Monthly Archives: November 2007

A magic word, vision. A glimpse of some future reality that might come to pass. A quick flash of insight that compels us to push forward with new energy and new hope. A slight intuition that speaks of more life pouring in, more friends gathered for the journey, more people lifted from brokenness and despair. A brief, fleeting thought that dares us to think it: perhaps we can change, finally grow up, finally find wholeness, maturity, and on the best days, a touch of the holy.

They say vibrant, alive churches have this is common: a simple vision. Maybe the same could be said of theatres, companies, and social clubs. Maybe it’s core to being human; that’s what we say in the theatre. Behavior is driven by desire. What we want. Marcus Buckingham says our appetites drive our behavior, our desires, and vision grows from that. Even the vision of being completely committed to doing God’s will instead of our own is a vision related to what we want, which is to know God, please Him, and have His power in our lives.

At church I’ve been teasing a sense of vision out of the people by constantly referring to the “Joe Girardi Jersey.”  The new skipper of the Yankees passed on wearing his usual #25 from his playing days, opting instead to wear #27.  The Yankees have won 26 world titles, so Girardi is declaring his goal on the back of his jersey for the whole world to see.  I’ve been asking the church about what they would put on the back of our jersey if we had one.  Yesterday, I told them to hone their “back of the jersey” thought to one sentence–two to five words if they could do it–and they’ll turn those in next week.   Perhaps it will give us a sense of what is going on in the minds of the people as they look toward the future.  I’m terribly interested to what kind of vision our church family has.

I know what two words I’d use…

I’ve asked several people this week, what should happen on a Sunday morning, and one word keeps creeping in.  Not the only word, but a good one.

Inspiration.

So the people come to the church on Sunday morning, carrying their lives on their backs, the breakdowns in expectation of the previous weeks and months, the frustrations of all that didn’t go right, as well as the unexpected joys, gifts out of the blue, sudden attraction in relationships, good food and company that caught everyone by surprise.  They wake on Sunday morning, and decide to head to a church, for reasons numerous and diverse.  Maybe they want to see a friend, or lift their hands to God, or maybe they’re hoping to get a feeling of forgiveness for a shameful thing they’ve never been able to shake.  Maybe they’re dragging a spouse, thinking the spouse needs to change, and if the preacher will just say the right things, the home will become the place of comfort and refuge they dreamed of when they were little.   Or maybe they come because their parents beat it into them, and they can’t escape the guilt, so church is their penance, their sentence, and they suffer because they just can’t muster up the strength to say they don’t believe a word of it.

Or maybe every once in awhile there’s a person in love with the source of the divinity interlaced with every moment, every space, and every good thing.  Maybe they see glory, and they run to the house of God because they feel like the Psalmist, that a single day in the courts of God are better than a thousand in the richest palace elsewhere.

Not realizing, of course, that the courts of God are everywhere.

For whatever reason they come on a Sunday morning, the guy who gets to talk to them now is me.  No fancy language this, no religious upgrading speech–”God speaking through me” (though my faith is that something like that is exactly what happens.)  How astonishing–I get to sit across a table and talk to these people.  As if we were having coffee (though it’s not exactly like that, because I get to do all the talking), but here we sit together, both of us hoping for an intimate time, a time of truth-telling, comfort-giving, challenge-making, repentance-falling, glory-to-glory time.   We’re all looking for the same thing.  In our secret hearts, we are hoping that God will come to us, make us his home, just as Jesus said, and that we will receive a heaping dose of divine air, of divine oxygen, of the stuff of life.   What we want (as in desire, as is what we lack) is inspiration.

Inspired.

As Bill Hybels says, “Whatever you do, inspire me.”

Breathe on me, breath of God…