Creation from Chaos

I find that God often challenges my thoughts and statements to bring me to a better understanding of God. Recently my thoughts have been directed to our weekly church service. I have been a supporter of the idea that we need some peace and quiet in our services in order to be able to worship. I have said that with the distractions currently in our church that it has become harder to find that place where we can worship and commune with God. One thing I find curious is that whenever I begin to make absolute statements and dig my heals in and refuse to bend in how I see things, God comes along and whispers in my ear that I may not be right. I may not be seeing the whole picture and just maybe God has a purpose for all the things that are happening in our weekly services. I was reminded this week that nothing new comes from anything that has become static and non-moving. We have quickly forgotten how we felt when the church service contained too much order and too much structure. We have forgotten that we wanted to be “free” to worship and not be constrained by a strict adherence to an order of worship that left no room for God to move among us
(not that God doesn’t move just fine within the order of worship). So I’m sitting in church and watching a mixture of order and freedom and God whispers in my soul that this is God’s work………..this is what happens when we dare to be what God has made us to be. We are a people with diverse needs and desires and we often speak up and shout to anyone who will listen what those needs and desires are. The problem comes when we find ourselves standing with our brother or sister and we stop long enough to hear that we are no longer shouting the same thing. So we experience a little tension and this is where I think God comes in. God takes that tension, that pulling of sides, and creates something totally new from it. That chaos that seems to exist in the middle between two opinions or between two people who see things from a different perspective, is the stuff of creation. God takes that chaos in the spaces in between us and shapes and forms a new thing. So as I watched our service, I realized that the service we have today is not what anyone envisioned a few years ago but yet there were little pieces of all of the conflicts from the past in there. Now I wonder and look forward to what God will create from this present moment of tensions and different ideas. Conflicts and tensions, however large or small, that open themselves up to the creator’s hand always emerge as something new, something healed and more whole than it was before.

Making a Quiet Place In Our Spiritual Life

Making a quiet space in our spiritual life.

I am concerned that our only weekly service offers very little space for being silent, for listening, for making a connection with the still small voice that often gets drowned out by the noise of our lives. I used to practice what I called a daily quiet time every day. I have fallen out of the habit lately and am now realizing how necessary that time was for my spiritual life, indeed for all of life. As I pondered my reasons for neglecting this important part of life, I began to wonder if the church, as a body often neglects this as well. I believe we do neglect this time of quietness and to our detriment. We spend a great deal of time trying to make the worship service "flow" and trying to bring a passionate response from the congregation through uplifting sermons and often loud emotionally charged music complete with visual stimulation just in case filling one sense (hearing) is not enough. I think all of these things are good things and the more senses we can have involved in our services then the more likely people are going to respond in a positive way with our Creator. But I also wonder if we are carrying on a one-sided relationship with God. We have very little time in our service to just listen to God. We talk about God and about what God is doing. We sing of our adoration of God and we even sing to God with songs such as "I Love You Lord". But we very seldom get quiet enough to hear any response that God might have for us. We all have people in our lives who talk "at" us and seem never interested in our response. I fear the church is becoming one of those who talks "at" God but isn't much interested in God's response. Maybe our main weekly service is not the most appropriate service to encourage the other side of the conversation. We can and should all try to listen everyday in our personal lives to what God is trying to share with us so that when we come together as a body then we can share through our songs and sermons and testimonies what God has done and is doing but shouldn't there be some place and time that the church can meet together to listen to the other side of the conversation?

I believe recently we have heard some begin to cry out for more quietness in the service. I don't necessarily think they are calling for a quiet time with God or a time of meditation though I know some are asking for a more quiet place and time to worship or express their worship in that manner. I also know that some are really just asking for less noise at certain times in the service. I wonder if we had a different time during the week that was geared towards a service of more quiet worship and meditation if we might begin to be more tolerant of the "louder" Sunday evening worship service. I suppose tolerant isn't really the word I am looking for here but rather "enjoy" the Sunday service. It would seem quite like being fed dessert all time, after awhile you can no longer enjoy that wonderful dessert because you are lacking the other wonderful foods such as vegetables and meat and bread. There is no balance and your body would begin to rebel. So I think our spirit is rebelling a little at being fed a steady diet of stimulation in our weekly service without the balance of a more quiet time of listening to God's response to our worship and our prayer. I'm sure that not all of us need such a structured service in order to make a quiet place in our spiritual lives but some of us desperately need a more structured place available to us to nurture this part of us.

I think we are getting bogged down with focusing on the "noise" and trying to fix the "noise" level when maybe we should focus on the lack of a space in our lives for quiet. It is not the noise that keeps us from experiencing this solitude and quiet worship in our lives but rather the lack of setting aside time for both the noise and the quiet. We should rejoice in our Sunday worship service and not be afraid to express the more louder emotions but if we are to be free to do this and enjoy this in ourselves and others then we have to learn to set aside a space and time and make a quiet place in our spiritual life and we must do that as a corporate body as well as individuals. I believe God will speak to us individually but I also believe God wants to speak to us as a church. Sometimes we need to hear God together just as we need to sing together to God.

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