So, during today’s morning church service, I found myself getting negative again about the whole Sunday-morning ritual of Christianity, and this time I decided I’d simply journal during the service. Here’s that journal entry…

[Sidenote 1: I tuned out the sermon completely, but at the end of it, as I was wrapping up my own journal entry, I began to realize that what the preacher lecturer had been lecturing the congregation about actually correlated closely with where my mind had gone during journaling... Coincidence... or Holy Spirit at work? Might have been either... the sermon was, after all, the kickoff lecture in a series we are about to start on the Holy Spirit...]

[Sidenote 2: Alexis and I were sitting with our friends Ric and Allegra, and at one point Allegra noticed my journaling and asked in a mock-surprised stage-whisper: "Are you having a passionate thought?!" I replied, "uhhmm... yes!" So, Allegra, here is what I was thinking... In all its unedited/uncorrected messiness!]

Sunday, Mar 19, 2006 11.25am

So I’m at church and my soul is so burdened by the structured precision. I look around and I see people, messy people, organic people, growing people, and I see them organized in neat rows and trying hard to be not messy, to be ordered and orderly, to focus, to think.

My heart yearns for communal organic messy life with God and with people, for organic worship expressions humming in the hearts of messy people in mysterious love with their awesome God.

I long for intimacy with God and people, an intimacy that infuses my soul from within, not something I have to put on as an external accoutrement. An intimacy that expresses itself in mysterious ways, involving the whole of who I am and the whole of who God is calling me to be, an intimacy that drives and calls and beckons and seduces, not one that burdens and accuses.

An intimacy that is tended in a nourishing framework but grows and thrives in the framework, not restricted and stifled by it. A wild kind of intimacy, one that not just defies my attempts to control it or manage it, but one that ignites such life within me that I dare not drive it away, that I sorely miss it when it’s not there. I long for that intimacy of God’s presence in my heart, not just a passive “presence”, but a living, active, laughing, crying, deeply powerful and powering spirited presense in my heart, a deep resonant heartbeat, the reckless presence of God in my heart that does not climb quietly into the clean compartment I have prepared for it in the desk drawer of my spiritual office, but one that floods my heart, permeates even into the nooks and crannies of the dirtiest, slimiest, darkest, deeply unknown corners of my heart’s foundation stones.

Does not do so quietly but with the rushing, purposeful, determined, eternal unstoppable thunder of His will for His Life expressed for His Worship in my heart.

And as I gasp in terror at the implications of this God in my heart, I realize that all this really means is that the Master is finally home. That He is looking at me not with eyes of condemnation or wrath at finding things the way they are, judgment for my useless and hopeless ineptitude with the life I have led so far, but instead with something else: hope.

Hope. Hope that my life, my being, is His. He’s not whooshing through my heart, my soul, tsk-tsking at the many faults, flaws, messiness, contraband, poison, and terrorist paraphernalia in the basement or in the living room. No, He is indeed saddened by all that, but He has hope - for He knows the plans He has for me and He looks around and sees the things He had already placed in my heart for His plans - things I may have found too in the course of my life, some of which I may have grossly misused, abused, neglected, killed, damaged even, things I may have ignored completely as I hauled in truck after truck of my own junk or even poisonous and anti-God bombs my “friend” Satan supplied me with.

But this life of mine, this soul of mine is not my own any more, nor was it ever really mine to begin with. I was knit in my mother’s womb by Christ, and I am now back in the hands of Him who created me, who knows me, and who had a vision in His Spirit when He thought of me and spoke me into existence.

He constructed this house, with its unique architecture, with its odd dining room and that strange twisted gazebo in the backyard that nobody quite knows for sure what to do with or how it got there, but it’s there.

And He is back. The Master of this house is back, and He is not going to quietly sit inside the clean desk drawer I’ve set aside for His “visit”. He is here to stay. And He loves the vision He has for me, STILL loves it, STILL loves me.

He is excited, passionate even, about the dreams He has for me, and it is a contagious passion that infuses my soul and encourages me when I am deeply discouraged by the filth He and I encounter as we reclaim the house together, or when I get overwhelmed by how much there is left to do, or when I get frustrated that the living room is not ready to enterta fulfill its purpose yet, or whatever. The Master is home, and it is His home, and He will NOT let anything destroy His dreams for me.

For they all are dreams and hopes of HIS ETERNAL GLORY!!

[Sidenote 3: I actually finished the entry before the last sentence, but I tagged that last sentence on in a bit of a hurry because the service was ending and I suddenly felt a big sense of guilt at ending it with "for me." Then I got mad at myself for feeling that guilt - it triggered a sense of anger in me at the church in general being a manipulative entity that makes you feel guilty for seeing any flaws in it.

Yeah I'm weird. Didn't you read the part about the twisted gazebo in my backyard?]