Hi friends,
I was surprised that the blog was been quite for a while. Hope everyone is safe and happy. Well its been a strange turn over for me, Almost five years ago I travelled to UK- a strange place with a diffrent culture and life style. But being and remaining has a christian was very challenging. Thanks to Greenbelt for helping me with my feelings and emotions in my struggles with my Faith.
I grow and still developing in my christain believes and faith a lot through GB. GB showed me an informal way of loving and serving God and the mankind.

Well coming back to India after 4 years, I felt very strange…..but all is good after all its a learning process…life here being a minority (christian) in this country…sometimes loses temper when you get in touch with the churches and its rules…. very strange…..sometimes feels like the churches and the priests are demons who are trying to sqeeze our neck. Its painful as I write this but doesn’t mean to hurt anyone.

Why the churches have to be formal???
Why they think that they have to control the lives of human beings???
Where did the old service oriented approach of the churches and the priests gone????

It feels like we are coming back to the past where the priests tend to govern the country and the people as they did durings the time of Jesus Christ.

The right word I am looking for is power!!!! POWER…
a strange word…..POWER when mixed with MONEY…..makes the christians greedy…..its a sad part that when india got independence the churches and the missionaries worked for the development and bettermend of the people.

Where as now runnign after money and trying to show their strenght and authority over human beings especially poor christians…

I am hurt…..feels like becoming a revolutionarian…..
But how ????
With whom????

Feels lonely…..but praying to God lifts my soul…..I love being a christain…. these struggles makes me more close to God…..

Feeling very strange and everyday I am experiencing different cultural shocks….but this is making my life interesting and worth living.

Thanks to GB and to the beautiful humans who touched my life.

Faith is hard.

What do you do with it.

Faith is useless unless it makes a difference.
In essence faith is a verb not a noun.
Faith is lived out in our attitudes, thoughts and speech

The point where faith meets the world is uncomfortable. but it is rewarding.

Today I spoke to a stranger. she was nice. I spoke with her. she spoke with me. I listened, we laughed, alot. My faith was there. My extolling the virtues of renewable eneegy was was a small part of living this faith out.

Today I saw a mother speak with courage and commitment about faith and the differnce this made to their life. This was in the glare of national & international media, Against the backdrop of a court case which must have made her faith a hard thing to deal with.

Faith is a stage beyond hope? (when hope is gone faith can still exist?)
If i was in her situation I hope I could react with faith.

Who would have thought that seeing The Producers could be a spiritually enlightening experience? A show that mercilessly pokes fun at every conceivable minority group still somehow manages to leave the audience with genuine joy, rather than mere cheap laughs. The sublime one-liners certainly help, (“Can I take your hat? Your coats? Your swastikas?”) but ultimately, The Producers is a story of redemption. When we first encounter Max Bialystock, he is a mess; a selfish, lecherous, swindling failure. As for Leo Bloom, he is timid, subservient and awkward, an accountant who aspires improbably to producing a Broadway musical. But through their friendship, both men are changed and ultimately redeemed. Their duet “’Til Him” makes it clear that this relationship has transformed them both. Of course, they must both serve a prison sentence for their dishonesty, and there is never a guarantee that all will live happily ever after (the surreal ending to Blazing Saddles shows that anything is possible in a Mel Brooks script). However, the curtain comes down with Bialystock and Bloom walking, together, into the sunset and a golden future of hit musicals. Redeemed through relationship. What a wonderful illustration of how a man can be transformed through a relationship with his creator.

Ffald-y-Brenin feels like the edge of the world. It’s miles of disorientating Welsh country road from anywhere, you can see nothing but fields from here, as far as the horizon, and the silence has an almost physical weight. The perfect place to come on retreat. My hostess encourages me “Be sure to go out to the cross, while you’re here. God’s doing some powerful things there.” Quite a recommendation. So, I make my way out. At the top of a rocky slope, out of sight of the buildings, is a six-foot tall, plain, wooden cross. As soon as I see it, I wonder why I’m there. I think back to my nightmarish journey. It feels like a pilgrimage, and I’m here for the same reason as any pilgrim - to seek God. The cross resembles a signpost, pointing left, right and up, and I realise that God actually is all around me, in the silent, panoramic view, stretching away on every side. I drove for six hours to get here, to discover God was actually all around me back in London. The irony. I can picture God with a wry smile on his face. I turn to leave, but I know I’m not leaving alone.

I love the idea of child sponsorship. It’s the practicalities I struggle with. The problem comes when, usually driven by guilt at not being in touch with Jair for months on end, the time comes to write to him. I begin with enthusiasm. I great him heartily and ask after his family. I then come to a grinding halt. What on earth am I supposed to say to a five year-old Peruvian boy? I decide to tell him a bit about my hobbies. I like sport. He’ll relate to that. So, I begin to tell Jair about the amusingly hopeless football team I play for, only to run into more problems. I think of my football boots, most likely made by sweat-shop labourers, somewhere in the far-east. Ooh. Guilt. I think of the lusciously green football pitches we play on, the branch of McDonalds we repair to after home games, the cars we all drive home afterwards. It’s the same game the world over, but I can’t help thinking we’re playing to different rules. Best change the subject. So I throw in a Bible verse, tell him I’m praying for him, and sign off. Lucky he’s still too young to read, really.

My views of justice and art in relation to faith have shifted radically during my life. In the fervour of recent conversion I once dismissed ‘justice’ as secondary to the over-riding priority of ‘salvation’. Years later I now regard justice as a fundamental outworking of Christianity.

I went through a similar journey with art. As a teenager I delighted in Christian alternatives to mainstream arts – from pop music to nightclubs. Through my university years I belatedly discovered and embraced secular entertainment, but (aside from the occasional Supergrass track) I could never see where Jesus fitted in.

Eventually I began to accept that Christianity did not have to sanitise the arts to make them ‘safe’. Just like justice, I came to regard the arts as a natural expression of faith. But it is only recently that I have also begun to see art and justice as ways of finding new perspectives on faith. Whilst many activists and artists dismiss God, in spite of this their music, actions or films have the power to give me a new perspective on myself and on my relationship with God. So, whilst I still secretly love Delirious, I can now hear God through many voices.

At a Make Poverty History debate I attended at Greenbelt the panel were unanimous that ending poverty was about giving people faith; faith in themselves and faith that they can change their own future. Although ‘empowerment’ is an over-used cliché within UK-based charities, it still seemed radical in the context of some of the poorest countries in the world. Yet isn’t this justice; that every person knows that they have the right and ability to change their own future?

What excites me about Greenbelt is that it asks these questions in the context of the arts. The organisation I work for runs a free art workshop. Watching withdrawn and marginalized people transformed by the simple act of painting or sculpting, I have seen the incredible power of art. Even if it is just for a few hours a day the man at his easel can think of himself as an artist, rather than just as homeless. By giving people the faith to believe in themselves again, art has the power to engage, inspire and revolutionise. Perhaps one role for us in seeking to end poverty will be to help people find faith in themselves through art?

I used to think that justice was about the rich helping the poor, thereby creating a fairer society. I realised some years ago that, not only was this view inadequate, it was fundamentally flawed. As much as I longed to ‘go’ and save the poor, I knew it was not my place to save them. In a world with finite resources there will always be rich and poor, and grand gestures are all very well but will never create a just world.

But this year at Greenbelt I found a fresh understanding of what justice could look like. Stumbling upon the ‘Living Generously’ stand I was challenged to live justly, not in a radical way but in a quiet, gradual way. Justice isn’t ‘going’ to save the world, it is staying at home and consciously limiting my consumer choices on a daily basis for the good of all, both rich and poor. This justice does not patronise continents and peoples I have been taught to pity rather than understand, but it does begin to redress the balance. And, as I am already learning, it is justice that takes faith - faith that small changes, quietly made, can change the world.

Thomas Merton said “faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace”. (As always someone else got there before me and said it much better than me but I adore the quote) It’s wrestling Jacob style all night long, it’s being Amelia Earhart dying to fly, and it’s heading for an unknown horizon looking for India but finding America instead.

I both admire and am slightly bewildered by people who are so certain of hearing God’s voice or knowing their destiny in God. My experience of faith is one of uncertainty and possibility- these afford me a chance to ponder, wonder and dream. All this time isn’t spent daydreaming or doodling- it’s a form of prayer or meditation. Previously in life my faith experience always felt an arms length away from me- I wasn’t really in any danger of burning with passion about something. Now my faith is a living, breathing thing, it’s visceral, its blood, and it churns. Faith for me is an expression of something internal; it’s something that requires oxygen, interaction and light. I guess that’s why the Carpenter spoke of mountain moving mustard seed faith.

The question of justice is a perplexing one. We’re born. We die. We object to major injustices- poverty, slavery etc but every day we allow little injustices. We allow inequality of genders; we allow homophobia to breed and walk by the homeless. In some spheres the rules of the game of life are unfairly weighted in one group’s favour- some would argue that politics are to blame. When politics goes wrong it has the potential to produce more than just bad government- it can be a living nightmare. (We’ve seen that proved throughout the 20th and the start of the 21st centuries)
It makes me angry that there are all kinds of injustices around the world. It’s easy to take a stand on an injustice if there’s no risk involved; no sacrifice. It’s easy to give a pound to someone who’s homeless but keep a few quid so you can buy a bagel and a coffee on the way home. My anger becomes energy; it’s a force for change. There are things for which an uncompromising stand is worth. These injustices motivate us to do something, to take risks, knowing if we don’t, things will remain the same.