When life/church feels flat...

Life can be great can't it? We have all had times of overflowing joy or settled contentment or anticipation and excitement. Those are great. But to be honest most of life is "normal". A bit good and a bit disappointing! Some things going well others less so. Some things making us happy and others sad. And then there are times when life is really quite tough. Hopes dashed, feelings hurt, relationships painful.
All of this is also true of church life. There are times when church life can feel exciting, and a church as a whole can be full of joy, or have a settled contentment. But usually church life is "normal", and sometimes it is really quite tough. That can be true of individual's experience of church, and it can be true of our corporate experience of church.

For us as a church last year was really very exciting. Sending a missionary to France, appointing an assistant pastor, starting a new meeting. When new things are happening, and others are anticipated the whole feeling of church is really quite exciting and this usually permeates to most of the members. However when church is "normal" and there aren't a whole raft of exciting developments going on, when people let each other down, or life is individually tougher, the experience of church can be less invigorating, or even (dare I say it) a bit of a drag!

What then can we do when "normal" starts to slip in to tough? How should we respond? 

First I would say keep doing what you know. Has church ever been a blessing? Have you ever found help in reading the Scriptures? Has God ever answered your prayers? You may not know what to do, but don't stop doing what you know. You may feel like God has left you on the shelf for a bit, still don't stop doing what you know. It is not without reason that God has blessed us with his written word, a word that is "living and active". It is not without reason that Jesus taught his disciples to "pray and never give up". And it is not without reason that God has called us not only to himself but into churches where we can strengthen and encourage one another, "growing up in maturity into Him who is the Head."

Second talk to people. If something in your life feels stuck, go chat with a Christian who loves you, whom you can trust (even a pastor). Give them permission to ask you questions you don't want to face. Be honest with them about where your life is at right now. 
It may not be that your life feels stuck, but that church is stuck for you. Something isn't working, church isn't helping the way it was. Again chat to people, especially chat to church leaders so that they know. It is easy to go along as a church leader oblivious that all your hard work is not helping anyone, because it used to and no-one has told you that it doesn't any more! Stop your leaders running themselves into the ground for no good to the church! Be careful not to develop a critical spirit - that can kill a pastor as quick as poison. But don't suffer in silence. Believe it or not you are deeply ingrained in your pastor's heart. He will fall over himself to do all he can to bless you! So talk to your leaders especially about your struggles with church.

Third, and perhaps most critically, be thankful. Be deliberately thankful. Be deliberately thankful for everything good that you have. It is interesting how much in the New Testament letters thankfulness is flagged up. For instance Philippians 4v6-7 says; "⁶ Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
So often one or two individual things that are not going how we would like give everything in our lives a grey covering and take our joy out of what we used to love. Because this one thing hurts right now, everything else is undone by it. Conscious consistent thanksgiving reminds us that though somethings are hard right now, God is good. Every good and perfect gift comes down from above, and we do have so many of them. Ultimately we have Christ himself. Through faith we have the righteousness of God gifted to us through his death for us. We have his love, we are given his Spirit. We have a hope that cannot fade. So what ever is happening now, however "normal" or even painful it is, it is not worth comparing to what we have in Him.

However "normal" your life is right now, you have in Christ a constant source for thankfulness and praise!

Creation And Quantum Physics

Before Easter we ran our Sunday evening Connected series as "God On Trial" and had a good number of people come with dissenting views about the world around us. Conversation flowed across many subjects, but inevitably returned to scientific inquiry many times. I say inevitably because most of the dissenting voices had an underlying philosophy that was basically Scientific Determinism.

It got my brain going again on various subjects that I haven't looked at for some time. One of those was quantum physics. I have for a while been meaning to get at it but hadn't yet managed it. So I went out and bought Stephen Hawking's fairly recent title, "The Grand Design". Certainly quantum physics is a very interesting area of study. Stephen Hawking presents it very well, though I am yet to be convinced by all his conclusions, especially about history on a big scale. (I need to read this book a few times before I really get to grips with everything he says in it I think.)

Anyway, for all you big thinkers (and mainly physicists I would think) out there I have some questions which Stephen Hawking doesn't address, or if he does he just fobs them off as not relevant, or with an aside that shoots down a straw man rather than deal with the issue. These questions are beyond me to answer, but I am wondering if any of you might have ideas, or places I could go to read a different (but as well thought through) perspective. Here goes:


Do the observations of quantum physics on a minute scale (e.g. quantum buckyballs) have anything to say about God as creator beyond, "this is how God made the universe"?

Is Feynman's "sum of histories" really the best explanation for the results of the double split experiment, especially where delayed observation changes the resultant distribution? 

Is it really legitimate to say because an unobserved buckyball may have taken one of several paths that we can't be sure of the history of the universe? There seems to be an element of taking what we see on the minute scale and applying it on the large scale when the large scale does not behave in the same way (i.e. we know the path of an unobserved football doesn't behave the same way as an unobserved buckyball).


I am sure there are more questions to be asked, and my head is still only just starting to get to grips with all this, so the questions probably display my ignorance as much as anything. But if there are other useful places to go which will help me get my head around all this, especially from a Christian perspective I would love to know!