there is so so much to say, but i feel a need to write it all down, in case i grow old and forget, or in case someone wants to read it, in case someone chances by this and is blessed by it the way i was blessed in India.
+open pages.
so. have you ever met a person you've never met before, but strangely you can talk to him real easy like you've known each other for years? well it's something like that with the Rays of Peace church: pastor, wife, staff, members, orphans alike, just that its not just ONE person, its a whole host of warm people. and they're for real! so genuine in just opening up their lives to you even though they don't even know you. after the first day with the boys we felt like we'd known them all our lives- within a day we taught them to stop calling us Aunties and to call us Akas instead [sisters], we played with them, ate with them, talked to them, lived like them. and it's not only the children who are so unguarded and genuinely friendly- i remember this man coming up to ask for prayer, because he was jobless and because he wanted a wife. a wife! it was definitely the first time i prayed that prayer- a wife for a man. i started wondering 'do they have arranged marriages still? or do i pray he'll meet a good woman, or that his mother will come to know a good woman..' and i felt ashamed because in prayers its not so much HOW God answers prayers that matters, but WHO God is. By virtue of that, when we see that God is so big and mighty, we dont have to worry about the how anymore- he takes care of it. so why am i talking about this man. you see, he didnt care what i thought about him or how he would appear, jobless and all. he didnt CARE how God would answer his prayer. all these decorative considerations, all these appearances were shaved off- no they didnt even exist, and right at the core all he knew was this: if i only Ask, i will receive. because my God answers prayers.
+mirrors
it's funny how the more affluent society becomes the more our masks grow thick. yet the more wrapped up and concealed we are, the more mirrors we surround ourselves with. why are most of us afraid to raise up our hands to worship, why are we afraid to press up close to the front and be EAGER, why do we shrink from showing interest and prefer to appear nonchalent, unruffled, impermeable? isnt it because we are painfully self-conscious? isnt that just what it boils down to- simply, basic-ally, really? 'cynicism' and 'guardedness' and 'sarcasm' and 'being cool' - aren't they just offshoots of a basic plant of self-consciousness, we are so afraid that our masks will wear off, that we will reveal something of ourselves, we are so afraid of getting hurt that we become so thickly wrapped: we criticise so that we ourselves won't be criticised. it's so much harder to praise something, because someone else will just slide along and shoot it down. you down. and the amazing thing is that that was not a single mirror in the Rays of Peace orphanage- we had to content ourselves with the reflective window surfaces! i think that's reflective of the complete image-ignorance of the Indians we met there. nevermind bout the mirrors, nevermind bout what others think of me: without this distracting pride, they fix their gaze on God and leave it there! if you think about it everywhere you walk in Singapore there's a reflective surface to 'check yourself out': the busstop boards, the MRT doors, the shopping centre walls, the lift walls, the silver dustbins??
+worship
i finally know what true worship is. after 18 years of 'worshipping' i have now seen and known the truth about it.
worship is being awed beyond our being by the infinite greatness of God.
it's saying WOW God, you are beyond me, yet you chose to come and live in me. it's mind-blowingly, eye-poppingly, gut-burstingly unimaginable that GOD should reveal himself to us. and by definition, being in AWE is this: A mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might. [dictionary.com]
being in awe is like a shrimp staring into the eye of the Great Blue Whale, into that eye that is bigger than you, and that eye alone is all that you can see for as far as your vision stretches, yet you are told that there is much, much, more to this huge being. i cant even begin to imagine the size of God.
and thus being in awe stretches beyond myself, beyond the limits of my imagination- all i can do is praise!. WORSHIP. being in awe requires all of me, and more, because it extends beyond me! because it says i'm giving You all of me, yet all of me still aint big enough a gift for You, logically. [yet by grace God says it is] do you get me?? that's why when we say "i worship God, but not wholeheartedly" its simply untrue because worship is being awed beyond myself, it requires all of me! i can't be half-awed. we're talking extremes here.
shout and sing and clap and dance like King David did- undignified!
>> incredibleindia
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