Fresh off a much needed silent retreat, I’m a woman of few words today. Indeed, I sense that much is changing within and around me and I choose to dance to the vibrant melody of change. Isn’t that the essence of creation? Something becoming another, even if that first thing was nothing at all.
Change - It's like the first notes from an orchestra breaking through the palpable sound of silent anticipation, shifting its audience ready or not through portals of time and memory, charting a path to a place they long to be or have been before.
All of creation will change, or it will die. I mean this in the now, and certainly the hereafter. In fact the entire goal of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we are changed - especially in the right direction. Because there is a wrong direction of change: it is prideful, forceful, disingenuous and unkind. Even the purest intentions to be changed into something good can become corrupted without a North Star. For us, the cross is True North.
This month’s pick is a video a friend-in-the-Life sent to me last week. Friendships are so important on the journey of life and to Life, but so is the lack of them. As humans we have a natural fear of emptiness and solitude, but these very things are the foundation of divine power. God will only fill an empty space, and I have seen him forcefully empty me - kicking and screaming - to fill me up with so much good. What a great love. So I digress to say, be determined to be surrounded only by the right people and not by a lot of people. This is counterintuitive to our world of social currency, but the best things are counterintuitive to a corrupted and decaying world.
In this sermon, a teacher I respect for simplicity in bearing the gospel, reorients us to the entire reason for our faith. And it’s not to be platformed, to be popular, to be wealthy, not even to build generational wealth - it is simply that we are saved, along with everyone we encounter. But here’s the paradox, and the only proof we will ever need that God's wisdom is chasms different from ours, because this simple yet crucial purpose of the gospel - that we are saved - houses within itself the totality of the wisdom and the power of God. Have you considered the power of God lately? Not read it, or prayed it, I mean truly considered it. If so, you would need some help.
Last week in meditative worship I asked the Father to open my eyes, to really see His glory. I wanted to quantifiably experience His essence. Size? Weight? Grandeur? I’m a mortal communicating with an immortal so I didn’t know, I just wanted to know, the one I was worshiping and adoring. He carried my mind to a visit to the planetarium a couple weekends ago with a dear friend. The images of the universe that I saw on that trip made me gasp, breathless. Then in that moment of prayer, my mind began to wrangle how with a word and breath, my Father made those magnificent things.
Overwhelmed by this lesson, this fraction of a response to my prayer, I puked all over my living room floor. I know, dramatic, but I remember my eyes widening with this realization, as images flashed through my head that I cannot describe, coupled with the understanding that this great being came in human form to live with me, die for me and be with me forever? It was enough to knock me down to my knees - and empty the contents of my gut across my hardwood floor. The truth is that we cannot handle the fullness of God and yet He simplified this gut-wrenching reality in Jesus who is the express image of the Father. How does something so unimaginably large fit in something so ordinary as a man? I suppose in the same inexplicable way the Spirit of God dwells inside us even this moment.
As soon as I watched the video I found it to be such a palette cleanser. A break from the pressures to do and to create and to achieve, which even believers fall prey to. There is nothing wrong with achievements but the power to achieve - and real power carries ease - is in the truth that Truth already did everything for me on the cross at Calvary. The One who made all the fantastic and mind blowing things I saw at the planetarium - forget earth - came down to the most underwhelming of planets as a man and suffered pain and deep humiliation, for me? It’s wrecked me nonstop for many days now and put me back together differently each time. And if that isn’t true power, then absolutely nothing is.
Count it fortune to be realigned to True North, every time that we are, because even (or perhaps especially) the greatest vessels need realignment - and we are vessels unto honor. Without True North you can imagine that we are imbalanced, off-kilter and suffering from spiritual vertigo, heads spinning from all the principles, rules, recommendations and teachings telling us what new life should look like. Yet there is only one who knows what our lives should be. And set here for a purpose full of death and beauty, when we find True North, there we meet with Him. This meeting breaks down our mortality for immortality, our corruption for incorruptibility, exchanging our nature for His own - and it feels like pure chaos. I know it. But now we don’t fight this change, we dance.
In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.”
- Henri Nouwen
Grace-Grace.
I have read a lot of words in my short span on this blue-green planet, and many of them incites brilliance. A few provokes deep emotions. This! This just plainly just brings me into the warm embrace of a simple, yet profound message of an immortal God who stooped low to embrace a mortal man. This is so beautifully expressed and utterly amazing. Thanks for sharing!
Very Deep and Insightful! Bless you, Babygirl!
"I am just here to be beautiful"... bathing in the love flowing from the True North. Thank you for sharing