It was a summer’s day at The Royal Foundation of St Katharine’s in London, where our retreat leader was located. Using his phone to show us his environs, Steve roamed the gardens. The retreat started at 10:30am and finished at 4pm British time. Down here in Melbourne, Australia, however, it was a cold, wet night. The retreat started at 7:30pm and finished at 1am. It’s helpful, sometimes, being a ‘night owl’.
Screenshot from https://www.rfsk.org.uk/events
An exercise
There were many interesting and helpful aspects to the retreat. The one I wish to touch on in this blog post was the instruction to look at a photograph of ‘young you’ and then to write two letters, first from ‘young you’ to ‘current you’, then later from ‘current you’ to ‘young you’.
It sounds a bit like ‘navel gazing’ to this pragmatic person, but I threw myself into the activity anyhow. I had participated in a contemplative photography retreat run by this retreat leader when visiting the UK in 2021, and was keen to re-visit the experience from the comfort of my own home on the other side of the world. I had wondered how it would go participating at night, but using photos from decades ago made that less of a challenge.
I’ll spare you descriptions of insights that relate specifically to my story, though I did find the exercise practically quite helpful. Ask me more about that if you like.
Our timeless God
The perspective of our immortal God is what I would like to focus on in this blog post. He knows the ‘young me’ and the ‘middle aged me’ as well as the ‘elderly me’ that, God willing, will exist in the future. He sees us in the completeness of who we are across time and place, and not only as we are at this particular point in time and space.
He sees us as whole people with a beginning and an end to our days on earth. Our souls will continue forever (eternal life) if we trust in Jesus, and he sees that too. Furthermore, we have been promised resurrection bodies, (Philippians 3:20-21, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52). That will be BRILLIANT, to put it mildly.
Trying to think outside the limitations of time and space does my head in. But that’s the reality our God inhabits. The Apostle Peter apparently thought along these lines too, writing, “With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8 NIV).
God sees….
He sees the dorky girl with the long socks and the badges on the sash for which she had worked so hard, standing in front of a set of encyclopaedias which contained answers to just about anything we might have wanted to know at the time. He sees that girl just as clearly as he sees this middle-aged woman sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a heater typing these words right now, all the knowledge she could ever want and a more besides available at the taps of a few keys through the wonders of the internet.
He sees the freshly graduated, naive school teacher embarking upon a teaching career in the cross-cultural context of Brewarrina, NSW (1990-1991). He sees the idealistic Bible College student who would go on to ‘do life’ with some very special people in Asia on and off from 1995 to 2015. He sees the cancer patient of 2015 whose world had just been turned upside down, almost literally, as she relocated from the northern to the southern hemisphere once again as well as navigated a serious illness. He sees the older, wiser cross-cultural worker still striving to impact work in Asia from her base in Australia, while not neglecting the people around her. Who knows what sort of person God sees in the coming decades?
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.Psalm 139:13-18 NIV
Fossils
We were later encouraged to go for a contemplative walk, watching for that to which our attention was drawn and photographing it as a way of ‘noticing’. Some of the retreatants ventured outside into a British summer’s day. I, however, walked no further than the bookcase, perhaps two feet from my desk … it was, after all, cold, wet and dark outside.
What caught my eye was rocks … specifically small rocks that I had brought back from the Jurassic Coast of the UK in 2021. These rocks contain tiny, tiny fossils. (I also saw there in Lyme Regis, England, magnificent big rocks that I would LOVE to have brought back and displayed in my backyard, but alas…..)
Tiny marine worms or fish or snails or other creatures lived then died in some sort of cataclysmic upheaval … perhaps a worldwide flood? In any case, their bodies are long gone but the imprint they made remains in and on these rocks, pictured above and below.
What of my life? What of our lives? I don’t expect that people will remember me beyond a generation or so after I’m gone, but am I leaving an imprint of any sort? I don’t care whether or not my name is attached to it, but I’d like to ‘make a difference’ and especially so in God’s kingdom work in a particular part of the world.
Motivated
I came away from the exercise freshly motivated to throw myself into academic research. “Writing that changes the world,” is how my supervisor put it some time back, inspiring me no end. Being re-motivated through this exercise at the start of a new semester was helpful … very helpful.
I’m no Leonardo da Vinci, whose legacy is extraordinary. I’m just an ordinary woman. Though I cope okay in our modern hyper-connected world, inside I’m still that uniformed girl with hair that never behaved (it still doesn’t) and long socks (no more), proud as punch over a sash of badges that crossed my front (long gone). Perhaps I’m grandiose thinking that I can leave any impact whatsoever? Nevertheless, I am bold enough to hope that I can leave the equivalent of a minuscule-marine-worm-hole-in-a-rock’s worth of impact through academic research. Am I dreaming?
Reassured
I’m reassured that the world doesn’t depend on me. I have a place in it right now, just as I did 57 years ago when God was “knitting me together in my mother’s womb.” (My overly literal mind boggles with images of needles and colourful wool, for surely he used vibrant colours when knitting me and not pastels, greys or browns, right?!) Yet God had been involved with his creation for aeons prior to my advent upon this planet. As he will continue to be after I’m gone and/or Jesus returns.
Ultimately, life isn’t about me. I’m very small. Minuscule, in fact. As the writers of ‘Lectio 365’ (a devotional app I often use) like to pray:
May I know grace to embrace my own finite smallness
in the arms of God’s infinite greatness.Peter Grieg, from ‘A Sabbath Prayer’ http://www.dirtyglory.org/new-page-3
Conclusion
I’m grateful to have participated in this online retreat, especially on the cusp of a new semester. God impressed upon me the fact that my days are in his hands and that he has work for me to do during this brief period in which I inhabit this earth in its present form. The same goes for all of us.
It’s not about me. It’s not about you either. It’s about the timeless, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent God whom we serve during the days allotted to us, whether we be young, old, or in-between.
To him be the glory.
(Though I earnestly desire to play a tiny role in glory going to him….)
