a beautiful thing to me.”18 Jesus and his dinner companions experience the exact same event, yet they see it from totally different perspectives. Jesus sees another dimension to the events: For him it is a profoundly moving, spiritual, worshipful experience. He points out the beauty of it. The others miss it. He sees it. He is a tour guide. Pointing out the holy and sacred that are present, right here, right now.
Our Story
We claim the beautiful and the good and the true wherever we find it, because all things are ours. Several years ago I was hanging around after one of our church services, and a young woman named Yvette walked up to me and told me she had been listening to me for the last few weeks and hated everything I was saying and totally disagreed with my teachings and the whole time she just wanted to stand up on her chair and yell at me.
I immediately liked her.
She went on to say that she was studying witchcraft and was totally opposed to the things she heard me saying.
I responded, “But you keep coming back.” And then I told her I was thrilled that she kept returning to our gatherings. I hoped that our community would continue to be a safe place for her to question and study and discuss and hear that God loves her exactly as she is.
The Sunday after 9/11 I talked about the need to forgive people when they wrong us. The word forgive in the Greek language actually means “to send away.” People hurt us and harm us, and we end up carrying around these debts they owe us wherever we go. To forgive is to refuse to carry those debts anymore. After the teaching, I walked off the stage and saw Yvette lying facedown on the floor, sobbing. She later told me she had been raped years ago and had been carrying rage and anger around with her that controlled her entire life. She realized she had no hope but to turn all of that bitterness and hurt over to Jesus, who had suffered far more than even her. And while she was at it, she might as well turn her will and her life and everything else over to him.
So I saw her a few months ago, and she handed me a sheet of paper with her email and phone number on it. I asked her what it was for, and she started telling me stories of the women she had been meeting who were witches but wanted to become Christians, and if I met any, to send them to her. And the more she talked, the more excited she got, telling me how she’s “an expert in this.”19
Beautiful, isn’t it? I claim Yvette’s story. And you should too. Her story is our story. And our story is God’s story. So many of us have been conditioned to think of our faith as solely an issue of us and God. But faith is a communal experience. A shared journey. I have heard people say their stories are not exciting. I can only imagine how deeply offended God is with comments like this. Not exciting? If the story is about me, then, yes, it is only exciting to a certain degree. But the point of our stories and our faith journeys is that they are about something much bigger. So now that you have heard a bit of Yvette’s story, claim it. I tell my story and my wife’s story and my friends’ stories—I tell every story. I want others to see how they are all connected. So if you think your faith story is boring, take someone else’s.
All things are yours.
Being a Christian is not cutting yourself off from real life; it is entering into it more fully.
It is not failing to go deeper; it is going deeper than ever.
It is a journey into the heart of how things really are.
What is it that makes you feel alive? What is it that makes your soul soar?
Recognizing God
A man named Moses is tending his sheep in the land of Midian when he comes upon a burning bush. He moves closer to see more and hears the voice of God, speaking to him about his people and their need to be delivered from the land of Egypt. God tells Moses to take off his sandals, for the ground he is standing on is holy.20 Moses has been tending sheep in this region for forty years. How many times has he passed by this spot? How many times has he stood in this exact place? And now God tells him the ground is holy?
Has the ground been holy the whole time and Moses is just becoming aware of it for the first time?
Do you and I walk on holy ground all the time, but we are moving so fast and returning so many calls and writing so many emails and having such long lists to get done that we miss it?
Remember Jacob’s words after his dream?
“God is in this place, and I wasn’t aware of it.”
Let’s go back to the cliff, planning a wedding with my friends. When they resonate with the peace and harmony of unspoiled nature, I believe God made it unspoiled by speaking it into existence. And Jesus is the life force that makes it possible. So in the deepest sense we can comprehend, my friends are resonating with Jesus, whether they acknowledge it or not. And when they look into each other’s eyes and there is love there—real, passionate love, the kind that would lay down its life for another—I believe that love is made possible by God in Jesus. Their laying down their lives is a picture of God doing the same for every single human being in Jesus, whether we affirm it or not. Jesus was up on that cliff with us that day. It is not that God is over here and real life is over there. If it is real, then it’s showing us God.
It is not that passion and love and exhilaration are in one place and Jesus is somewhere else.
Wherever you find those, you are finding God.
In affirming and celebrating all that they did that day on the cliff, my friends are closer to Jesus than they could ever imagine.
I could feel my car keys in my pocket, and all I could think about was how far I could be by 11 A.M.
How much gas was in the tank?
How fast could I drive?
Sitting in a chair in a storage room behind the sound booth, I could hear the room filling up with people, and all I wanted to do was leave.
What do you do when you’re a pastor of a church, it’s Sunday morning, the parking lot is filling with cars, people are finding their seats, the service is about to start, and you are scheduled in a few moments to give the message and you realize you have nothing to say?
How did it come to this? It started out so great . . .
My wife and I and several others started this church called Mars Hill in February of 1999 with dreams of what a revolutionary new kind of community could be.
I was twenty-eight.
What do you know about anything when you’re twenty-eight?
But anyway, we did it. We started a church.
People who are starting churches, or want to someday, often ask me when I knew it was time to do it. And I actually have a coherent answer: I knew it was time when I no longer cared if it was “successful.”
I’m serious. I had this moment in October 1998 when I realized that if thirteen people joined up with us, and that was all it ever was, that would be okay.
This thing inside of me was so strong
