some of us, it means letting go of the secrets that have held us captive for more years than we can remember. For others, it’s about recognising that we cannot change those we love, much as we may want to. We need to walk away from the lies about our unworthiness that drive us to work more hours than God gives us for rewards that no longer satisfy us. We need to learn to walk in the freedom of truth for it is only the truth that will set us free. 

Secrets, Lies and Grace - Part 1

How do you feel about your life? I read two quotes about women recently: The first one said: ‘So few grown women like their lives.’ This made me wonder why this might be and that led me to the second quote: ‘Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good looking, good tempered, well groomed and unaggressive’. And this is of course the challenge that faces every woman – how do we learn to like ourselves when the pressures on us are so intense? 

First there are the lies society tells us. Society tells us that there is such a thing as ‘a perfect woman’. But of course that perfect woman is able to walk on water. Then it goes systematically undermining us and our views of ourselves by telling us in ways both subtle and unsubtle that we will never be good enough. Lady Gaga has been hailed us the cultural icon of our time. Her song ‘Born this Way’ encourages people to celebrate themselves as they really are and not to allow anyone else to determine their identities.  But let’s be clear: Stefani Germanotta doesn't perform under her own name; every appearance and performance is choreographed, costumed and constructed to the nth degree to project a pre-selected image. So, despite what she says, what she does simply reinforces the lie that we are not good enough as we are.

How many of you follow fashion on the catwalk – you know you watch those programmes when we look at what designers tell us we should be wearing and how we should look. Well, if these fashion icons are to be believed: there is an ideal shape for women and women are not good enough to portray that shape. 

Lea is currently a top Brazilian catwalk model.Well, Lea was not born a woman. She is the product of gender reconstruction – surgically changed from being a man and as such has a form created around the concept of the 'ideal woman' What about Andre Prejic? He is a young man used on the catwalk and for big modelling campaigns (like Vogue features) because he represents ‘the ideal female form’. How scary is that? How do you compete with the image of the ideal female form when that form isn’t even female?
Depressed yet? Well, don't be, watch out for Part 2 tomorrow. The clue is in the title...