New Things… Again…

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Permit  me a little latitude here please.

My “in progress” box on here has a dozen unfinished entries I’ve abandoned for some mundane reason or another. I’m struggling to focus and my mind is racing all the time.

Even more than usual.

Normally I try to focus for a couple of hours a week to write an entry or two on this article factory, but for the last few months – I realise now – I’ve actually been battling quite a deep depression.

Moving back to England last April was supposed to be the move that opened the doors for me to finally really get EWM growing in a big way. I had dreams of renting an office, launching a magazine and truly moving into the vision God put on my heart nearly 25 years ago. Instead I’ve found myself being trapped in an endless cycle of stalling and writer’s block that has stopped me getting things done.

I got trapped in the “you have to apply for a job” cycle, where I sent out my CV for jobs I’m qualified for, have experience doing and that hopefully won’t drive me completely insane.

It’s a small window.

I’ve mentioned my battle with ADD before in this blog. I had anticipated that getting a continuation of the medication I’ve used for about 6 years in South Africa would be straightforward in England. After all, it’s a “first world” country.

The problem is that the NHS is grossly underfunded, and the “requirements” for treatment have to be met precisely. To that end, the NHS sends out a questionnaire to establish whether a person actually needs treatment for ADD.

That’s Attention Deficit Disorder.

The questionnaire is about 15 pages – front and back – long.

I wanted to cry when it arrived in August last year. It took me five days to get through it because one of the problems people with ADD have is an inability to concentrate on things like 15 page (front and back) questionnaires. I sent it off, and waited.

And waited…

And waited…

And – well, you get the idea.

In October I called them to be told the form had not arrived yet, but I’d probably get an appointment in November. In December I decided I’d wain until I got back from my visit to see family in Cape Town (I’ll get to that in a minute).

On my return in January, a lot had changed.

hit the fan 2

So I called the ADD/ADHD clinic to see what had happened.

The form had never arrived – but (the helpful lady said) they would happily send me another to complete.

I don’t cry very often, but I actually broke down on the phone. The thought of having to go through 15 pages (front and back) again was too much to bear. The lady asked me if I was ok. They must get a lot of 45 year old crying men on the line who are actually perfectly fine. Then she asked if I had any suggestions what they could do.

So I said “Can we just fill it out over the phone now?”

She freaked out a bit – it’s a long form, after all – but then she said she just needed to get a glass of water, and we spent the next 90 minutes going through the questionnaire together.

Hopefully I’ll get an appointment in March.

But enough of the negative stuff.

December and January saw some massive changes for me, and in particular the beginning of an answer to a prayer I’ve been praying for 30 years…

Baby 1st scan

It’s taken 14 years of marriage, more heartache than I thought I could ever deal with, and some extremely expensive medical help, but a week ago we went to the hospital and were given this amazing picture.

I don’t care that it’s only 10 weeks this coming Friday. I’m going to be a daddy!

God has been telling me to pray for my children since I was 15 years old. I’ve never doubted this day would come, but I’m completely blown away that at 45 it’s finally arrived.

Now, however, the real test of my Faith begins.

While I try to do what God tells me to do, I don’t get an actual income from it (yet). Since my wife will need to take maternity leave, I need to begin earning an income in the next two months.

It’s a scary thing,starting a family at 45. Even scarier when I’m not in 100% health. But I’m doing it. It’s too soon to say if it’s a boy or girl, and honestly I don’t mind.

So things can change. And we never know when the change will come, or how it will impact our lives.

I started worrying I was too old to be a dad before Christmas. Then God reminded me Abraham was just a little older than I am. I can deal with that.

I’m still trying to work out where I am in regard to the “Dream Giver” project. But I’m fairly sure I’ve reached the Giants.

Ordinary reaches the Land of the Giants with nothing but his Big Dream. The first giant he meets is “Moneyless”, a giant I know we can all identify with. But his dream is enough to slay the giant.

I’m fighting that battle right now. This ministry is my dream, and right now I’m battling the same giant Ordinary had to fight.

I’m NOT asking for donations here by the way.

Just support in prayer.

I think we all need that though.

Perfection

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Perfection

The “Featured Picture” here I took a couple of years ago at my home. I grow my own herbs and at the end of the season there’s always something I’ve not used all of. That year it was mint. The plant flowered, something I rarely see as I use a LOT of mint when I’m cooking, much to my wife’s annoyance (she thinks I’m trying to make dinner taste like toothpaste).

I was sitting on the stoep of the house and along floats this bee. I never antagonise them. They usually die if they sting us, so I’m not worried about a single. It calmly floats over to the mint flower and settles down, collecting nectar.

It had never occurred to me that mint could have nectar until that moment. I grabbed my camera and snapped the shot, such simple beauty. And the bee, so perfectly designed to perform the job of collecting nectar from such tiny flowers.

I looked at the mint, it was suddenly a thing of such visual beauty to me, not just another herb. The flowers in a bunch at the tip of each stem, perfectly aligned for a bee to come and collect from them.

So I began looking at other things. This sunssunset a1 2002et was taken in September 2003 at Slangkop Lighthouse near Kommetjie. The picture is a little grainy because it was taken the old-fashioned way – film not digital. I’ve been to the spot many times since, but never seen the alignment of sun and lighthouse the same way again. The timing was perfect for the photo.

We live in a world created so perfectly ordered that we can predict to the second when an eclipse will take place, when tides will be high or low, and how high they will be days, weeks in advance.

Consider the laws of nature, the constants that allow us to fly in aeroplanes: gravity, thrust, lift, stalling speed. These constants are set in stone. A scientist can predict precisely how much thrust is required at a certain wing dimension to achieve lift and therefore flight, and at what speed the airflow must continue to travel around the wing given its dimensions to maintain that flight – the stalling speed.

Frequency of light and sound. 186000 miles per second, the speed of light is a constant. 1100 feet per second in air is the speed of sound. These are constants. Certain mediums change the rates, so different gasses produce different speeds for sound and light, glass, perspex etc change the speed of light to produce filters, but this is only possible because the initial speed is a universal constant.

Mankind is now looking at ways to get humans to Mars, presumably because we need to find more landfill sites. But the trip is only plannable because we know exactly where Mars will be at any given moment.

It is known when Halley’s Comet will be round next, and when it’s been around before. It has been hypothesised that it may even have been the “star” the Magi followed to Bethlehem spoken of in the Nativity story – the exact date of Christ’s birth not being known but the time the comet was about is very exact, and fits the general timeline.

Consider the mathematical odds of life. Billions to one against this rock floating around a star of sufficient size and density, far enough away that it doesn’t scorch the ground, close enough that the rays provide enough heat. All the other variables that even 0.0001% out mean life cannot exist. Yet so many choose to convince themselves God cannot be a reality.

I bet you were wondering when God would appear in this post.

The requirements to not believe in God are so much greater than the requirements to believe. To be able to be convinced that life happened here by chance takes far more faith than believing everything was created by something far bigger than we are, with a form of intelligence beyond our own. The arrogance of it is even more staggering.

To believe there is no God is staggering. Being convinced that the world and life is a chance fluke is ignorance of the highest order. I can’t explain the process an egg goes through to grow into a chicken in terms of the science behind it, but I’ve never met a scientist who could answer why life happens in that egg. We know the chemical make-up of the egg. We can mix the ingredients to the exact proportions, but if we put it in an incubator we’ll never grow a chicken. Life is not simply a chemical reaction. If it were we could replicate it.

The perfection of creation is only matched by the flaw it carries. Us.

When we rebelled against God we brought death into this universe. God responded by giving us Grace to counter it. The cells in my body replicate themselves and produce identical copies of themselves. We call this “growth” and “life”, but if the new cells are identical to the old ones, why do we age? Chemically there’s no reason for ageing I’ve yet to be told, although I’m open to comments on this post explaining it (as long as you use small words please, I’m a simple man of faith, not a brilliant scientist – I leave medicine and science to my wife, a doctor, who can’t explain it either).

An atheist is simply a man with no invisible means of support. What hope can there be in an atheistic existence? For an atheist, the purpose of life is to die. The end product is to return to being nothing more than a pile of chemicals sitting in the dust.

How depressing.

I may not be perfect, but as a Christian, my faith gives me hope. Hebrews 11 states Faith is the substance of what we hope for. It is the evidence of what we have not yet seen. How perfect that is.

God is perfect. Jesus is perfect.

We are being made perfect.

I’m a work in progress. So are you.

On a path to perfection… Enjoy the ride!