Is Love a Name?

Last year my brother and his wife asked me to write a 'reading' for their wedding. I was, of course, delighted to do this for them. They got married in a beautiful setting but as it was a Civil Ceremony, the law dictates that there can be no religious words or references used during the proceedings. The reading must be strictly non-religious and approved, in advance, by the Superintendant Registrar.



I decided to write about the nature of love in marriage and how love is not just a feeling but something that you do. Where better to find inspiration about the nature of love but from the Bible? See if you can spot the influence of Corinthians 13 in the speech that I made:

Is Love a Name?

Love, within marriage, is not just a noun, it should be a verb too.
In other words, it is not just a feeling that you experience, a name for an
emotion. It is something that you do, something that you practise.

What does it mean to practise love? It means being patient, it means being kind. If you practise love you will not be jealous or judging. Instead, you will be gracious and accepting, you will wipe the slate clean – regularly - forgiving mistakes or poor decisions. To become a master practitioner, you will think the best of the person you love, believe in them, have hope in and for them and search for the truth with them.

Practising love is something that you will do together: you will bear, you will endure, you will have faith in each other; you will laugh, enjoy and begin to learn together that love is more than just a name of a feeling.


©Nicola Morgan, February 2010

Strictly Praying

This is not about being strict or disciplined. I’ve called it Strictly Praying so that my last line works.

I, like many others, don’t put much time into prayer. I quite often say a quick please and thank you in the morning before getting out of bed and getting on with the business of the day. Sometimes a sorry (particularly if I’ve been heavy on the red wine the night before). However, when I do actually take the time to devote some real time to it, the results are quite amazing. More of what happens later.

I used to wonder why monks and nuns had chosen to remove themselves from the world and spend so much of their day in prayer and silent contemplation. Of course, I appreciate that there is no one answer to why someone makes that decision and that their reasons may be varied and complex as people are. I must admit, I did used to think that it was a bit of a waste of time, that if they so loved God and the message of Jesus then they would be better off out there in the world trying to do good works and help others. However, it later occurred to me that if you accept that you are created by God, that everything is meaningless in the bigger picture, then making sure that you have God at the centre of your life and communicating with him is probably the best thing that you can do with your time. (Incidentally, Ecclesiastes is an amazing ‘wisdom’ book and far from being despairing and cynical, it is full of hope – a subject for another blog post.)



I’m not going all Sound of Music on you, I’m not running off to be a nun anytime soon. However, it did make me think maybe I really ought to be spending a bit more time on prayer than I currently do. Earlier this week, through my letterbox came my free copy of New Wine magazine and after a quick flick through admiring the graphics and the quality of the paper, I actually read ‘How to Hear God’(which you can read by clicking here). This article reminded me about that thing called two way praying.

So, I sat down and asked God what he had in store for me that day. Nothing. So I waited a bit longer. Nothing. Tax return deadline is looming and I need to finish my accounts. But I waited. Nothing. It had been a whole ten minutes now and I really needed a cup of tea. Nothing. So, I opened my bible at Luke (if you have read my previous posts, you will realise I am spending a bit of time on Luke at the moment) and I turned to Luke 11 ‘Jesus’ teaching on prayer’ where Jesus taught the disciples to pray. We can probably all recite the Lords prayer and maybe often do it, as I do, mindlessly and without it saying or meaning a great deal each time we say it. I read through the familiar words in just this way. Nothing.

I carried on reading to the familiar passage of Luke 11:9-12 ‘ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you’ which explains that if your children ask you for something, you do not give them something awful instead and that we will give good gifts to our children (despite our handicap of being human, flawed and ‘evil’) so God will give us the Holy Spirit if we ask. So I read it again and knocked. Then God spoke. I read the Lord’s prayer again and, sure enough, the words ‘Forgive us our sins for we also forgive everyone who sins against us’ jumped out of the page at me. This set me off on a very interesting path of forgiveness that will be the subject of another post.

Sometimes we may not know what to pray. This doesn’t matter; ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for but the Spirit himself intercedes for us’ Romans 8:26. So, I think this is a note to self on prayer: persevere, keep doing it, keep on knocking, your persistence will pay. Keeeeep on praying!

ps. for the benefit of my overseas readers, we have a show in the UK called Strictly Come Dancing (the picture is of that show) which ends with the phrase 'Keep on dancing'.

Have it to the Full

My husband and I work with the youth group at Church and we were, recently, looking John 10:10. Now, I know I'm not going to win any awards for my film making here but sometimes it helps to have a short video clip to show the kids. For some reason, something on a screen can grab their attention - much more so than if one of us tells them that we are going to read a bible passage (which will probably be met with the whole lot of them getting their ever-present phones out to text or check messages or listen to something else). So, this is the short video clip that I made to introduce the passage to them:

From the Mouths of Babes*

My youngest daughter is only five years old and she prays all the time: for Daddy to come home safely from his journey, for her sister to be happy, to find the bits of lego that she needs or her missing library book. What is amazing is that when either of my daughters cannot find something they will pray together to find it. They always do. They do this quite naturally without ever having read ‘For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them’


It is very interesting to talk to my youngest about God because she is so natural about it. If I ask her what happens when she prays, she says she is talking to God.
‘Does he talk back?’
‘Yes,’ she says earnestly and looking at me like I’m a bit stupid ‘he talks to my heart’.
‘And how do you know it is God?’ I am clearly even more stupid now
‘because it IS! Only God talks to your heart like that.’

So what is the nature of this relationship between God and little children? It is far less questioning, far less intellectual, perhaps, than the one that we try and cultivate throughout our lives. It seems to be something that comes entirely naturally to them. Importantly, there is a distinction between their belief in childhood fantasy figures like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy. Both my children believe that these figures exist and, indeed, have both attempted to communicate with them too, leaving letters and treats out for them. The crucial difference seems to be that they do not pray to the fantasy figures, only God and they tell me, it is only God who talks to their hearts.

I have often wondered if this is what Jesus meant when he said ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ...anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’

There is a poem that I love by Elizabeth Jennings called Summer and Time which observes that children are able to live in the present moment without attempting to ‘mix up time’. They are not worrying about what they have done, what they will do but live in the ‘present hour’. I can see this ability slowly being chipped away at in my eldest daughter as she is conditioned at school into thinking through consequences, of considering how her actions will impact – and this is necessary and desirable, but slowly she is ceasing to just be in the ‘present hour’.



I do wonder if it is the point about being in the present moment in order to be able to communicate with God that is so important. This is something that we must work on maintaining or we lose it as we grow up and learn to ‘tease the sun-dial’. It goes along with the idea that Jesus teaches in Luke 12:22 ‘do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear.’ This is certainly true of little children. They do not worry about such things. Such distractions are of no concern to them as they will all be taken care of somehow which is what Jesus says ‘seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you’.

Perhaps we should endeavour to be in the present moment more, put more faith in God and not spend so much time lamenting our mistakes of yesterday and worrying about what to do next. Perhaps this would allow us to experience that still, small voice of God. I wonder if the way that children explore the world with fascination and joy, living in the moment and feeling God speaking to their hearts is what Jesus was talking about.

*Geeky reference: this reference, which is commonly used, is actually from Psalm 8:10

Wilderness Part 2

Yes, I’m still on about the Wilderness and about Luke 4. There was just way too much to put into one blog entry.

There is a lot of Christian-bashing goes on out there in media-land. A lot of people who think that Christians are all crazy and deluded (and some of them probably are). Have a look at any discussion forum where the issue of Christianity is raised or discussed in the press or on YouTube or Facebook – anywhere – and people will be ridiculing it and finding flaw. The Bible gives them lots of material to throw at us in order to ridicule us when taken out of context. They can laugh at Leviticus, poke fun at Paul and rant about Romans. If you take passages out of their context and fling them around, they do sometimes seem quite ridiculous, out of step with modern-day thinking and ideas. Worse, they can seem oppressive and contrary to what we consider to be decent values now.



In Luke 4, the devil quotes the Bible at Jesus. It is when he was leading Jesus around trying to test him after forty days in the wilderness and he says ‘If you are the Son of God...throw yourself down from here for it is written “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully...”. Now, at that point, that must have been just a little bit tempting. There he is, the devil, goading Jesus and – of course – Jesus could have done anything. Scripture has been quoted at him and it must have been tempting not to think ‘you know what, I am the Son of God and I’ll show you’. Of course, he didn’t. But what he did teach us was a valuable lesson in how to interpret and read scripture. Don't just accept it when someone quotes a passage at you, put it in context.

What Jesus did was put the quote that the devil had hurled at him back into its context: ‘It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’’. He does not allow the devil to use Scripture that has been selected and used wrongly to tempt him into action.

As a former lawyer, I am – boringly enough – quite interested in interpretation of laws and rules. Jesus looks to the most important principles here in interpreting scripture. Later on, Jesus revealed what the key principles are when he answered the question ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments’.

Well, that bit of advice that Jesus gave tells us a great deal about how to interpret the various rules and guidelines contained in the Bible. The Bible is a huge book, more like a library of books, and you can probably find passages in there to support more or less any argument if you look hard enough. But it is no good taking small passages or groups of words together and quoting them to prove that you have a point. It only works if you apply the key principles first; loving God and loving each other. So, when people are using passages to justify homophobia or sexism or prejudices, perhaps they should ask themselves whether they are applying the commandment on which all the Laws hang. These principles must be the ones that can guide us through the wilderness.

The Wilderness - Part I

A picture of the City of London - where they make big piles of money! It may not look like the wilderness, but I would argue that maybe it is.

I was talking to a student yesterday who was telling me how she was certain that there was no God. She happened to be looking at a poster about philosophy that I have on display which explains that philosophy asks the Big Questions and one of them says 'What if God does exist?' and also 'What if he doesn't?'.

"That's a very interesting question" she looked at me, very slightly worried.

"I have never thought - what if I am wrong, what if God does exist".

(That was just before her Mum came and picked her up in a brand new Mercedes Benz. ("Oh Lord, won't you buy me...")). Yep, that is a pretty big question for people who have taken the path, as most of my family have, that God does not exist. For them, their life is about material acquisition and ensuring their own comfort. It is probably fair to say that most people in society think that way. That may be rather simplistic as it is also about other things, some very noble and many quite beautiful but to my mind, without God, they are missing the point. Being emerged in materialism and secular values is, to me, the Wilderness. And that is where we all live.

Last night, I was discussing Luke 4. Several things struck about this, the first thing was the contemporary battle that we all face: The devil leads Jesus up to a high place and shows him all the kingdoms of the world 'I will give you all their authority and splendour...If you worship me, it will all be yours'. I thought that summed up so much about contemporary life. We are bombarded, all the time, with images of stuff - desirable things: shoes, clothes, ipods, ipads, cars, houses, holidays, glamour, fame, wealth, riches. Now, clearly, the intention of the people who are spending millions on promoting their goods to us is that they create in us a desire to have them. That is how retail and marketing work.

I came home, one day, having been to John Lewis - the department store full of 'desirable' things; I looked around my house and felt a deep sense of dissatisfaction that my living room was nowhere near as beautiful as the ones they had displayed in the shop. My husband reminded me that, of course, that is exactly what they want you to feel! They have gone out of their way to create a dissatisfaction with your lot and therefore a desire to have more or newer or shinier 'stuff'. We look at it and we are tempted by it. Then, if I imagine someone saying to me - you could have all of this, all of this and more. You can have it all....Well, that is what these adverts and our culture sells us all the time. If you make these material goods your priority, you could spend your life in pursuit of them and, as the devil said to Jesus, it will all be yours.



When I worked in the City earning lots of money, I was surrounded by people to whom money was extremely important. Consumer satisfaction is a transitory state, it changes all the time. So everyone would be comparing their latest versions of whatever cars, bags, shoes they had just acquired. The obsession with money and stuff is certainly not exclusive to the City, however. If I ask most of my students what they want to do when they are older, the vast majority will say that they want to make lots of money and be rich.

Of course, as we know, when Jesus was faced with temptation like that he answered 'It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only'. Jesus was quite clear on this subject, he warns elsewhere that you cannot serve both God and money. He warns us to 'Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions!' I don't think he means that you can't have any money but that you must not be worshipping it or falling into greed. This is difficult because the people around us are, of course, absorbed by our material culture and I am certainly not immune to it! You and I may find ourselves standing there with the devil (we'll come back to him later), going 'hmmm, yes, I would quite like all that stuff please'. This is our daily battle in the wealthy West: to follow Jesus' example and worship God, not all those lovely things in the shops. Even the really good stuff.

So, here we all are, out in the Wilderness, facing our tests. Question is, what are we going to do in response?