Woody’s two-word invitation made me ponder a four-word promise Jesus made before he headed back to heaven. As he told his first-century followers to go and make disciples, he assured them, “I am with you.” That promise goes well with his command not to be afraid and his foretelling of the Holy Spirit’s omnipresence. But this morning, I heard something different in that claim: an invitation to access him.
2020 needs no introduction, but this tumultuous year introduced me to three new prayers. My conversations with Jesus grew sweeter and more intimate while the world around me seemed to move further away, and these simple prayers proved cathartic for my soul. You might find them helpful. Just in case, here’s how I bumped into them.
Before meeting Todd, I’d never been in a service where the person leading music checked out of their “duty” and just prayed on their knees until the instruments stopped. I’d never seen someone walk off the stage to comfort someone during a song. I’d never seen someone put down their mic and their ego and then shout praise or whisper prayers while everyone else kept singing. Years after these firsts, Todd lost his voice and still led our church services—just with his mic muted during the music. In every other church I’ve attended, I’d never seen anything like that. That role went to the person with the best voice, the most musical experience, or someone with the pedigree of specific liturgical castes.
If an angel called you something, it’d probably stick. That’s your nickname now. Even if nobody else ever used that name for you, you’d probably say it when you looked in the mirror. It’d definitely make it into your journal.
For me, it’s a been a hard factory reset on my hardware. It’s led to more time in nature, where I feel Jesus most and closest. It’s asked me how much of my identity is wrapped up in my commercial value and what those paychecks afford. It’s confronted my privilege, my arrogance, my condescension. It’s alerted me that I’m not as good of a friend as I had previously thought. It’s reminded me that I’m not in control.
I walk in this darkness with “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” I have access to the source of all light, the genesis of all triumph, the fountain of all good things. His rivers flow in the dark. His waterfalls pound boulders whether tourists watch or not. His tides rise and fall without intervention. His purview surpasses my imagination.
God makes beautiful things for himself, whether we will ever find it. He paints and sculpts because he can, because he enjoys it. He creates just to store beauty. He curates gardens and fountains where we can’t take credit for them. He has done this for millennia, knowing that we would take centuries to find his masterpieces—that we might never find them.
One thing we can all be a part of, though, is the remedy for whatever we feel ails our local church or even the global Church. Few of us will impact multiple churches. None of us will change the American church as we know it. We can, however, follow Mother Teresa’s call to “help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.”
What is possible to experience and what is impossible to know should both draw us to marvel. Both should make us wonder how we got here. We should all be amazed on a regular basis.
I’ll never forget that moment in my life: the sense of accomplishment, the impression of awe. Scientists have found that reflecting on life’s wins like these refuels our serotonin levels in our bodies, which helps us manage stress. Triggering those memories and what goes with them immunizes us to burnout. So, I wear these hats regularly to take me back to January 2008.
Preachers have explained to me from pulpits that children inherently trust others, that they don’t bring a lot of baggage to their worldview, that they accept premises without a lot of investigation. As the uncle of thirteen developing humans, though, I’ve found that the inquisitive questions never stop. From what I’ve heard as the friend of multiple child counselors, kids can be skittish, skeptical, and complicated.
I just ugly cried in a public park downtown.
Don’t worry: they were happy tears. I was overcome with both gratitude and hope.
Worship has changed for me over the past decade, informed by others (like Todd) who see worship as a lifestyle instead of as the standing song, the sitting song, and the standing song before a sermon.
There’s not a single verse in the Bible that says church has to be boring, that it has to be attended in investment banker attire, that worship can be expressed only in liturgical ways. When Jesus healed people or raised their loved ones from the dead, how do you think those beneficiaries responded? If lives are being utterly changed in a church, why would we expect a different response?
So, for the last three days, I’ve been talking to God about it, asking for something worthy of John, worthy of his mom, worthy of answered prayer. Today, I interviewed John for an hour about his mom—a woman I’ve never met.
The best distance to affect spiritual formation in another is three feet or less.
What if worshippers didn’t have the restraints of religion?
Is it that hard to think there’d be more than one way to communicate with the God of creativity, variety, and inspiration?
As I sang these words, I struggled to say them. Something inside me pushed me to lift my arms, as the Psalmist requests—as my spiritual heritage condemns as “vain glory.” I pushed through my trained restraint, raising my fists above my head, almost victoriously.
In that way, I guess, I connect to David. Like the psalmist, my sin ironically drives me toward him and spiritual closeness.
But it was like I was trying to excuse my choice of not being a pastor, a thought many preachers’ sons probably struggle to extinguish. I enjoy design and writing. I just assumed growing up that the higher echelon of Christians all had talents they had to abandon to be vocational ministers.