Something else I have realised is that anytime anyone tells a story or recounts an incident, you get the highlights, increasingly our world has become a selection of peoples’ highlights reels. Someone said to me recently “If it didn’t appear on social media, did it really happen?”.
Listening to a phycologist on radio 4 the other week (I’m nearly 50 so radio 4 is increasingly becoming appropriate to my stage of life) she said the problem with instagram was that we end up comparing our lives to someone else’s highlight reel.
This of course leads me to think about my old blog, the book I wrote Gatecrashing or my friends Pete’s book Dirty Glory and how they present highlights of otherwise mundane and normal lives. Of course we need stories and testimonies to inspire, build faith and challenge the status quo and I love a good read.
But there is something we mustn’t miss in reading stories and listening to stories and that is the gaps in between the highlights. The book of Acts is a great example - there are not many verses that say ‘One day the apostle Paul got up and made a tent, and the next day he made another tent and the next day he went for a walk and made a tent’. In fact if you look at the chronology there are probably thousands of days in the bible were all that happened was Paul got up, prayed, did his normal Christian stuff and made tents. Throughout the bible people surely went for walks, prayed the same prayers in the synagogue, had meals, sailed on ships and just carried on with everyday daily life that never became a verse or a chapter in the great book. I would imagine they lived their lives faithfully and courageously, but the normal Christian life contains its fair share of activity that is routine and, dare I say, mundane!
It’s in the journey of routine devotion that the magic happens; people pray the same prayer for 30 years and one day it gets answered, someone prayer walks a certain area for 4 years and then an opening occurs, we try to read the bible and one day we realise we have read it all and start again. The greatest testament to faith is faithfulness, most days nothing spectacular happens but I chose to keep getting up and doing the same thing, praying the same prayer, loving the same people.
I would like to celebrate devotion more, it’s not sexy and doesn’t look good on social media, it can’t necessarily be captured online but it is what brings breakthrough, changes lives and grows the person who practices it.
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