But I know, darling, that you do…

Ok I just munted a Nick Cave song (which I wrote about previously) for my own purposes 🙂

But I really don’t believe in a ‘transactional God’, who keeps a tab with us constantly asking that we settle our side of the bill. I don’t believe in a God who punishes us when we get things wrong, or who sends trouble our way to balance the ledger when we sin.

But I used to. I remember thinking that if I did something dodgy during the day and then backed my car into a bollard that evening, that it was just God balancing the score. I’m happy to say that phase of my life and theology has passed and I no longer find myself waiting for divine retribution if I happen to give the finger to another driver in a minor road rage moment.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that this type of thinking is so prevalent among Christians, as it had infected my own life in my younger years. It was probably reading Phillip Yancey’s 20th C classic What’s So Amazing About Grace, that jolted my thinking from transactional to grace. I was going to say ‘karma to grace’, because I sense my understanding in those days was more based around a karmic idea that around anything Christian.

I don’t think my church was preaching a form of ‘karma’, but I somehow drew these conclusions – that God rewarded good behaviour and punished sin by meting out pain on the people who wronged him. The thing is if we hold this view (that God punishes when we fail) then chances are we hold the opposite view too – that God will take care of us if we live a good life – that faithful adherence to the ‘script’ (and that will change depending on the denomination/culture of church you were raised in) on our part will mean that he will keep us safe from sickness, accidents or even death.

How do you know if you hold this view? I imagine you will get disappointed with God if you lose your job, your marriage busts up, or you get scammed for a lot of money. God has let you down even though you did your part.

In your mind it sounds like this: ‘I was a decent Christian – attended church every Sunday, went to Bible studies, I even gave money!… and now this?… What’s the deal God?’

It’s transactional, just in the opposite direction. It’s typically a stance that younger Christians may have, simply because our brains are formed in a cause & effect world and we know that part of the Christian life is to ‘please God’, from which we then deduce that he should then look after us.

If you hold a transactional view of God then you can expect your faith to come unstuck somewhere along the line. It’s that simple. It will… And if/when it does the solution is not to ‘forgive God’ and go back at it in the same way. Trying to relate to God transactionally is like to trying to run Windows on a Macbook. It just doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t operate in that way.

What Yancey wrote that was so powerful, was the simple line; ‘there is nothing you could do to make God love you any more – and there is also nothing you could do to make God love you any less.’ If you have never heard that then read it again and let it sink in.

And as an out come of that God won’t give you a promotion in your job if you never skip a week at church, or if you sign up to help out in Kids’ ministry. Nor will he allow your house to flood, or your car engine to sieze if you drink too much one night when you are out.

He isn’t like that.

God is a lot of things, but fundamentally he is love – and he is good. And from him comes what Yancey calls scandalous grace. When you genuinely encounter this God and his unrestrained grace, you will no longer even see the transactional God.

It’s an interesting time to be making any kind of observation or declaration on social issues.

I literally haven’t had time to offer my informed and distilled two cents worth on all that is transpiring in the world – and there is a LOT going on. But what I’m observing is people cancelled, fired, reprimanded or otherwise sanctioned for having opinions that are counter to the party line of their workplace or tribe. And then there are those asked not to comment either way on issues that are contentious – best not offend anyone at all…

This morning a well known local Christian leader (Peter Lyndon James) wrote that he found himself with no choice but to resign because his voice on immigration appears to be at odds with his role as a CEO of Shalom House. Of course there was the cancelling of Jimmy Kimmel’s show for his comments on Charlie Kirk and there have been several other incidents.

It’s an interesting challenge, choosing how and when to use your voice for what purpose – and at what cost… 

I’ve never held back on this blog, nor have I felt constrained by any entity whose reputation as an organisation may be tarnished by my views, and it’s a line I intend to keep holding into the future. If I ever find myself with an opportunity for employment again in a larger/diverse organisation it may need to come with the condition that my personal opinions are not going to be restrained because of my involvement. No doubt there would be some employers and orgs unwilling to take that risk.

I should clarify that this doesn’t make me unaccountable – just not reportable to someone who controls my salary. I do listen to push back from friends and ministry colleagues who may not share my opinions and when I feel like I’m wrong I try to correct it. 

All that said it feels like we are increasingly living in a polarised world where it is difficult to hold and then present a nuanced point of view on contemporary issues. And I hesitate to speak as I don’t want to get dragged into the mud of other people’s wars and cast as ‘one of them’ or ‘one of those’ if I am neither.’.

I do hold opinions on all current events – drawn from what I’d hope is a wide spread of sources – but I sense were I to express them I would end up in the same debates I see festering on various friends FB pages and blogs. I’m not convinced much of it is productive.

I’ve also been writing for long enough now to know that my immediate response isnt always my best response. But perhaps one of my biggest concerns is around the lack of space to dissent and the suppression of unpopular views. I have always believed ideas stand or fall on their own merits. But at the moment in parts of the world it is the ‘left’ suppressing dissent while in other parts it seems the ‘right’ is now doing the same.

My interest in this is partly for its own sake, but also for how we form and hold communities of faith in the middle of the polarisation. It will not serve the world for us to retreat into ‘leftie churches’ and ‘right wing churches ‘. There are Christians living at all places on the political spectrum and if we only listen to like minded voices then we will only be further apart. That said it takes great wisdom to lead in this current climate. I’m musing on how we speak into the situation in different types of communities – large and regional or small and local. Each one brings a different tension into the communication process and the hope for peace and acceptance of difference 

(Anyway, maybe someone will instead castigate me for not taking a visible and firm stance on current issues!)

A few weeks back someone came up to me after I’d be teaching in their church and said ‘you’re Sam’s dad right?’ I said ‘yeah.’

He said ‘can I tell you about a moment I had with Sam?’

My heart lit up. Of course! Tell me… And he shared a story of meeting Sam at the local skateboard bowl, and thinking he was a bit crazy because he was immediately dropping in on the steepest section of the bowl with no (apparent) fear.

‘Really?…’ I said. I hadn’t seen Sam skate for a while and the last time he wasn’t in that kinda zone.

‘Yeah… we were a bit worried for him. He was just really going for it!’

I can’t remember where the conversation went from there, but I do remember feeling a real sense of joy simply because someone had chosen to remember him.

After 18 months I imagine some folks aren’t sure what you should say to us or Ellie, or Cosi. Do we talk about Sam? Do we ask about how we are going? Will that cause more pain?

Is it best just to say nothing and allow us to raise it?

Prior to Sam’s death I would have been one of those people wanting to care, but not knowing how to jump in, so then just doing nothing and hoping someone else would have the conversation. What I’ve learnt is that I really value my friends who keep Sam in the conversation and who ask genuine questions about how we are going. We have been blessed with some great people in our life who have stayed in touch and not let him or us be forgotten.

I just spent half the day doing some brick paving in the back yard and 18 months later the thought running through my mind was just a loop of ‘Sam is gone… how did this happen?…’ or some variation of these. I feel like he is ever present in my thoughts – probably more than he was when he was alive even. And while I feel like I’m in an ok place with accepting his death, I certainly don’t ever want to move on – or have him dropped out of the conversation.

If you’re a person who wants to walk with us and keep his memory present (not every conversation obviously – that would be annoying!) then here are a few things I have observed that have been really valuable to me.

• friends just checking in and offering a coffee just to catch up and hear how I’m going. It’s clear they want to know what’s happening for me in regards to Sam so I feel permission to open up and be as ‘full frontal’ as I want or need to be.
• texts and messages sometimes on significant days eg father’s day or his birthday, or even just random texts to say they are thinking of me.
• people who are willing to shift the conversation to Sam at any time and talk about him or their memories of him.

If you are one of those people who just don’t know what to ask or where to start here are a few questions that you could ask that stretch beyond a simple ‘how are you going?’

What have you missed this week?
How has grief come up this week?
How has.… significant event felt with the absence of Sam…?
What do you miss most?
What has been hard recently?
What catches you off guard these days?
What do people say or do that hurts that they may not consider?
What do you feel you need of people at the moment or is it too overwhelming to know?
What are your favourite memories?
Tell me about…
Do you want to process any of the traumatic memories?
How do you find your day to day life harder or different to before?
Is there anything I can be more sensitive of?
What of the future do you feel robbed of?
How are you going managing grief in…… setting?
What is helpful for you when you are feeling … if you know?

The bottom line is please talk to us and keep him in the conversation. We miss him terribly and we love it when people are willing to share memories, or to delve into our lives and ask the kind of questions that go beyond the surface

And of course a huge thank you to those friends who have done this and cared for us so beautifully over this time.

It’s amazing how simply hearing one throwaway line can completely rewire your imagination.

I was walking along the beach this morning with Tahnee listening to a podcast on the subject of Vocation where author Karen Swallow was being interviewed about her new book ‘You Have a Calling‘. I am speaking this week on the subject of Vocation and I had some teaching ready to go – a fair bit of old stuff with a few new ideas from more recent reading and experience. It’s a subject I am familiar with and I enjoy teaching around it, but something was bothering me and I couldn’t seem to find the itch to scratch it. Something just didn’t feel quite right in the content.

The conversation on the podcast was around the calling of Paul and the high visibility and clarity of his calling – yet at the same time acknowledging that a literal calling of that type from God is rare and exceptional. Swallow went on to say:

“And so, but there’s so much joy and satisfaction that can be had in the ordinary and mundane. And we miss it if we’re looking for something else that’s not there or not ours to follow.”

From A Theology of Hustle: You Have a Calling: Karen Swallow Prior on Work, Vocation, and Beauty, 26 Aug 2025

She went on to use the analogy of the Lord of The Rings

“But I always like to think about the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. And like, man, the hobbits are an example of this to me. Like, they’re just like very simple people, and they carry on, they party, they hang out, they like live like pretty mundane lives, especially compared to the other characters, these elves and these wizards. And it’s God’s mission that’s carried out through the mundane in so many ways. Like, it’s only the people who are mundane that are able to walk out that calling in so many ways. And I just, I love how he brought that out in that work, so. Yeah. Where most of us are called to be hobbits.”

Most of us are called to be hobbits…

I love that line. It makes so much sense. As I reflected on what I had prepared I realised much of what I was drawing on from scripture was call narratives of people like Abraham, Moses or Paul. And while they are graphic and inspirational, most of us aren’t those kinds of people.

Most of us aren’t Aragorn or Boromir either. We are Frodo, Sam and Pippin living simple ordinary lives in 21st C suburbia, so when we sing that song in church about being ‘history makers’ it feels like there is a bit of pressure to step into a vocation that is not ours to own. My guess is that few of us will be Nelson Mandelas, William Booths or Wilberforces. But we can be ourselves if we can be content with that.

We can be the people God has made us to be in the place we find ourselves today.

As I pondered where to head with this new insight I felt drawn to re-explore the book of Ruth – a story of some difficult life situations, some formative choices and some (relatively) insignificant people living out their calling in a beautiful way.

Ruth’s story could easily be over looked as one about vocation because she doesn’t appear to have a moment of revelation where God speaks to her directly. In fact as far as we know she wasn’t even a worshipper of the Hebrew God.

What we do have however, is a woman responding to her own tragic circumstances with selfless love and care for her older mother in law. Could that have been her calling? Was this a form of ‘aged care’ in her time? It seems she made a very firm choice to set her course on the care and protection of her mother in law even at the expense of her own happiness.

Her choice to follow Naomi back to Judah and to stay with her until the end is a beautiful story, but it isn’t grandiose in any way. It is just a simple depiction of love, kindness and selflessness – even to the extent of marrying Boaz and having a son with him. It’s hard to imagine that Ruth ‘loved’ Boaz in the sense that we imagine romantic love, but being with him and having a son with him was part of her care for Naomi.

And it didn’t go unnoticed.

⁴ The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! ¹⁵ He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.

Ha… your daughter in law who is better than seven sons…

Yeah – there are Abrahams, Moses and Pauls in our communities, but more often we have Ruth types who live their lives faithfully and with integrity, and who generally go unnoticed. And if my wife happens to read this to the end – then yes – I see you in this – and you have been a beautiful example of a life lived in quiet, usually unseen service to others – one of whom is your mother in law and to whom you have been ‘better than seven sons’.

There is a quote from Henri Nouwen that I read years ago, but Danelle flicked across to me again recently that feels like it echoes more of this sentiment.

“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems.

“My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress.

“But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simple like them, but truly love them” (Gracias: A Latin American Journal, 1983).

It’s not a bad thing to be a hobbit and to live the simple life, to sit on doorsteps and play ball. It might even take some of the pressure off (unless you happen to be that one hobbit who finds the ring…)

In reflecting on vocation or calling, it has led me to seeing it a little differently; less a moment of God encounter and more a compilation of our life circumstances and backstory, merged with our innate capacities and then driven by the decisions we make in critical times. Yes – there could be a burning bush type thing going on, but maybe most of determining vocation is ‘letting your life speak’ to quote Parker Palmer.