Monday, November 22, 2010

The Summit “Unplugged”

Have you ever felt like you were part of something incredible, but couldn’t put it into words? Your fear was that no one would dare understand your excitement once you started down the precarious path of trying to use the shallow reservoir of vocabulary at your disposal. Well, that’s me.

This weekend our church planned and enacted a Sunday worship entitled “Unplugged.” I dubbed it The Summit “In the Round.” It was special in the most simplistic way. The cross was placed in the center of our worship space and an altar was created with rock stacked around the base of the cross. The chairs were arranged in a circle extending outward making room for each additional row. The band, well, they were the unplugged part—except for our base player. As it seems, acoustic base are not that popular. See, I told you it doesn’t seem so exciting by my description. But, maybe it wasn’t the room, or the music?

Maybe the excitement was drawn from the people that flocked to The Summit’s service to worship and remove part of the dense baggage that the world has given them all week? Maybe it was watching their face when they seemed to get that I was emotional vested in what I sharing? Maybe, it was the single moment that they voiced to their own inner conscious, “Hey, God does love me!” Maybe it was none of these things?

I wonder, if not for a second, the feelings I experienced were part of the same gift that I wanted others to feel through my words. Maybe it had nothing to do with the room semiotics, or the semiotics of what I was saying, but maybe, just maybe, it was feelings drawn from listening to God. I wonder to myself, as my excitement grows stronger, could it be as simple as that? Could my excitement be contributed to affirmation -that my small steps were somehow coming closer to the large cosmic steps that God makes on multi-dimensional levels? I wonder that in a lesser than life-threatening way is what I was feeling just as important as Abraham walking Isaac to the scene of obedience on Mount Moriah? I got to think it was different.

Maybe it wasn’t the room, the congregation, the band, or my ability to say a word in honor of the Messiah and a cross. Maybe it was the children and the way they circled together and sang, for the adults, “Sanctuary?” Maybe that’s it! What if everything I was feeling could not be contributed to a single act, but rather, everything that took place on that Sunday—beginning with my walking in my office door and lifted the screen on my much-coveted MacBook Pro to the private after-service conversation of a dear friend that wanted to make sure that I was not getting burned out! Probably more than anything, it was the culmination of events, one building on the next, until the serene God that was present in the room even before we arrived made the congregation aware that God was in our amidst. And yes, in tune with Luke, the cross was just the center of it all. Maybe that’s why I’m excited?

I love my church.