A Fistful of Pearls: Gems for Christian Living

A Fistful of Pearls

Gems for Christian Living

Beth Mallender

Copyright © 2011 by Beth Mallender.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8979-2

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-8980-8

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Contents

A Messed Up Start

Out There In The Real World

Broken

Beginning To Believe Again

Cynical

Finding God For Myself

Starting To Learn

Finding Purpose

All I Ever Needed

Pearl Number One

Pearl Number Two

Pearl Number Three

Pearl Number Four

Pearl Number Five

Pearl Number Six

Pearl Number Seven

And Finally . . . A Fist Full Of Pearls

Am I the only one who sometimes thinks that the Christian faith is just way too complicated? Is it just me, or do you sometimes think that what, at first seemed so amazingly good and easy, now suddenly seems inexplicably difficult. Especially the longer you go along the road of Christianity!

It seems to start off really simply—sitting at the cross, accepting the fact that Jesus loved me and died for me, and just coming to him—just as I am—like that is all that matters. In fact, if like me you searched a long time for the truth—the simplicity is almost too good to be true. You get told that the amazing thing about grace is that it is free and anybody can receive it—regardless. And you come to Christ in awe and wonder, and you think—wow! I didn’t imagine it would be this easy. God loves me, enough to die for me—and that is pretty much it! All I have to do is believe and accept that love, and that’s it. Wow! Simple.

Why then, I have to ask, after thirteen/fourteen years of being a Christian do I feel like I was sold a bit of a lie? Why do I often feel like I am just not making the grade, not hitting the mark, falling short in some way? Why do I occasionally feel that in order to earn grace and love and forgiveness, I have to fit a certain pattern, live a certain way, be a certain kind of person? That grace and forgiveness are not quite enough. That there is actually more to this life than meets the eye? More prices to pay than I was willing to pay at first. Was I sold a lie? Or am I being sold a lie now? Or have I somewhere along the way just simply got myself confused? Am I the one over-complicating things?

How on earth am I supposed to live this Christian life right? Because it seems that although they tell you that we no longer live under law but under grace—that isn’t strictly true is it? It seems that although we were told that grace was free—there are still costs and prices to be paid.

You have to go to church, you have to read your bible every day, you have to join this connect group, you have to perform these tasks . . .

What if I don’t? Would I be a lesser Christian? Would I not get to heaven? Would I somehow fail to make the mark, the grade? Who is judging anyway?

And so I have to ask myself, how on earth am I supposed to live out this Christian life? Am I supposed to live it out—in fear and trembling? Or in hope and faith?

Now you will find out there, many thousands of books telling you how to live this Christian life. There will be books on worship, books of prayer, books on evangelism, books on theory and doctrine. And those books will have probably been written by established pastors and teachers and evangelists, all probably with lots of strings of very important letters behind their names.

And they will all tell you some amazing truths about being a Christian that will make you understand better your faith. They will, most of them, be God inspired books and the men and women who write them will have been anointed to write them.

So I have absolutely no intention right now of pulling them down or asking that you consider mine in comparison to theirs. Unless I want to get on the wrong side of My Father in heaven!!

Why then, you may ask, would we need another book on how to live this Christian life? And why would we listen to an ordinary, uneducated woman who we have never heard of?

Truth is, I don’t fully know the answer to that question, yet. Maybe when you have read the book you might tell me.

I’m not a good sales person am I? This is where I should be reeling off an impressive list of credentials, and giving you some motivation to continue. But to be honest, I don’t have a massive list of credentials. So, why would you read my book? After all, you don’t know me. I am not living in a massive mansion, surrounded by the very obvious favour of the Lord! I am a middle England housewife, living in a semi detached house, and there is nothing remarkable about me at all. I do not run a massive church, in fact I am not on church leadership at all. I am just an ordinary nine to five woman, who has a passionate faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and has been living this Christian life for thirteen years now.

Once upon a time I believe that God told me to live the small life in a BIG way and that is what I intend to do and all I know is that God just recently told me to write a book and to share how I live my Christian life. This book is not designed to help the Christians who know and understand it all—it is for those of us who struggle with the small stuff. Those of us who trip up constantly, and our ministries aren’t big enough or noticeable enough or glamorous enough to cover our failings!

If nobody reads it, then that is fine, because I have learned that it’s better to obey the voice of God than to resist it. Moses gave all the reasons in the world why Pharaoh or the children of Israel wouldn’t listen to him, and all of his reasons were valid and justified. After all, he too was a nobody—a stammering idiot, stuck out in the desert, passing his time by talking to burning bushes as a way of getting by.

But he went to Pharaoh anyway, and he faced the scorn of the children of Israel and he got on with what God had told him to do.

And today that is why I am sitting writing this book.

I believe that over my thirteen years as a Christian God has given me certain pearls of wisdom that have helped to sustain and grow me in someone that I can now live with, and look in the mirror and accept.

I am not perfect, and I certainly do not do everything perfectly—but that is now OK. I am kind of cool with my imperfections, and I am cool with the fact that God is OK with my imperfections too. He gave me these pearls and they have often been my lifeline when other life lines seem to have been cut off. So now I am throwing those pearls out into the big wide world—and seeing where they land. Maybe there is one in here for you. One that will just change your life forever. So here we go . . . A fistful of Pearls!

A Messed Up Start

So, first of all who am I?

Well I am forty years old and I am a twice married mother of two. Both of my sons have different fathers and the man I am with now is not father to either of them. (Not quite the woman at the well, but getting there!). I was a teenage mother, a single mother for most of my youngest son’s childhood, and I was backslidden for twelve years. My credentials, as you see, are not that impressive.

If you are looking for someone who has walked on water, turned water in to wine and raised the dead—I am not that person. I am just a woman who knows that she has been forgiven, set free and walks with Christ every day of her life. A person, actually, probably a little bit like you.

Let me tell you a little bit of where I come from.

I was born into a Christian family in July 1970. I was the youngest of four daughters and according to my mother, I was the ugliest baby she had ever given birth to. Long and thin and purple is how she described me often, like a skinned rabbit. I was also told frequently by my parents that they had been trying for a boy but gave up after I was born.

So not only was I the youngest and ugliest of the Gallagher girls, I was also a disappointment from the start.

My childhood was not a bad one as I recall. Apart from a case of child abuse at the hands of an older relative, when I was six, most of my childhood was spent in idyllic bliss. We were raised in a country village, in Nottinghamshire, England, and our home was always filled with Christian relatives and friends. Church was the most important thing in our lives and we were raised upon a gluttonous hunger for all things church.

We did not have the chance to think that there was anything else in life other than church because it was church three times on a Sunday, church two hours on a Tuesday night—being bible study night, Wednesday lunch time was fellowship time—for all the church ladies, Thursday night was prayer meeting, Friday night was youth night, and Saturdays were invariably spent chasing Christian conventions and special meetings across the county.

Even holidays were spent at Christian guest houses, or with other Christian friends, or at Christian conferences or festivals.

Only at school did we escape the whole Church fest. And even then, had my parents had the money, we would have been sent to a Christian church based school.

Unfortunately (or luckily, depending on your view) funds were low in our household, because mum did not work and dad had a low paid job. And there were six mouths to feed—plus all the other family that piled round constantly to visit. So it was reluctantly to state school that we were sent.

And it was at school that I learned of a very different way of life. Especially when out of the blue my parents uprooted us, when I was eight, to a mining village some miles away from the quintessential farming village life we had always known, so that they could do more of the Lord’s work there.

That place was typical of most Northern coal mining communities, salt of the earth folk perhaps, but rough and ready none the less. On my first day at the new school, I soon learned that my posh, middle class accent would not help me fit in. Nor, I realised, would my inability or reluctance to adopt the customs of the other kids—ie, swearing, fighting, and generally being loud and coarse and cocky. The kids in my new school were all clearly much more street wise and life hardened than I was, and mixing with them either had to toughen me up or isolate me completely.

So I developed two lives. One that had me sweetly singing Christian choruses in church and at home, and the other that had me swearing and being rude and ill mannered at school.

The guilt and confusion I felt at who and what I was supposed to be, had me bound in knots—not to mention the fear. A fear and guilt and confusion that has followed me for much of my life, incidentally.

This was the seventies and this was the decade when everywhere you went in church, the Second Coming was being thumped home to us all. Pulpits were being bashed fiercely by wild eyed preachers warning of the hell—fire and brimstone destination that awaited those who were caught out by the return of Jesus. Watch out—Jesus is coming back soon we were warned constantly. If you are not ready he will catch you unaware!

Everywhere you went in the seventies, there were little posters of a silhouetted figure of a masked robber with a swag bag and the caption Watch out there’s a thief about! and although that was a government warning against actual criminals lurking about ready to steal everything you had, and nothing to do with Christian belief—I can remember feeling the exact same sense of foreboding and paranoia every time I saw it, as though God was using those to signs to warn me constantly about the second return of Jesus. After all the scriptures did say—Be alert, for he comes as thief in the night! You can see where a child might draw the comparison!

I can remember living in fear that I would wake up one morning and my parents and family would have been raptured and I would have been left behind, fodder for the antichrist who would now be ruling the world. The amount of times I lay there in the middle of the night wide awake and terrified, a cold sweat breaking out on me as I feared my parents had been taken and I had been left behind like in that Christian horror film A Thief in the Night!

I certainly knew that I was not good enough to get taken to heaven, but for me it was an impossible situation—fitting in and not getting bullied at school meant that I was on my way to hell, and yet living that way of life was such a light relief from the oppressive atmosphere of church, where every grown up eye seemed to peer down on you, trying to limit your fun.

I knew I was bound for hell—I was a terrible daughter—always fighting with my sisters, often making my mother cry and throw herself on her bed in despair—but I didn’t want to be bad. I wanted to be good, I wanted to be a Christian.