Last Thursday

Thursday night we had a great time together at McAllister Center! We enjoyed worshipping God together and praying for our burdens together using our imaginations. After all, God designed us with imaginations and we too many times use them for nothing important, or less than admirable purposes!

So, we began with imagining many things in our pasts to thank God for, then things in our present and then things in our future that He might do in us and we praised and worshipped for all that God has done, is doing, and will do in our lives. Then we took a few minutes to give anyone who wanted to a chance to praise God out loud for how great He is.

We have learned through the weeks that in many things we can worship. This week it was obviously about using our imaginations and minds to give thanks to God and to talk to Him. In past weeks we have worshipped to simple things like how marvelously He created our hands, to using crayons and paper to worship Him with writing and pictures and paper, to listening to the sounds around us to worship and noticing how wonderful the things we hear can be, to singing praise songs to Him. The truth is, this is all an attempt to do two things, 1) to help people worship God who are not as “into” the songs and worship type that we see in most churches – this being a point to our group, to help people find God who have not found church to be the best place for them to do it and 2) to begin to help people see that we can worship all the time, if we begin to simply notice the things around us and how wonderful God is that He has made all this earth and all the things in it!

After our rather unorthodox worship time, we took some time to pray to God for our hurts and burdens, our fears and losses, our concerns and worries. We imagined Jesus, in all His glory in heaven, and then imagined Him looking down at us. We then imagined our pain or hurt or issue in our hands and turned our hands out to Him to give Him the problem – which the Bible says He wants to take from us – and then we opened our hands like cups to receive His blessing, forgiveness, peace, joy, love, etc. in the place of the problem we had just given to Him. It was a nice time of quiet imagining and thinking about God. I left the time feeling much more free in my spirit…

Having spent time worshipping and praying, we had some teaching. This week’s teaching was really the first for what will be several months of teaching and learning along the topic of What is More than More? What do we mean? The teaching began and ended with the same questions.

Why do you get up in the morning?
What is your motivation for living?
What lights your fire?
What are you passionate about?
What is your reason for all you do?

The scripture we used was from Ecclesiastes, which is a book in the Old Testament of the Bible, and we used the Message translation, which is simply the way someone interpreted the Bible into modern language.

Here is the passage:

Ecc 1 “Smoke, nothing but smoke…There’s nothing to anything- it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? “What I’ve concluded is that so-called wisdom and knowledge are mindless and witless-nothing but spitting into the wind.” “I said to myself, “Let’s go for it-experiment with pleasure, have a good time!” But there was nothing to it, nothing but smoke.” “Oh, I did great things: built houses, planted vineyards, designed gardens and parks…then I acquired large herds and flocks, larger than any before me…I piled up silver and gold loot from kings and kingdoms, I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and-most exquisite of all pleasures-voluptuous maidens for my bed. Oh, how I prospered…everything I wanted I took-I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse, held back nothing. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task-my reward to myself…Then I took a look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing.”
“The smart and the stupid both disappear out of sight.”
“We work to feed our appetites; Meanwhile our souls go hungry”

This seems an awful lot like American Society. Granted, not many people are really working these days at acquiring large flocks and herds, but some people definitely are acquiring large flocks of electronics and large herds of sexual conquests… The question is where does all this pursuing of more lead? The author of Ecclesiastes suggests that it is all “smoke.” We run and run and run after stuff – often times with the stuff in the end simply controlling us as our credit card bills pile up and we work from early to late to simply make the minimum payment.

With much thought and prayer, I came up with a list of general categories that I think Americans run after – the “more” we pursue. These things are not bad by themselves, but when they control us and become our reason for living, for getting up in the morning, the thing that we think most about, dream most about, work most for, they end up in…well that’s where we’re headed in the next meetings.

Here’s the list (if you have any to add, please let me know!):

…money & wealth – “If I could only win the lottery! Think of what my life would be like. If I could just work hard enough, train hard enough, maybe I can make tons of money and have it all.”
…fun & pleasure, “I’d quit my job and just play, have fun all day, party and party and party all day, all night. Girls/Men, fine food, the finest hotels, fanciest clothes, whatever my heart desires”
…family & children, “I’d give my children and family the best. Quit my job, invest in them totally, the best schools and education, the best clothes, the best teeth (we’re working on orthodontics now!), playing with them and helping them grow and become.. I’d invest in my relationships, my husband, my friends, grow them all strong.”
…fame and achievement, “I’d become the best in my area. I’d rule the company, the town, the country. I’d be a great race car driver, the best in my field. I’d publish studies or books, change the face of the world with my greatness. I’d prove to my dad, my mom, those people who picked on me, to everyone that I really am somebody”
…fitness, strength, and beauty, “I’d be the strongest, toughest, most powerful, leanest, most beautiful, most perfect body, most sensual, most sexy, the most defined, ripped, cut. I would fit the mold of everyone’s perfect woman or man. Everyone would desire me and want me.
…religion and right living…”I’d be the wisest, holiest, most starched, never swearing, never grumpy, never miss a church service, always read my Bible every day, always have my private prayer time, always control my temper, never make a mistake, totally sanctified, and make sure everyone else knows how they fall short too,”

The truth is that I run after these things far too much of the time. When I look at where most of my time is spent, it is in the pursuit of one of these way too much. It grieves my heart.

We are going to be looking at each of these, one by one, over the next several get togethers (the next will be 6/12 at 6:45 at McAllister Center – see previous posts for directions) to see where they lead in the end. We will even be having some guests join us who have pushed one or more of these roads to the end of the line and they will be sharing their experiences with us. The great news is that even as all these “more’s” (again although none are bad by themselves and in the right perspective) in the end seem to lead to smoke, or in another word to nothingness, if they are the main drive to our lives, there is a More that truly is satisfying and wonderful and makes all these others come into the right perspective in our lives. He is the More that is More than the more that we chase! Jesus is More than more! You see, you were made to be something so awesome and great, and in Him, all the things in this life fall into their correct place. Money, instead of ruling us, becomes a tool to life fully. Achievement becomes something that can be part of something much larger than just “being the best” and on through the list we could go. You see, all of the things on the list above have value, they just are not meant to be the ultimate value in our lives.

We concluded with a song, “My Generation” by Starfield. I have tried to attach the mp3, but can't seem to - sorry
Here are the words:

There is something more
Hello, we're going down the hallway to the door
We know there's something more
Our soul has a got a hole
We know but what's it waiting for
Scattered in the street
Like dreams and destiny
The things we wanna be
Are scattered in the streets
If we're coming clean
We've seen to know we're incomplete
Chorus: How do we feel, how do we feel
My generation is aching for real
Dyin for love cryin for truth
My generation is aching for you
Country of our own
Is all we're asking for
A place to call our home
A country of our own
We know it must be close
Our souls are searching through the cold
The cold, the cold
Chorus: x3
How do we feel, how do we feel
My generation is aching for real
Dyin for love, cryin for truth
My generation is aching for you

And so, the questions…

Why do you get up in the morning?
What is your motivation for living?
What lights your fire?
What are you passionate about?
What is your reason for all you do?

Be thinking about it and we’ll hope to see you on June 12th!