hunger

Maybe our hunger for God is a hunger to be known. Maybe my hunger for God is a hunger to be known. I want to be known...to be understood. Maybe I think that somehow if others know me...I'll know myself better. Sometimes I feel like I'm a stranger I've only met in passing.

A hint of surrender

This weekend John asked me what I thought about missions--specifically where I related to them. Little did he know that he was knocking on a door I'd been opening a lot during the last several months. Various chapel speakers would relate the need on the mission field--two women from Wytcliffe vividly painted the faces of people receiving God's word for the first time in their native language. My roommate has never stopped talking passionately about her heart for the Romanian orphans she met on spring break. And I started asking myself what I did think about missions.

I remember coming home from summer mission trips in high school. Outwardly I was excited--I was serving God on the mission field, sharing the good news of Christ...but inwardly, the entire thing frankly scared me to death, and I'd breathe a sigh of relief when it was all over. And I'd feel horrible for feeling that way. After all, Christ told us to share his good news with all people. It wasn't "all people" I feared. It was the "sharing the good news." So I came home from Hong Kong, Peru, and Trinidad secretly deciding that I had done my duty, I obviously wasn't called to missions because it scared me, and now I could go on and get started with my "real" life in the U.S. of A. But lately I'm not so sure. When I hear about missions (both foreign and domestic)--I immediately start making excuses to myself--how I'm not called, how I don't have the missionary skills, how God would obviously never send me. And my reaction is much the same with sharing my faith in general. Instead of looking for ways to talk about Christ, I look for ways to avoid it. I know that isn't the way it should be. I have the bread of life, and all I do is hoard it.

On the drive back from Ohio, my thoughts returned to this now-familiar path. But this time they went further. As I was thinking about my plans for the future, I felt God speaking to my heart with a clarity I rarely experience. He said to me, "Don't hold your life too tightly...it might not be what you've got planned." And I'm still not quite sure what to call the feeling I experienced. But with David Crowder in the background and my hands gripping the steering wheel, my heart began to soften--and it tasted of surrender. I still don't know where my place is in missions--maybe God is simply telling me to open my mind about a possibility--maybe I'll spend the entirety of my life working a 9 to 5. But I know my mission hasn't left me there either.

true words

I haven't the time or energy to write at the moment, but here's another voice.

"Is it not true that for most of us who call ourselves Christians there is no real experience? We have substituted theological ideas for an arresting encounter, we are full of religious notions, but our greatest weakness is that for our hearts there is no one there. Whatever else it embraces, true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God. Without this, religion is but a shadow, a reflection of reality, a cheap copy of an original once enjoyed by someone else of whom we have heard." --A. W. Tozer

So true. Let me not settle for less than all of God--I want the live symphony, but so often I listen to a cheap music box.

horizontal humble pie

I went into chapel on Friday anticipating the usual praise and worship with relish--I could already feel the stress seeping from my shoulders. Then the usual announcements began...and kept going...and going...instead of worship music, I was listening to a play-by-play of our upcoming Day of Prayer and Service. I shifted in my seat, nudged my roommate, and nodded to the speaker to get on with it so we could start the real chapel. He kept talking. At 10:48 (chapel ends at 11), I was past annoyance, and I started asking whether this was announcement chapel. At this point, I had tuned the person speaking completely out.

Finally, the band jogged on, and the worship leader began singing "Great is Thy Faithfulness" a cappella. But I couldn't sing. I had gotten so worked up about the length of the announcements, that when the worship actually began, I couldn't focus on God. I didn't have an attitude of worship; the feeling that ultimately overwhelmed me was one of shame. I haven't felt that intense level of conviction in quite some time--I had become so immersed in my own agenda (which to me seemed to be, of course, SO holy) that I missed not only an opportunity to listen to an encouragement to serve but almost the very thing I had come to do.

Scripture reminds us again and again that our vertical relationship (me to God, God to me) is intrinsically linked to our horizontal relationships (me to others). We aren't to come before God in the Lord's Supper if we aren't right with our brother or sister; if we hate our brother or sister, we cannot say we love God. How true. And after some heart-to-heart with my merciful heavenly Father, I was able to enter into worship (albeit a bit more humbly).