I know what your morning looked like. Ladies, you tried to find something to wear. You couldn’t wear a skirt because you tore a hole in your last pair of pantyhose and you don’t have time to shave your legs. You don’t have a single pair of heels that don’t kill your feet anyway. You don’t have time to iron. Function will overcome fashion once again. You’re having a bad hair day. You’ve just thrown the cat off the wardrobe of clothes you left on the bed while trying to find something to wear. You see the scattered mess of hair the cat has left behind. How does he do that? He sheds enough hair to clothe Alaska.

Gentlemen, your favorite tie has gone missing. Turns out it made a great leash for your daughter’s build-a-bear dog…you know…the one you’ve spent more money clothing than your own kid. The tie has been tied around the leg of her bed in 27 knots, a physics phenomenon only small children can master. You spend five minutes on your knees, as an adult, with your butt up in the air as you unwrangle the tie. Although the knots have been unfolded, the material remembers its stretched and twisted state, and refuses to press flat. Your son can’t find one of his only “good” pair of shoes, and your daughter has tangled the hair brush in her hair like fishing line in the vacuum cleaner. At this point you cry out to Jesus, and somehow you load the vehicle, which feels like a moving van, and off you go to church.

I know your prayer…God, please let the service be good today. Please give me some direction for my life. Please watch over my family. Help me be a better parent. God, take away the anxiety in my heart. Renew me today.

Maybe the service is not about how God can serve you, but how you can serve God. Maybe worship is not about God giving you direction for your life, but you surrendering  the direction of your life. Maybe God is not so interested in taking care of your family in spite of you as much as loving your family through you. Maybe God doesn’t want to take the anxiety from your heart. Because maybe God doesn’t want to take anything. God wants you to give, to give in, to surrender. 

Worship is an act of love-making, of sharing of one’s self and taking in the being of another. It is a dance, an ebb and flow, a continual, complimentary movement of surrender and trust and adoration. Worship is realizing that nothing comes into being except through Jesus. Not one thing. With every inhale we become a testimony of that life, and with every exhale we return worship.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 05:36 PM.

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