8/21 update

Last Thursday we met at McAlister and we just really enjoyed a true time with each other and God. It wasn’t fancy or uppity. It was just people, for real people, meeting together and recognizing the depth and amazingness of each other and searching into the amazingness of God. It was really cool, but also fun and relaxed and challenging…all of these things.
We started our time talking about our favorite scent. We laughed and enjoyed the variety of answers from fresh cut grass (not the crappy candle version) to roses (the peach kind are the best) to the smell of [clean] babies. It was a view into who we really are…not who we portray ourselves to be most of our lives.
As always, we prayed and invited God to join us and then we began our time of worship. Worship is simply a fancy way of saying that we notice God and celebrate how cool He is. In keeping with our “smell based” time, this week’s worship was all about smells. We closed our eyes and we tried to focus on God as we smelled things like play doh and cinnamon, chocolate and coffee, perfume and baby powder. We focused our minds on a God who is big enough to make a world that contains mountains and oceans, seasons and skyscrapers, but also loves individual people…like you and me. We savored the idea that there is a wonderful & loving, but still huge & awesome God who can make all these scents and the amazing sense of smell to take them all in. Plus, on top of all that, making the mind and soul in you and me that responds to smells with such gut wrenching passion (like the smell of your child or lover). It was really good.
After our time of worship, we always have a time of sharing things that are bothering us…hurts and issues and needs and concerns. We believe that, in sharing them, we break the power of them and in praying for them, we invite our giant God into them to help us through them. It is always good to share and pray.
Next, we had some learning and teaching. We read in Ecclesiastes chapter 1:
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.”

We have been talking about all the “more” that we in America spend almost all of our time chasing after; things like money and achievement and fame and fitness and beauty and religiosity and pleasure. We have been talking about them and what they do to us. A few weeks ago we talked about the pursuit of money and how it leads to nothing…smoke. Thursday we moved on to talk about the pursuit of pleasure.
We see people all the time whose pursuit of pleasure ends up in smoke and destruction. We see the 11, 12, 13 year old girls who look into our eyes with an emptiness never there before…their innocence is gone in a fleeting attempt for pleasure in the arms of a boy, and we grieve for what their pursuit of pleasure has led them to…smoke. We cry with the anguish of the abandoned family whose mother or father has left for another lover, or for another hunting trip, or whatever pleasurable thing called to them…mom or dad lost the “pleasure” in the way things were and felt they had to move on “to be happy.” We hurt in our own, well meaning, lives as we look at the times that our families get less than all of our attention and love because we are focused on whatever pleasure is coming next in our lives. We feel the sense of imbalance in our world: something is messed up here. We grope for and run after pleasure with such passion. We are told constantly (either directly or drawn that way by the images portrayed) in ads on TV, internet, and otherwise that we can find pleasure and happiness in this or that or the other. We get unsolicited emails, leading us to web sites with pornography of every kind that promise that “here is fun, here is peace, here is escape.” Yet, deep in our souls, we know this is not true. This is not reality. There must be something more.
We also know that happiness and pleasure are not bad by themselves. We sense them in the purity of the smell of a baby and coffee and cinnamon. We remember them in the honesty and truth of wedding days and hands held in true love and devotion. We savor them in the wonder of deep laughter, not at someone’s expense, but in just the bubbling up of life from somewhere deep inside us. Somehow, we know that we were made to have pleasure and happiness, yet always there, just behind, is the messed up world we live in and the twistedness it has made of this truth.
We begin to ask ourselves, “What is the answer?” Just as money is necessary to live and can be so good and yet can destroy so completely, so with pleasure. The truth is that the “more” of pleasure, just like money, leads to “smoke,” and the only way to find the good, wonderful, heartfelt and true pleasure that we all seek and love about life is to not search for the “more” of the pleasure, but to search for the “More” that gives balance to the pleasure and puts it in the right perspective in our lives…just like He does with money. God is the “More” that provides the balance to all the good things that if overdone, lead to “smoke.” He wants us to have pleasure and joy and happiness and will give these things to us, at all the right times, if we will live our lives running after Him, instead of some other “more.”
It reminds me of dealing with my son, Nathan. Nathan loves to think about the next thing that’s going to happen, always looking forward (and I’m glad for that). The problem is that sometimes Nathan forgets that he has a daddy who loves him very much and wants him to have tons of fun in life. He sometimes manipulates, sneaks, and often doubts…asking things like, “What will we do?” “Will we have fun?” “When will it happen?” “Are we going to do something fun?” “Are we going to be done working?” Sometimes getting himself so convinced that it will never happen that he gets downright distraught and even angry. At times like this I call out to his soul…to his memory of who I have been in his life. “Nate, does your daddy love you?” “Yes” “Does he always shoot for what’s best for you?” “Yes” “Does he always have fun things planned and coming up for you?” “Yes” “Does he sometimes even make the ‘work’ fun?” “Yes,” and a smile begins to cross his face as memories of his life begin to flow. “Does your daddy abandon you and leave you with no fun, no playtime? Does he wish the worst for you and look for ways to make your life boring and yucky?” “No,” and the smile widens into a grin. “Then Nate, trust me. Trust that your daddy will give you tons of fun; Lots of play; Lots of games and laughter and joy. Trust. Don’t try to always make it happen on your own.”
Sometimes when I think about these talks I am plunged into a deep reflection on my own relationship with the “More” I have been talking about above. The God who made me. At these times I realize that I, and humanity in general, so often are like Nate. We look for our happiness and pleasure and fun…we clamor for it…we go after it with so much of ourselves that we destroy others and ourselves in the process. All the time, God, the true “More”, is there all the time, knowing exactly what will give us pleasure, what will make us happy. He is simply waiting for us to call out to Him…make Him the focus of our lives and…Trust.
This may seem simplistic and even silly if you have not had a relationship with this God I am speaking of, but it is not. He really does love you. He really does want you to have pleasure and fun and all the other “mores” that you run after in your life. To begin finding Him all you need to do is begin talking to Him. We call it praying, but it need not be fancy. It is simply talking to Him as if He were right there with you. Tell Him what’s bothering you. Ask Him to be in Your life…to help you begin to sort out all the confusion you find in the world…your world. He will help. Then, please email or comment on the blog. We want to help too.
We finished our time with communion...a celebration of a God who does these kind of wonderful things and we chatted and went back to our own slices of America…hopefully to live them a little differently.
We hope that you will join us next time, September 4th, 6:45-8:00PM. All people are welcome, no matter where you are in this life.