Little grey boxes

I was one of those kids who chatter a lot. My family called it waffling, and my brother would make a hand signal of fingers and thumb being opened and shut together like a barking dog whenever I was caught in the act of talking too much. Which was most of the time.

I was taller than everyone else, and I had size 8 feet, which I hated; I wanted to be cute and charming like my gorgeous elder sister, who everyone adored. Instead, in my eyes, I was big and noisy and grotesque.

I used to try to become what it seemed the world demanded of me, by attempting what I call personality surgery; I would practice being quiet, considered, obedient, with a tinkling laugh, which would only be heard at appropriate times. My quiet obedience came across as sulkiness, and anyway I couldn’t maintain any of it for more than ten minutes.

We so need encouragement and affirmation. Our children grow up riddled with self doubt – not because we don’t love them – but because, among their peers in the school playground, and among their siblings, they probably receive criticism at a ratio of about ten to one over the amount of encouragement they get. What we actually need, to grow up healthy and confident, would be the reverse of that.

It took the intervention of Jesus Christ to change my self view, and here I am in my middle fifties, stumbling on a realisation that takes my breath away: all those things I learnt to hate about myself – my habit of just saying what came out of my mouth before engaging my brain, my sharp sense of humour (kinder friends call it wit), and lots of other things that have dogged me since childhood – have been coupled together with all the things that I just thought were useless – such as my ability to write little ditties and poetry, to sing, to chat to all and sundry and tell stories – have become the very things that, under God’s grace, He uses as the Out of the Ashes ministry develops.

So, whenever we do a public event now, you will find that we have little grey boxes of ash to give away. They are a reminder that, just like St Paul, who had a thorn in the flesh that he repeatedly pleaded for God to release him from (2Corinthians Ch 12:7), so it is with us – when we totally hand ourselves over to God, when we offer ourselves to be used for His purposes, He will take the very stuff that we thought was too old and used up, too disabled, too damaged, or simply too pointless, and He will use and bless every last bit of it, in the breathless wonder of His plan.

His strength through our weakness.