The Sky Is Cracking

I haven't been keeping my spiritual practises as well as I should. One I have initiated  this year in response to reading Leonard Sweet's book nudge was taking a time each day just to admire and  observe the created world God had made. Today I was surprised as I walked through the University by the beauty of the creation that God has made and God's ability to speak to me through it. Even in the barren trees of winter (note most native trees in New Zealand are evergreen but in urban spaces the trees planted reflect a colonial past).  I looked up and saw the stark winter leafless branches of an oak tree silhouetted against a blue sky (always good to see a blue sky in winter as opposed to storm clouds and rain). They fanned out in a fractal like pattern and then I thought, in a dazed early Monday morning kind of way, it looks like the sky is cracking.

It looks like the sky is cracking and if I'm honest it feels like the sky of my world is cracking. On my facebook page I wrote a new status today that said 'World Imploding' and it feels like that as the funding for the church planting project I am involved in finishes and it looks like I'll have to move on. Looking for a job for next year. Not wanting to move my family from where they are. Having encounters with people recently that has really rocked my sense of call and vision (if it wasn't knocked enough). I have a sense that I'm cracking up under the anxiety etc. Yup it really feels like the limits of my well constructed world are starting to crack...

Then in one of those stream of consciousness moments I started to remember a sermon I had written about the angels appearing to the shepherds in Luke's gospel. I had talked about it being like the sky being folded back like the curtains at a theatre for the grand show number of all show numbers. I began to think again about the incarnation, God stepped into our world became a human being "one of us". The hope is that if the sky is cracking then its not my world imploding but rather the promise of a God who is sovereign and whose love never comes to an end, assuring me that in this winter like place that there is the hope of Christ's presence.