Jesus | Emma Tanner

Worth the Wait

by Emma Tanner

I am not a fan of waiting. I feel myself getting irrationally impatient with the person at the front of the queue at the supermarket who seems to be taking an interminably long time to find their purse. If I post something on Facebook or twitter (or even a blog page!) I’m looking for a pretty instant reaction. As I’m watching my children take an age to put on their coats and shoes to go out I can feel my blood pressure rising. And it seems that I’m not the only one. A 2009 study conducted by TalkTalk looked at how long it took people to reach their ‘point of impatience’ in a variety of scenarios. Apparently the average UK resident loses patience with being kept on hold after 5 minutes 4 seconds (I’m sure the 4 seconds make all the difference!) We don’t like to be kept waiting by our friends for longer than 10 minutes, and we expect our texts or voicemails to be responded to within 13 minutes and 16 seconds. Mark Schmid, communications director at TalkTalk said

“The speed of the online world is making us less prepared to wait for things to happen in the offline world, causing people to reach the ‘Point of Impatience’ earlier than ever before.”

(TalkTalk, 2009)

Since the Princess Project was born in 2011, God has been teaching me a lot about the importance of waiting. Starting the project had been a deep desire of mine for so long, that once it finally started to become reality, I felt more impatient than ever before. Carry on reading…

Princess Project The Journey

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Throwing off the chains

by Emma Tanner

Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening. Suddenly, there was a massive earthquake, and the prison was shaken to its foundations. All the doors immediately flew open, and the chains of every prisoner fell off! The jailer woke up to see the prison doors wide open. He assumed the prisoners had escaped, so he drew his sword to kill himself. But Paul shouted to him “Stop! Don’t kill yourself! We are all here!”

The jailer called for lights and ran to the dungeon and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, along with everyone in your household.” And they shared the word of the Lord with him and with all who lived in his household. Even at that hour of the night, the jailer cared for them and washed their wounds. Then he and everyone in his household were immediately baptised. He brought them into his house and set a meal before them, and he and his entire household rejoiced because they all believed in God.

Acts 16:25-34, New Living Translation

Reading this amazing story this morning really challenged me. Paul and Silas had been arrested, stripped, publicly humiliated, severely beaten, and thrown into prison. Unlike many of us would react, however, they were not wallowing in self-pity but praising God! Their focus was not on themselves. They were not saying “Why me?” They were not giving in to fear, misery or despair, understandable as that would have been. They are focussing on God who they know is always the same no matter what is happening on earth. Carry on reading…

The Word

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Culture Clash

by Emma Tanner

For the last couple of days I’ve been reading about the Council at Jerusalem, in Acts 15:1-21. Paul and Barnabas had fallen out with other factions in the church who were arguing that the new Gentile converts still had to adhere to traditional Jewish practices, for example circumcision, in order to be saved. Paul believed passionately that this was contrary to the gospel of grace. In his letter to the Galatian believers he writes:

“Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you. I’ll say it again. If you are trying to find favour with God by being circumcised, you must obey every regulation in the whole law of Moses. For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace. But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us. For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love.”

(Galatians 5:2-6, NLT.)

This led me to ponder what we are tempted to add to the gospel. We too can get bogged down in our church culture. What additional demands do we make of people, that make it difficult for them to worship with us, and to become part of our church families? Carry on reading…

The Word

In the beginning…

by Emma Tanner

The first words of anything are always the hardest to write, and this blog is no exception. I know what I’d like to write in the future (and I know that I would love lots of people to want to read it!) but it didn’t feel right launching into something with no preamble, and no explanation. Why am I writing this blog? Why should people read it? Who am I, anyway?!

Put simply, I am on a journey, and I would love to share my travels with any kind and interested folk who care to read about them. Unfortunately my days of actual travelling (as in the go-to-different-(preferably sunny)-countries type) were somewhat curtailed by the expansion of our family and shrinking of our income (not that I would swap my two gorgeous girls, or the husband, for a life of jet-setting, of course… but I digress). No, the type of journey I am on is a rather more abstract one. I became a Christian at the age of 18, and have been travelling ever since. Sometimes the route has been quite smooth, like a gentle ramble through the Kent countryside on a warm day in September. Sometimes the terrain has been much less even, more like stumbling up Snowdon in the fog. Sometimes I haven’t had the faintest idea where I’ve been going at all.

The past two years have been rather different. After a good many years of what has often felt like aimless stumbling about, I finally feel like I am starting to walk the path that God has made for me (or rather, that he has made me for!). 2 years ago I took a step of faith. I acted on a passion that God had placed in my heart, that had been welling up inside me for a long time. I stepped way out of my comfort zone, and founded an organisation to come alongside and support new mothers, especially those young single mums often isolated within our communities. I was also challenged to go deeper with God, to get to know Jesus better, to spend time with him daily, be filled with the Holy Spirit, read my Bible. I have discovered (better late than never) that doing things in his strength is so much better than doing things in mine.

All this has had a profound impact on me. I honestly think that if I had looked at the future me two years ago, I would not have believed it was the same person. In 2 Timothy 1:7 Paul writes “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love and self-discipline.” I used to be crippled by that spirit of timidity. Now I find myself speaking up, being bold, being confident in my identity as a daughter of the Living God. I am very much a work in progress (goodness am I!!) but God is gracious, and transforms us ever so gently and gradually into the people he has designed and called us to be. I’d love it if you could join me on my travels.