Before you read this you need to read my post from yesterday in order to make the link with Halloween – it acts as an introduction. I wrote it as a way to give us Evangelical Christians (normally very wary of Halloween) a different way to think about it. The idea revolved around liminality – thin times and spaces created by change. I want to relate that to part of what I do in life.

At TEAR Fund, on the last day of the every month we devote the day to prayer. We divide the work day into 20 minute slots and each staff member takes one of those times. We pray for our supporters, our partner organisations working around the world, and we pray for the communities they work with. It’s a time to remind ourselves about who we are, what we do, why we do it and who we do it for and most importantly, it’s a chance to bring our organisation back to the feet of God as ultimately, all that we are and do is His.

This morning I introduced our day of prayer by reading about Jesus’ time in the wilderness/desert. I used Eugene Peterson’s rendition of Luke 4:1-13 in The Message. Jesus’ time in the wilderness is a liminal time – it’s the space between his childhood and baptism and the beginning of his ministry. It’s a ‘thin’ time. In it he’s faced with evil and the temptations that go with it. It’s a time of change between who he was and who he was to become.

There are plenty of these sort of times in the Bible where people are faced with change; they’re faced with liminal time – that time between who they were and who they will become. It’s a space of uncertainty and unknowing. Think about the Israelites wandering in the desert, between who they were in Egypt and who they would become. Moses faces a liminal time after he kills the Egyptian slave driver. He flees and no longer is his identity found in who he was but nor was he yet the great liberator of the Israelites. The Disciples, in their whole time with Jesus were in a liminal period, between who they were when they were called by him and who they would become following his Resurrection. They also faced an intense liminal time in the moment between the Crucifixion and Resurrection and then again between the Ascension and when they began to preach. The sweep of scripture is littered with such stories and they all have something in common – God acted in those times and people were shaped into who he wanted them to be. That shaping was often tough and not pretty but the space between the people and God in that liminal time became ‘thin’ and we sometimes see God acting in very dramatic ways. Whether those circumstances were thrust upon them by their own doing, by others or by God, each time represented a moment or period where their certainty was stripped away, they were faced with the best and worst of who they were and God acted.

Too often we flee from these times, doing everything we can to hold on to certainty and absolutes rather than facing our fears, embracing the sense of mortality they often bring and allowing the process. Halloween gives us a chance to think about and reflect on those times – with all the terrors they can bring. This morning I used Halloween and Deadrich, my accompanying plastic skull (representing our mortality), as an introduction to invite our staff towards embracing our own liminal space.

At TEAR Fund we exist with liminality constantly. Natural disasters and humanitarian disasters brought on by conflict cause liminal times for large numbers of people. Our partner organisations serving some of the poorest communities in the world face change and liminality constantly as circumstances around them shift and turn at sometimes rapid rates. The media environment can cause liminality as it twists from one story to the next, taking the whims of donors with them, thus shifting where we have to, and need to focus our attention. We can all see such shifting and changing, such liminality, as reason for stress, or we can see our environment and the work that we do as a thin space – the space where the barriers between us and God are stripped away.

It is my firm belief that the space between God and the poor is thin and I think it has to do with the lack of certainty that goes with their context and their being – they exist in liminal time and space. We all have an opportunity step into that with them and embrace the voice and actions of the Divine in the thinning of that space. We enter their liminality and in order to do so, we embrace our own liminality. That’s what we do at TEAR Fund and plenty of people journey with us in that.