It's been a couple of weeks since I returned from my weekend at Mt. Angel. I don't want to turn the experience in to some spiritual high that I'm trying to clutch and grab onto for as long as possible, but as I read over my journal entries from that weekend, I have to say that a chord strikes in my heart and I feel the pull towards contemplation tugging yet again. I feel a slight lift in my spirit and flutter in my soul thinking about the raw beauty of solitude with God. Obviously, I haven't been able to get time like that with God back here at the YWAM campus. But I've noticed that some revelations from that weekend have definitely translated into my day-to-day here, which I think is really important, and tells that the experience wasn't just hype.
For one, I don't find myself resenting corporate prayer and worship anymore. Before the weekend at the monastery, I could pinpoint numerous times when simply being in worship or intercession with other Christians made me so furious I would run out of the event and go to my house, slam the door and scream cry into my pillow for an hour. I could never figure out why praying and worshiping, things that are supposed to be deep times of communion with God, would make me so damned pissed. But in the silence at the monastery I noticed that in corporate worship times, I wasn't seeking God for God's sake. I was seeking a vision, a picture, a word, anything to share with everyone else in the room to prove that I "hear God". Not only that, but I was definitely testing my own ability to twist his arm--to see how much I would whine and strive until I got him to do what I wanted. Of course you never realize these things until you are able to step outside of things and take a good hard look at yourself. God definitely helped me do that. Now when I'm in worship or prayer I take comfort in the fact that it has nothing to do with me. All worship and prayer is about is bowing my head and honoring a God a thousand times bigger than myself. It's about sitting in the wonder of the fact that I'll never be able to control any part of who He is. I'm helpless in taming him. And just to clarify, this isn't sappy sentiment I'm talking about--I'm not sitting wide-eyed, with warm fuzzies about God (although there's a place for that). I'm talking about a deep peace and sense of humility, knowing that I am tiny and God is HUGE. That simple fact of knowing that it's useless for me to manipulate God or back him into a corner, melts my rage. Thank God.
Secondly, my bible has also shifted from being a source of resentment to a source of life and refuge. I want to read my bible. Because it's not about me. It's not about what I can get from it. Yeah, that's a perk. But it's just a perk. The Bible is about learning about the biggest most beautiful most complicated neverending never able to understand thing in the whole universe--God. And something about picking up this Bible freakishly gives me life in a way nothing else does. It honestly freaks me out sometimes, because I can't explain what it does in my soul. It shifts things. It hasn't been like that for a while and I think the shift is this--lifting my gaze from my navel, to God himself. He's so much cooler than me.
Again, thank God.
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