Renewal - What's in Your Hand?

by Michael Mann

Late last year I had the joy of attending the opening of the affordable housing project at Warwick Uniting Church. This remarkable project was part of a trio of projects that included Warwick’s sister congregation at Killarney and the Torres Strait Thursday Island Uniting Church.

Having spoken with some members of the Warwick Uniting Church at length, those projects started with the congregation looking at what they had in their hand – in their cases, under-utilised land – and daring to respond to the perpetual invitation to dream and partner with God, asking big questions about what a small church with a big God could do...

“What are the needs around us?”

“What could we do with what we have?”

“How could we see God’s kingdom come in our community?”

If you talk to any of the members of that congregation who were involved, they would tell you they didn’t have the money for it. They had some of the skills to get started, but they weren’t concreters or plumbers or carpenters. By no means did they have the means or ability to finish the whole journey.

But they had obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit to take a step and begin, and they had the faith to believe and trust that God would make a way and supply what he had dreamed with them.

Sometimes that small nudge to obedience is all we have to go on. An impression. A feeling. Someone’s name being called to mind. And, if we’re sensitive to that nudge, God can use us.

I rarely remember my dreams. When I do, the feelings are often quite intense and the memory is quite vivid. Some years ago, I started to wonder if God might be speaking through those more vivid and intense dreams, so I invited God into that space. Less “use what’s in my hand”, more “use what’s in my subconscious”, but I asked God to use it to speak to me as he needed or wanted. It suits me because I get to sleep while it happens.

More than once, I have woken from a dream with a person impressed intensely in my memory, something I usually take to mean I need to reach out. One morning last January I woke with this very sensation, having dreamt of a former colleague I hadn’t seen in almost five years. I reached out to check in and, to my surprise, she responded with a candidness I had rarely seen from her.

This colleague had been raised in church. We’d spoken about faith occasionally, but this was different. She is an impressive individual and leader – a former lawyer turned hospitality executive who is now a CEO. But the thought that God would prompt someone in a dream to contact her softened her. Things were good on the surface, but there had been plenty of unseen struggles. The compounding effects of a major work trauma, a separation and divorce, then the death of a dear friend in the Westfield Bondi attack – it had all compounded and taken its toll. To hear an admission like that was remarkable.

It wasn’t a long conversation. It wasn’t a moment of salvation for her, or an encounter with God that brought deep inner healing. But it was a seed of the Kingdom. A reminder that, no matter how hard the road and how deep the pain, God is thinking about you, and he will use unlikely ways to tell you he cares.

We’re probably not all going to have Moses like experiences of leading a nation to freedom. But maybe, if we continue to offer all the different aspects of ourselves to God, we might just see his kingdom come in big and small ways.