Open the doors and see all the people

We crawled out last Sunday from our confinement into the morning light after fourteen long months.  The light and the experience almost blinded us at first.  And while we had been faithful in attending church on a screen during the pandemic, and while worshiping God is always "in person," now that we are vaccinated and given the official go-ahead, it was time to go to church.

It has been so long since I have been in any kind of group of people in real life, not just on a screen, I was admittedly a bit anxious about it.  Staying home was comfortable for me.  Staying apart had become our new ordinary.   Zoom sustained us when we had nothing more, and what would we have done without it?  But it is not a substitute for the real thing.  Zoom has content and faces.  It is two-dimensional, having the appearance of length and breadth but has no depth.  It is missing a vital dimension.  Church is not just three-dimensional, being with people, but the limitless reality of the spiritual.  Zoom has not the capacity to love like "being the Body" does.  Zoom is an informational event.  Church as it was intended is a transformational experience.

We went to church.   And while people were still careful, scattered about the sanctuary, there was something very different being there.  You are able any day of the week to get a sermon on YouTube or a podcast.  But we stood not just in that physical building, but among God's people there, and worshiped. The music, even songs and hymns I could sing without words on the screen, embraced me.  Singing the ancient words of the Doxology made tears come to my eyes.  Not by an emotional reaction, but a response to the reality of church.  There is not just community there. Community is being built there.  We saw people that morning, not just faces on a screen.  We met others for the first time that we had come to know just on Zoom.  We interacted with some acquaintances we hadn't seen since the winter before last.  God invented the Church.  And the church did not just survive the pandemic, but thrived in spite of it.  I realized standing in that age-old sanctuary, how much we had missed.  And how much we need the church...and the church needs each one of us.

We have become once again the early Church.  We need each other.  We need to worship.  We are wired to worship.  If we do not worship the Almighty God, a lesser god will take His rightful place.   If I don't see the need for church, something else will infiltrate.   If we "don't have the time for that," we will live poorer for it and wonder at the emptiness.  Our own self-proclaimed "freedom" becomes another outpost of our enslavement.

 

And they devoted themselves

    to the apostles' teaching

and the fellowship,

to the breaking of bread

       and the prayers.

And awe came upon every soul...

                 Acts 2. 42-43 

 

I realized that awe on Sunday.  Until those moments, standing in that sanctuary, I didn't realize what I was homesick for.

 

And let us consider how to stir up one another

          to love and good deeds,

not neglecting to meet together,

as is the habit of some,

but encouraging one another,

and all the more as you see

       the Day drawing near.

           Hebrews 10. 24-25

And if that is not enough...

We were camping earlier this week, stepping outside my comfort zone, being a little bit vulnerable and beyond the grip of the clock or the grid of the internet.  We set up our tent on campsite 56, settling intentionally not just into the wilderness but into endangered spaces of time itself.  

In those moments, I do not require a permission slip or need an excuse to sit in those margins and think and look around me at the wonders of creation.  I can feel the cool breezes that do not come from a ventilation system.  I can sense the warm embrace of an early sun.  I can listen to the concertina of the woods, the chattering of squirrels, the chorus of birds practicing their parts, the rustle of leaves, and the groaning of ancient trees.

I was sitting in my little fold-up camp chair, just sitting there without an agenda, looking upward into a boundless blue that defies description.  And suddenly, Scripture was fleshed out before me.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A passage I had read earlier in God's Word came to life:

For Your steadfast love is great above the heavens, 

Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!  

Let Your glory be over all the earth!  

                                Psalm 108. 4-5 

That kind of steadfast love holds us, that kind of faithfulness we can rely, that kind of glory has no limit.  Words have not yet been invented for that hue of blueness, let alone the magnitude of God translated into language.

But then the trees waved their branches and rustled their leaves as if trying to catch my attention.  Because if the enormity of the heavens is not enough, God also provides an intricate canopy of trees.

For you shall go out with joy,

and be led forth with peace.

The mountains and the hills break forth

before you into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall

                 clap their hands.

                            Isaiah 55. 12

Tish Harrison Warren's new book Prayer in the Night spells out the wonder:

"To believe in something beyond the material world we have to take up practices that form our imagination – and hearts and minds—in light of the resurrection, in light of the possibility that, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

And if that is not enough, surrounded visually by His glory, we can know we are loved by God more than we can realize and grasp.  Just looking up at the vastness of the heavens, we capture but a glimpse of what His steadfast love looks like.

And then go into our day under that great canopy and into that grand chorus.

 

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Two days ago, my six-year-old granddaughter and I were headed to the public library for a curbside pick-up, on just an ordinary day -- which is never so ordinary at all.  Something sparked our conversation to talking about God and that everyone does not believe in Him.

"But what about the proof of God?" she asked.

And before I could even say anything, she said, "The proof of God is everywhere.  You just have to walk into the woods.  And see God did this."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of the mouths of babes, His glory shines.  The awe of God is so obvious to them.  Children are not surprised by Him at all, but recognize what is beautiful, unexpected, and inexplicable.  There is so much that we are distracted from and miss entirely, even that which is pointblank before us.

Walk into this day like a six-year-old.  Capture the wonders of His faithfulness all around you.  It is not that God will show up.  He is already here and continues to reveal Himself.   We are the ones who need to show up.

And see the forest and the trees.

 

For you shall go out in joy

and be led forth in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

shall break forth into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

                          Isaiah 55. 12