In
what setting do you feel most connected to God?
I’ve attended church all of my life.
In my growing up years I was in the church building three or four times
each week.
Am
I better for it? Probably not. Shocked?
You should be.
Greatest
of news … God can’t be confined inside the four walls of a building called a
church, meeting hall, sanctuary, cathedral or tent.
My
Texas friend, Tim, says he worships God out on the plains of Texas on the
back of his horse. That is where he
feels closest to God.
I
had a wonderful worship moment not too long ago while lying on my living room
sofa listening to Carolyn play a bunch of my favorite hymns and gospel
songs. That was a portal to heaven as
surely as any other I’ve experienced.
I’ve
had God moments in church, surely, and I’ve had them as I sat or stood gazing
upon the magnificent natural beauty of this world.
I’ve
had God moments in wonderful, intimate conversations with friends as we
discussed life and God, struggles and success.
God can be as present in those moments of our lives as He can in any
fine cathedral in the world.
I
love this quote from Mother Teresa.
“In church is not the
only place
where we find God.
We find him in the
mundane,
the ordinary, the sick and suffering. And we are closest to him,
perhaps, when the
portals
of eternity open up
to receive our loved
ones.”
~Mother Teresa
Frankly,
the idea that God can meet with us, any of us, all of us, whether in church or
in a parked car, a small apartment, a lush hotel room, or a boat on the Pacific
Ocean – the idea of God coming to me anywhere is what prompted me to start Internet
Church.
I have envisioned someone on the
streets of Seattle, or in a town where you live, coming to wherever they call
home late on a Saturday night. Perhaps
they’ve been wallowing in less than righteous activities, and they feel lousy
about themselves and the state in which they are in and long, yea hope to make
some kind of God connection.
Through
some miracle of God they stumble upon Internet Church and God directs them to
some word of hope either in a current post or one of the back-list posts and for
that moment in time God comes down and invades their world with love, hope and
grace.
Now
wouldn’t that be something?
As
far as I know, most of my readers are Christian, and that is good. Many of them have already had their weekly
God-moment, and maybe in the middle of their week they find yet another word of
hope to move them along the path toward God.
And
if a reader hasn’t been to church in a while, or perhaps never, regardless of
his/her state of dress, distress, financial, mental, physical condition, God
invades their world through some words on a blog site, then God is doing His
job, and I, perhaps, have had a small part in that too.
The
big takeaway today is this – God is not restricted to four walls called church,
or 3 songs, a prayer, an offering and a sermon.
He is much bigger than all of that.
What
God most wants is to have relationship with each of us. He wants to be invited into the everyday-ness
of our lives. He loves the mundane and
the messy parts of our lives just as He loves the shine on our shoes, the knot
in our tie and the press of our clothes.
He
moves best into the places we vacate for Him.
All God is asking for is a space in our hearts that meshes with the
God-part of our heart.
Remember
this – God loves us as we are – not as we should be.
The
invitation says “Come unto me, all who are weary and heavily burdened. I will give you rest.”
That’s
the kind of heart God is looking for.
Internet Church
Offering Words of
Hope
Encouragement
Inspiration
One Word at a Time
