Here’s a picture of our DTS students who will be going to Rwanda and Burundi, from left to right, Alison, Meg, Rowan, Kellen & Lindsey:
Every few weeks I meet with a guy called Richard to chat and pray. This is something I’ve been doing for about a year now, but back in autumn when I started back with YWAM I started to neglect and stop doing. I really felt the effects of not having this accountable and prayerful relationship, and so about a month ago, we started intentionally meeting up again.
Something that I really appreciate about our time is the closeness to God in prayer I feel when we pray together. Have you ever had an experience of prayer when you can just very quickly feel the presence of God, tangibly taste and feel Him in the room? Well, it seems that this happens when we pray, and I always come away feeling refreshed and ready to face another busy week in YWAM Belfast, knowing that there is someone faithful and prayerful behind me and interceding for me.
When I was over at his house the other night, I think I was coming with a lot of baggage, there was a lot swimming around in my head, a lot going on inside, and so I wasn’t really feeling in that prayerful a mood. We talked for a while, and then we started to pray. Immediately I felt the presence of God, and then as we prayed, God gave me a picture of something that really impacted me.
I saw myself sitting on a chair on a stage. In my arms was a ventriloquist dummy, and through this dummy I was speaking to the people around me. I was using this dummy as my method of communicating with the world around me.
I thought about this vision, and started to pray into it, and God just opened the meaning of it up to me
I’ve just been very challenged by the idea of what image I present of myself to the world. Am I presenting this idea of “Tom Tate: Super Person”? I think it’s easy for me to outwardly seem very sorted, to have this appearance of being all nicely sorted out, and yet on the inside to feel completely the opposite!
Jesus had something to say about this where it talks about the two-faced nature of the Pharisees:
“You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.”
Matthew 23: 26-7
As the leaders of the people, the Pharisees were putting on this façade of perfection, and yet their insides didn’t reflect the outside at all, quite the opposite.
I’ve been challenged in my own leadership in not putting on this façade myself of sorted-ness, of perfection, because, the truth is (not that this is going to come as a shock to any of you…) I’m not perfect…not even close! None of us are, and yet, one of the hardest things for us to do is to admit our faults or our mistakes in front of one another. We don’t want to be perceived as weak or faulty.
This is particularly a problem I see in the Christian world. On a Sunday morning we come to church with smiles on our faces, and all pretend like we’re doing great, like the problems of the world don’t faze us, because we’re Christians! We like to think that we’re somehow immune to the things that non-Christians struggle with… Sorry friends, but this just isn’t true!
This is one of the reasons that ‘broken’ people struggle to come into the church, or are so wary of Christians. We scare them away with our “perfect” exterior, they think they can’t join us because they don’t have this idyllic life so many of us show to the world. If only they knew that most of the time, underneath this perfect exterior on show to the congregation on a Sunday morning is a soul broken just as much as their own.
This picture of the ventriloquist and his dummy has confronted me. It’s challenged me to not filter my words and my actions through my brain, thinking “how is this going to make me look?” because, you know what, this is just my pride, my worry about how people are going to see me and not wanting to look bad. Instead therefore, the challenge for myself is to live in this attitude of humility, acting out of my faith and my relationship with God, not this pride and attitude of self-promotion.
The author and apostle Peter has the following to say about this:
“Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
1 Peter 5:5
We are called to cover ourselves with humility, like our very clothing. The humility that we walk in should be as obvious as the jumper I’m wearing right now.
I’d much rather be known this God-given humility than any of these pride-induced fantasy exteriors I project to the world.
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