Immersion - The Story of God

Welcome Back...

I've been in a bit of a blogging funk the past couple of weeks. Not sure why, just the way it goes from time to time I suppose.

There are going to be four posts today of some short pieces I wrote for an event we held at our church this past Sunday Evening. We're calling it Immersion - a chance for us to be immersed into the story of God at work in us and the world. There's an introductory movement and then three that follow. I hope you enjoy them.

Movement One:

Day before days to be numbered
Night before daynight was sundered
See without sight,
Spark before light
Look with the eyes of your soul.

What you see is not all there is. What you cannot see is more real, more solid than the ground on which you sit tonight. This story begins in a time when day and night meant nothing; and in a place where light and darkness walked together. It commences cloaked in invisibility.

Can you see what you don’t see? When you see the stars, can you see through their light so distant to a moment so distant when nothing exploded with light and heat and something was born?

Sound before music is rendered
Wind before whispers remembered
Echoes resounding
Universe bounding
Rings with the sound of his voice.

The wind whispers with the sound of a voice whose source is the music of the universe. You’ve heard it. You hear it echoing in your ears when you let the silence linger. You hear it in your own voice when it shakes with the smallness of life.

Can you hear what your ears don’t capture? When the ocean’s tide pounds the shore, can you hear in its roar the distant sound of a moment so distant when the first notes of the first symphony first sounded into the air and the universe began to resonate in the key of God?

Love at the center of being
Mystery is in you revealing
Beating of heart
Speaking in part
Of love you wish you had known.

Your heart beats with the cadence of an unearthly poetry. Your feet keep time with the rhythm of an unseen drum. You are not alone. You’ve never been alone. There is a love that has pursued you all the days of your life, and though you have run, and though you have attempted to hide, you cannot escape. You don’t want to escape. You want to be found.

Can you feel what your heart has longed for with its every beat since the day you were born? When you listen to a poet’s verse can you feel in your heart the distant rhythm of a distant moment when a perfect heart beat with a perfect love for a person who had not yet been born?

The story begins there, in those distant places, but it has flowed through millennia and centuries to this moment. Though your journey has wound through many twists and turns, it has brought you here tonight, to be immersed into the story of God at work in you, and in this world, even though you may never have recognized it.

Immersion - Hatred to Love

Hatred is such an ugly word. Perhaps it is most hideous when we see it in ourselves. Hitler, Stalin, the White Hoods of a KKK rally – these all jar us as disembodied and distant images of hatred. We recoil at their mention, not wanting to be bothered with the thoughts and feelings they arouse. But when the hatred is closer to home it’s harder to ignore and suppress.

“You don’t hate, though.” At least that’s what we tell ourselves. But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we hate what we don’t understand. Maybe we hate what makes us uncomfortable. Maybe we hate the one who is unlike us simply because we can. Maybe we hate ourselves, because we’ve never been able to be comfortable in our own skin. Or maybe, when it comes right down to it, we hate the idea of God.

God is easy to hate as long as we consider him to be the grumpy old man sitting in his big La-Z-boy recliner in some remote corner of the universe who is too old and crotchety to get up and do anything about all the bad stuff that’s happening in this world. God is easy to hate when we can’t seem to figure out why he made us the way that he did. God is easy to hate when we envision him as the Cosmic Hater.

But when the rhythm of his love some day overwhelms you, and captures your imagination, it becomes more difficult to hate – not just him, but others, and even yourself. When God the Cosmic Lover steps in our direction to embrace us, it’s possible that our defenses will relax and our hatred will melt away.

Do you remember when you first knew love? Do you remember the way that life was in that moment? Calling to you from across the distances of time and space is a God who has pursued you from before the moment of your birth. His love is seeking you, seeking to show you what love is, and how hatred has deformed and broken you.

You were followed here tonight. You’ll be followed when you go home. But it’s not because someone is hating you and hunting you. It’s because someone is looking to love you. Turn around, go ahead – you’ll see.

Immersion - Despair to Hope

Sometimes the music changes on us. Catching us by surprise the song takes us in a direction we never expected to be going. Once borne along by a beautiful melody the chords darken, the notes mellow and the lyrics cast shadows where once they had lit the path.

The music changes and we try to stop listening. We know it’s taking us nowhere, leading to a dead end, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves. We wake up worried, live frazzled, and sleep fitfully because we can’t get the song out of our head. Its sounds swell in our ears and threaten to wipe out the idea that there ever was hope, or a future.

Call it what you want – call it life, call it reality, call it the human experience. But whatever you call it, remember that the music can always change again. Don’t forget that as quickly and subtly as the shadows came, the light can come again. Don’t lose the sound of the music of hope that still resonates in your soul when you hear it.

There is a song that you were born to sing. There is a melody that you can live to carry, and it’s a tune of hope, and promise, and possibility. The notes that sound at the center of the universe resound with the echoes of a beautiful day. They are strong, they are bright, and they are here to carry you along like the songs of your youth carry you away to another time and another place.

When you sing the song you were created to sing, you will find your voice. It is sweet, rich and lovely. There is nothing monotonous about it. It is not uniform or an endless repetition of sameness. Oh, what’s that? You haven’t found it yet? Wait. It’s looking for you now.

Immersion - Fear to Faith

What are we afraid of, really? When you were a kid maybe you were afraid of the dark and your parents had to buy you a night light to get you to sleep at night. Maybe you were scared silly by your crazy old neighbor who used to yell unintelligible phrases out here window as you and your friends ran through her backyard.

But one fine day our fears went and grew up, sprouted legs and started walking around the living room like they owned the place. They followed us out the door on our way to work and crept under the covers when we came home to sleep. They haunted our dreams and blurred our vision, and the whole time we kept waiting for them to disappear like they used to when Mom and Dad cradled our heads in their arms and whispered words of comfort. But the comfort didn’t come, and we woke up in a cold sweat one morning knowing without a doubt that the world was falling apart and we were going to get crushed in the fallout.

Sometimes for all the blank canvas in front of us, with all of its white and wide open spaces, we still can’t see. We see the stars, see the sun and the moon, the trees and the fields, and there is this nagging suspicion that we’re lost in the middle of it all. We want to paint, to allow our hands to float free over the canvas and create something beautiful but those fears seem to creep up on us like the monster under our bed, and chain our hands to our sides.

Sure, the fears are more sophisticated now. We’re not afraid of the dark outside our window at night, but the black emptiness that sometimes stares back at us from the eyes in the mirror – eyes that are the windows to our soul. You might think this sounds overly dramatic. But ask yourself if you’ve never felt pursued by a nameless and faceless fear that threatens to extinguish the last spark of belief that there is something more to what we see.

Ask yourself if you’ve ever been afraid of nothing. Tell yourself that you’ve never feared that the story of your life would amount, in the end, to exactly nothing. Tell yourself that you’ve never been afraid that God, if you could even call him that, thinks nothing more of you than an elephant considers a gnat on his backside.

And while you’re telling yourself all that, remind yourself that your fears, no matter how haunting; and your doubts, no matter how daunting, are whispering to you that you could be something great. They’re telling you that what you really fear is what might happen if you don’t believe. They’re actually inviting you to open up to a God who, get this, believes in you. He believes there is enough possibility inside of you that he wants to shape you into his own image. He sees past the blank canvas and past the dirty dredges of clay to the finished product – and what he sees is beautiful!

Jacob Goes to School...

Today, my little boy went off to school - preschool that is. He's 3 1/2 (as he'd tell you very quickly) and he's extremely excited about his first preschool experience. He is attending Sandcastles Montessori Preschool, which is renting space from the church that I happen to pastor.

It's pretty hard for me to believe that Jacob is growing up so quickly. I can still remember the day he arrived in this big, wide world. I can still hear those first newborn cries, smell the sweet smell of his baby skin, and feel the softness of his infant skin on my cheeks.

Lately I've been trying to teach Jacob three little lessons that I think will serve him well no matter what adventure comes. Although he'll recite them a little grudgingly at this point (I believe the exact phrase is, "Daddy, do we have to say this every day?") he would be able to tell you what they are:

1. You are extraordinary, because God made you that way.
2. I love you. No matter what, no questions asked, I love you.
3. I believe in you. I believe that whatever God sets in your heart to do, He will give you the ability to accomplish.

And thinking about it today, I thought about how quickly we forget those simple lessons. Or about the possibility that maybe no one ever took the time to tell you those things. Jacob went to school today, but in his going, I think I may be the one learning the biggest lessons...

New England Leadership Roundtable

I'm taking a brief break from the synergy discussion (great thoughts going all around, I'm hoping to post tomorrow) to inject a plug for an event I'll be helping to host in October.

October 3rd Alex McManus will be here in Providence for an event called a Leadership Roundtable. This is designed to be an experience of interactive coaching and conversation with Alex, who is a genuine innovator and man possessed with the vision to advance the Kingdom of God to the ends of the earth.

This event is, for me, an extension of an experience I began earlier this year. I participated in the inaugural cohort for the International Mentoring Network which culminated in an amazing week spent in Los Angeles with several other men in whose company I am (in all sincerity) humbled to be found. I came back from that experience with a passion to share what I'd seen and heard there with people here - this is one way I'm trying to do just that.

I know this blog is being read by all kinds of people in all kinds of locations, but if you're going to be in the Providence area in October, see if you can make it to this event. There's a cost associated with it($99), and I'm not shy to say that you'll get your money's worth for the experience. The event will be hosted by Renaissance Church and my good friend, Scott Axtmann.

If you're interested, you can register here.

There's even a rumor that THE Octavio will be present...and a confirmed response from the illustrious Dale Swinburne.