Wednesday 10 January 2018

Christian Today article " A Methodist Minister describes how he survived a devastating illness - through God's Grace

What follows is an article I was invited to write for the online magazine Christian Today. You'll find the link to that at the end of the blog.

2nd September 2016 was going to be a lovely day. My wife and I had it all planned out. We’d go to a garden centre in the morning to see if they had any patio furniture in the end of season sale. Then drive up into the Cotswolds for lunch, before heading to Stratford-upon-Avon in the evening for a friend’s wedding. That was the plan …

Returning to the car after shopping, I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my back near my kidneys and collapsed. My wife (a senior nurse) suspected a kidney stone but as I was drifting in an out of consciousness she called an ambulance while some fellow customers and a first aider from the shop kept an eye on me.

A paramedic arrived and checked me over. He was concerned that my blood pressure was low and felt I needed to get to hospital in Bath (about 20 miles away.) There was no ambulance available, so he decided to drive me in his car. With me hanging on to a saline drip with one hand and the door handle with the other.

We got to Bath, and I was seen quickly. Time blurred but I remember a doctor sending me for a CT scan. As I came out of the scanner I knew something was seriously wrong. There was a resuscitation team on standby and I was moved from the scanner to the trolley very carefully.

Back in the A&E the doctor told me that I had a “Triple A” (abdominal aortic aneurysm). In layman’s terms the aorta was leaking and was on the point of rupture. “It’s very serious Mr. Gray. In fact, 50:50. We are transferring you to Southmead Hospital Bristol for urgent surgery.”

I had enough time to say goodbye to my wife, before being placed in an ambulance.

Lying in the back of the ambulance, all I remember is feeling really at peace. I knew I was in God’s hands. I wasn’t afraid. I was worried for my wife and son. But as for me, I was with God. I gave myself to God, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace.

(With hindsight this peace and tranquillity was literally a Godsend. I’m sure if I’d been stressed it would not have helped the condition at all.)

I remember arriving at Southmead but after that nothing. In fact, three weeks went by before I knew anything again. (I spent three weeks in the Intensive Care Unit having had several emergency operations. My wife tells me the first 24 – 72 hours were “touch and go”.)

I woke to find that due to having a deep vein thrombosis, my right leg was paralysed. (The blood supply to the nerves was cut off and the nerves severely damaged.)
I remained in Southmead until early November before being transferred to a rehabilitation ward at our local cottage hospital. By the end of November, I was back home.
It was only on coming home that I think the enormity of what had happened hit me. Having to be brought into the house in a wheelchair up the ramp now built at the rear of the house has that effect.

Over the next six months or so, I received incredible support from community physiotherapists who got me from being reliant solely on a wheelchair, to walking with a Zimmer frame, to walking with crutches. All the while my wife did the exercises with me and cared for me.

By the autumn I was driving our now adapted car and this gave me a sense of getting back to normal – or at least the new normal. And finally, on 7th January 2018, I started back to active ministry (on a part time basis) by leading the powerful Methodist Covenant service. My right leg still isn’t fully functional but it is vastly improved.
During the first few months at home, two of my frequent visitors were fellow clergy but from different denominations. They both prayed with me and talked with me. And one of them asked me one day “So how are things between you and God?”

It was a very good question. But I was able to answer straight away that things between me and God were fine. I didn’t blame God for what had happened, I’d felt God’s presence with me from that moment in the ambulance and I was at peace. I also had this real sense of my ministry not being over but it looking (inevitably) different.
I realised years ago that God doesn’t speak to me directly, but He speaks through other people. He spoke at various times through the two clergy I mentioned. He’s spoken through Methodist colleagues. And I’ve been blessed to have many wise Christian friends who have been beside me over this last 16 months and who have often given me words of encouragement.

And throughout God has sent others to be beside me. There was the Afro Caribbean ward orderly who came into my room one day whistling “Give thanks with a grateful heart.” There was the physiotherapist who was a Christian. There was the close friend who gave me a holding cross “for when you ae frightened” (which I was from time to time.)

On coming home from hospital, initially I had to have a bed downstairs. The only place to put it was my study but that left the question of how I could manage to get to a toilet and sink for washing. One of the occupational therapists who assessed the house before coming home had a bright idea. Remove the wall between my study and the downstairs cloak room. Genius! (The wall was only plasterboard.)

Now I am back at work, the wall has been restored. But as yet the study isn’t back to normal. There are still bookcases to be put back and pictures to hang. One picture that will have pride of place is a beautiful piece of calligraphy that my wife commissioned when I entered ministry. It is Jeremiah 29:11 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

I will soon look at those words every day and wonder anew what those plans are. But I know that I have hope and a future.
As I mentioned earlier, my first service was the Methodist Covenant Service. I conducted most of the service sitting on a perch seat.
The liturgy contains these words
“Let us give ourselves to him, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace.”

I’d rather not have gone through these last 16 months. And I certainly wish my family and friends hadn’t gone through all the heartache they experienced.
But I can say with certainty, that by giving myself “to him, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace” I am here to tell the tale.

This is the link to the article https://www.christiantoday.com/article/my.story.how.i.survived.a.devastating.illness.and.gave.myself.to.godexecute1/123344.htm

Sunday 7 January 2018

I have set my rainbow in the clouds

The following is based on a sermon preached at Central Methodist Church on 7th January 2018 as part of the Covenant Service.


Just before Christmas, I went to the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol to see an exhibition of work by Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry is an English artist, known mainly for his ceramic vases. There were examples of his pots but there were also sculptures and tapestries he’d made too.

One tapestry that held my attention was one he made in 2017 called “Battle of Britain.” It was a large tapestry 3 metres wide by 7 metres long.

In the foreground we see a teenage boy, mobile phone in hand. Sat on his bike overlooking a depressing landscape.

To the boy’s left is a railway line and backing on to the line is a row of houses. These are clearly meant to represent something like a run-down council estate.

Taking up the centre of the tapestry is the scene of a park. But the children’s playground features broken equipment and a concrete skateboard park is covered in graffiti.
Beyond the park is some farmland. A lone tractor ploughs a field, but the tractor churns out dirty black exhaust smoke. Somehow the land looks poor and it is partly flooded.
In the distance we see electricity pylons. There is an elevated section of motorway clogged with traffic.

It is clearly winter as none of the trees have leaves and there are black, ominous clouds in the sky.

All in all, it is a very depressing picture. And yet, a large rainbow straddles the centre section.

I was transfixed by the tapestry and the story it told. For to me the desolation of the landscape conveying hopelessness, was transformed by the rainbow. A rainbow symbolising hope. A rainbow serving as a reminder of God’s love. I don’t know if Grayson Perry meant it in that way. But that is what it conveyed to me.

We all know the story of Noah. The building of the ark, the animals going in two by two. The flood. The rain lasting 40 days and nights. The birds flying out to see if there was any land. And then finally the rainbow.

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9: 8 – 11

After the flood sent to punish the earth for sin, God showed his love and forgiveness by establishing a covenant, an agreement between God and Noah and his decedants and through them all people in future generations.

And the promise was at one level that never again would God punish the earth in this way.

13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind Genesis 9: 13 – 15

But God’s covenant made with Noah, and symbolised by the rainbow, is much more than that. God’s covenant with Noah is designed to show the world how much God loves the world. Every person, every animal, every fish in the sea, every plant. God loves everything. God’s covenant, God’s promise, is built on his love for each one of us. It is a promise that runs throughout the Bible. It is a promise that is shown in Jesus.

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16

God loves the world so much, God loves each one of us so much, that God no longer seeks to punish the world but seeks to save the world through his son.

17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. John 3:17

I’ve used the word Love, but perhaps we should be thinking more about God’s grace.

Grace is God's unmerited favour. It is kindness from God that we don't deserve. There is nothing we have done, nor can ever do to earn this favour. It is a gift from God.

Webster's New World College Dictionary provides this theological definition of grace: "The unmerited love and favour of God toward human beings; divine influence acting in a person to make the person pure, morally strong; the condition of a person brought to God's favour through this influence; a special virtue, gift, or help given to a person by God."

Or as I’ve heard it explained with this acrostic:

God's
Riches
At
Christ's
Expense

As part of the service the Methodist Covenant service we sing a hymn by Charles Wesley

“Come let us use the grace divine, and all, with one accord, in a perpetual covenant join ourselves to Christ the Lord.”


Through God’s grace to us, through his Covenant stretching back to Noah and forward to today and beyond through Jesus Christ, we are assured of eternal life. And in return for this gift of grace, this gift of salvation, we promise to set aside ourselves and do what is right for Jesus Christ.

That is what Wesley’s hymn is saying and that is what we promise in the Covenant service. As the words of the service have it.

“Let us give ourselves to him, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace.”


Over the last 16 months since I have been ill and unable to participate in active ministry, I have had much time to reflect on those words.

“Let us give ourselves to him, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace.”

That’s not to say I knew them off the top of my head. It is only in re-reading the Covenant service that the words registered. But I was very familiar with the sentiment.
One thing I hope not to do now I am back in semi harness, is to dwell too much on what happened to me and my family when I was taken ill. But that said, I want to touch on something I have experienced time and again over these 16 months.

When I was rushed into hospital on 2nd September 2016 the doctor at RUH told me what was wrong, that I would have to be transferred to Southmead for an immediate operation and that what had happened was life threatening. At that moment I experienced a peace like I have never known before. I gave myself to God, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace.

Now believe me, I’d rather not have gone through that. And I certainly wish my family and friends hadn’t gone through all the heartache they experienced.

But I can say with certainty, that by giving myself “to him, trusting in his promises and relying on his grace” I am here to tell the tale.

Over New Year we spent time away with some close friends staying on a farm in Carmarthenshire. On New Year’s Day, we went for a walk in Laugharne – Dylan Thomas’ home. It is a pretty little place. The sun was shining on the river estuary. There were flocks of sea birds and wading birds on the mud flats including my favourite the oystercatcher. As we got back to the cars and took one last look across the estuary I was the first to see a rainbow. I think to everyone else, it was just a pretty sight. But to me, it was a reminder that God is good. And by his grace I am restored to you.

13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.