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Showing posts from December, 2018

A Season of Grief

  There is one thing I have been most afraid of my entire life, I have had a fear of death…and not just for myself, for those who are closest to me. It’s not because I fear that there isn’t a God who promises life eternal in heaven or that deep down I don’t believe I’m saved. I think it’s more to do with a fear there will be pain in dying, and being a highly emotional person, I fear the brevity of my emotions. So when my sister was first diagnosed with stage four cancer, I was suddenly forced to grapple what I had long feared the most, the potential of loosing a loved one. The confronting realisation that all of us will die, our lives are in God’s hands, and none of us know how long we have to live in this world. It was taking an abstract biblical truth and then putting flesh and bones on it. A lot of big emotions ran through me on a daily basis, and at first I found it to be a very confusing time as my relationship with my sister was very close but at times complicated. Cancer in ...

Bringing Christmas in Focus; Mindfully Celebrate the Birth of Jesus

I’ve been learning a new skill of late: the skill of practicing mindfulness. It’s a skill that helps to focus a mind that is overly busy and distracted. For someone like myself, someone who thinks about a million things at once, (often ruminating about worries and fears or mentally trying to solve all of life’s problems) the practice of mindfulness is helpful. It helps to discipline your thoughts in such a way as to be fully engaged in the present. The model I have used to help me learn this skill is called Mindful Walking, a program put out by Headspace. It taps into the simple exercise of walking. Being a natural habit of mine, it is perfect. It begins with getting me to think about how my body feels when I walk; how my feet feel as they hit the ground. As I allow my mind to focus on this, I am drawn into the present. However, it is difficult to stay in this moment (thinking only of my movement) and my mind invariably drifts off to other things. When I recognise that I have wandered...