I love our new church.  God keeps using the sermons to converse with me, to challenge me, and to uncover something that needs changing, discarding or embracing.  God keeps inviting me to walk into a place deeper with Him, a place I haven’t been in awhile and a place I haven’t yet gone.  We’re on this journey together, and God is using different aspects of this church to push me on further.  I’m excited about all the possibilities…

I love the worship too.  Beautiful music and hearts sincerely seeking after Him.  There’s an earnestness and sincerity by the worship leaders that draws me into His presence…  And ya know, I love too that there’s a diversity in music too.  It’ll take me awhile to get used to gospel music or singing songs in Spanish, but I like it.  Even if it’s not my “heart music”, I like it.  Here’s a video that I sneakily took on Sunday.  You can hear Sam singing on the video. 

And God’s given me an opportunity to serve at Coast.  I’ve been meeting with two of the pastors to develop a discipleship strategy for the church.  Something about employing one of my passions makes me wanna sing!

The church meets on top of a high mountain, so every Sunday, Sam and I always ooh and ahh over the grand view of the ocean as we’re driving back down.  Here’s what I mean:
   

See how happy we are after we’ve worshiped God?

Like most Americans, I am so used to a particular rendition of Psalm 23, that it just rolls off my tongue without effort and without thought:  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”  And while such a phrase has meaning to me, I never realized that it wasn’t very meaningful to me until today when I read it in the TNIV. 

“The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing.”

“I lack nothing,” said the Psalmist.  Wow!  Such a declaration sent reverberations from my mind to the depths of my soul. I lack nothing?  How strange that I often feel like I lack so many things.  I don’t say it in so many words, but when I am constantly thinking, “I wish I had more money”, “I wish we had a better house”, “I wish I had more time”,  “I wish I was smarter”;  I am really saying that I lack X, Y, Z.  But with Jesus as my Shepherd, I really lack nothing.  I have everything I need and more.  How I desperately need to meditate on this verse until its truth sets my restless heart free.

Psalm 63:3

This is probably one of the most striking verses in the Bible, to me.  It’s so counterintuitive in the world and even in the churches.  Just listen to a handful of prayer requests when you’re in a small group or scan the list on the church bulletin.  Often, our number one prayer request is to petition God for someone to be restored back to good health.  And while it is not wrong to pray for good health, it may be somewhat revealing of our hearts that perhaps one of our greatest priorities and values is “to live as long as possible with as little pain as possible”.  And yet, in such vivid contrast, the psalmist says to God, “Your love is better than life.“  The declaration echoes the profoundest of truths that –

“Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere”  Ps 84:10
“You fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand.” Ps 16:11

and reminds us that our greatest priority and prayer ought to be:

“I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”  Ps 84:10
“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.”  Ps 42:1
“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”  Ps 42:2a
“You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you.”  Ps 63:1

An echoing of these heart’s-cries will put us on the right path of thinking that the greatest value in life is not to live as long as possible with as little pain as possible but to live as much as possible in His satisfying presence, so that we might know that His love is so inexplicable that it truly is better than this life.

They say that marriage is a mystery.  Sex is a mystery.  And, isn’t God, too, a mystery?  When we seek greater knowledge and greater insight into these deep matters to find answers to our questions, the result is having categorical conclusions and reasonable answers.  We come up with practical formulas, techniques, how-tos.  “If you follow these six easy steps, then you will have a great marriage, great sex and a great relationship with God.”  Somehow, the pursuit of knowledge about these things deceives us to believe that they are fully knowable, completely comprehensible, and we lose sight of the fact that even the glimpse that we’ve come to understand is only a glimpse of understanding — and that as time progresses, our understanding will deepen and we will recognize all too soon that when we had thought we understood, we really knew nothing at all. 

We realize that marriage is about relationship.  Sex is about relating – one whole person with another whole person in relationship.  And God is “Person” in relationship with us.  To forget this and consider otherwise is to exchange the satisfying depth and fullness of relationship with the void of institution, biological function or religion.

Relationship is dynamic.  It’s unpredictable, intangible, ungraspable, never truly knowable — because it involves persons.  Persons always have more depth and complexities – more and more, there’s always more.  New discoveries, new thoughts, new emotions – joys and delight.  It ought to keep us suspended in wonder, awe and amazement — of thankfulness, of gratefulness, of longing to plumb the depths of this great mystery — even all the while knowing that we can never truly know.

Lord God, keep me in awe of all that you are and all that you have given me.  And may that awe overwhelm and overflow in adoration and worship. 

“Woman, why are you crying?  Who is it you are looking for?“  Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, John 20:15.

Because Jesus is staring her in the face and asking this question, it almost seems to me as if He is really asking, “Aren’t you looking for me?”  How come you’re missing it?

Yesterday as I read this in my sickbed, I felt that Jesus was pointedly asking me this question.  It’s funny how sometimes you can be so busily about His business (doing this, doing that) or so focused on your ministry tasks (contact, connect, recruit, mobilize, evangelize) that you end up missing the point.  The point is to find Jesus. 

Just like the point of prayer is not to get something; it is to invite Jesus into your heart and life and situation, so that He can unleash His measureless power and then you can respond in worship — which is ultimately what we’ve all been created to do.  The point of prayer is, in other words, to get Jesus. 

The point of my relationship with God is… my relationship with God.  The point is to enjoy being in Jesus’ presence.  Not solely to do great things for Him.  How’d I miss that?!

Ineffable.

Sometimes God takes you to levels that are so deep and wonderful you just can’t explain.  Or He does things that are so meaningful to you, but you feel like you can’t say it aloud because no one would understand fully why it was so magical and amazing and heartstopping. 

It’s not fair, you know.  Something so wonderful to me, I wish I could explain it to you!  But there are just no words. 

I have a relationship with Jesus Christ, and it’s the most wonderful thing in the world!

“Lord, I give you my heart, I give you my soul…
Have your way in me.”

We sang this on Sunday.  Honestly, the last words of this praise song has a heavy sexual connotation to me.  And I can’t help but think about it every time we sing it.  Yes, true confessions:  I am thinking about sex during worship service!

In my non-Christian days, I used to talk to these guys with whom every other sentence – yes, even normal sentences – were sexualized.  Every statement was a double entrendre.  We threw around words of seduction to each other such as, “You can HAVE YOUR WAY WITH ME.”  (Yes, the exact words in the aforementioned praise song.) 

And here’s where “redemption” is amazing.  When I sing those words to God, I remember what those words used to mean to me… but NOW they have been transformed into something very different  – even HOLY — a desire for God to have that kind of free-for-all, free-for-anything, intense thorough control over me and in me.

It amazes me that God can redeem my past sexually immoral transgressions for something eternally beautiful.