Wednesday, July 18, 2007

I drove and got lost,

lost in prayer.

a Habakkuk prayer. The watchman on the wall looking at things the way they are, and wrestling with God over the way things should be. Trying to be the midwife and the mother of God's promises coming to birth...to life...screaming, and crying hot tears and pounding my steering wheel with the wind racing over my face.

Passing cornfields, and barns...buggies and farmers. Praying for God's fields white unto harvest, praying for those few workers to catch fire, and praying for that remnant that are trying to rebuild the wall. Passing strangers that God knows by name, and he has counted every hair on their head, and he is calling out them them through everything.

Praying for the pain people have felt, the lies that have trapped them and led them away from their true selves. Praying for the emptiness, the lost dreams, the narcotics of distraction, and the rationalizations that rip them out from their destinies.

Simply praying.

Raw and unfiltered prayers. The sort that ought to bring lightning down on the roads I am racing down. Audacious prayers like Nehemiah before the king...prayers for the impossible and improbable. Prayers to make angels move, providence to attack, and Gods hand to move in power. Demanding prayers that risk the edges of relationship with God, prayers that bite with blood and agony, prayers that dare to challenge the gates of Hell. Authentic, transparent, prayers from the gut...unmeasured...without flowers...raw.

Simply.

And returning from the prayer wheels of driving I listened to Aaron sing. Worship done simply, unvarnished, and full of the sort of blues-melancholy-hope-and longing that Robert Cray and BB King would be proud of. Bob Dylan and John Mark Mcmillan...and maybe even shades of Marc Cohn. With pictures of Belfast rising on the screens beside him...songs of hope with a background of mission calling and longing flickering like lost kingdoms all around him.

it was almost like synchronicity I suppose. My banshee wailing around ashland, and his gentle voice seducing belfast from 10,000 miles away. And for me I suppose, that is the magic of the kingdom of God. So many deep things going on that so few know about. The hours I have spent begging for God with and in him on the streets of Moscow, a place I will never go...and yet even if they don't know it there...my own songs echo and glow on those streets a million miles away.

I don't even know why I am telling you this, except that somehow these things lead us home. Those out-of-body spiritual moments of prayer and worship that transcend the moment, and unzip heaven and we are flooded with a grace so fulfilling we can't help but wish that others could have a glimpse...a sip...and a whisper of the echoes of the richness of Gods heart for people.

and still, though I am deeply resting in God tonight, in a moment that is centered and balanced...my heart breaks. It breaks for the man I know will read this an still remains aloof from crashing through the barricades and finally surrendering to faith. His head game is so sad, selfish, and enslaving. His excuses so pitiful and frail. He has never tasted what I KNOW to be realer than real...and I pray for the day he will finally be strong enough to break and surrender. And I pray for others. From Belfast to Buffalo...on Smith avenue and Sandusky. For all those who have too much pride, too much pain, too much rejection, too much...to be able to find their way.

God, dear God. Open a door for all of them...or send me to open the door and show them the way. Because what I feel this night is far beyond myth or medication; beyond delusion or illusion; it is the brief moment when spirit and flesh function as one and perceive you with full attention through every sense and pore of my body.

you are everything. and no amount of prayer or worship could ever do justice to this moment...right now

and I wish this for all of you

amen

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