Two Churches and a Boat

A few days ago I was in Brussels, Belgium, being a tourist. It was a California-swimming-pool-blue sky day and I walked the city with my wife and her mother. We stopped in cafés and shops and museums and experienced the city as much as one can in two days.

We walked to a cathedral at the top of a hill, a massive building with twin column towers reaching to the sky. Flags lazily flapped in the breeze at the cathedrals highest point. I was sure the inside of this building would be as impressive as the outside. Having seen the cathedral in Cologne several times, I was anticipating a similar feeling of dumbfoundness when I walked inside the sanctuary.
I was disappointed when we couldn't find a single door that would open. We walked all the way around it. I tugged on a door with St. Peter carefully engraved on it, nothing. St George's door? Nope.

I was upset. And not just because St. George gets to be a Saint because he killed a dragon when we know there aren't such things as dragons. I was upset because I hate the idea of locked doors on churches. The only thing I hate more than locked churches are churches that charge admission, looking at you St. Mark's in Venice.

Later that evening we walked after dinner. I love to walk after dinner. It makes me feel like Woody Allen, but not like weirdo-maybe-pervert Woody Allen, but like cool-artist Woody Allen. Really more like a character in a Woody Allen movie. I love having a delicious meal with people I like and then walking with them, talking mostly about how good the meal was. It's one of the few distinctly urban experiences I enjoy. So we walked. We meandered through the skinny streets of the old town and then came upon a small square with cafés and bars (Brussels ain't running out of cafés or bars anytime soon) and there was a church in the middle of the square.

This church was old, sure, but not special. The outside of it looked like any number of churches in Europe. It could have been a small Catholic church in about 20 countries. Its door, however, was open. We walked up to it and were shocked. The inside was jammed with stuff. Just tons of things. This tiny church had paintings in gold frames all over the walls, a crucifix ten feet tall hanging in the entryway, and not one empty space. Individually, each piece of art was beautiful. Piled together with ninety other things and a giant shrine holding the bones of thirty or so martyrs, it just looked busy. We took off, overwhelmed.

Sometimes we can be closed off. Maybe full of truth and beauty, but unavailable to anyone. We have a lot of good ideas about God but don't ever share them. Or maybe we like our people, but don't want to be open to those people, whoever they are. We can be closed up cathedrals.

We can also be so full of stuff. We can let people in, only to show them everything we have immediately, scaring them off. We can be "vulnerable" but really all we mean is we are OK sharing a ton in small group or praying out loud. We over-share in an attempt to be more pious or to cover up what is really wrong. We pile religious things up in our lives, like they will help us.

I saw a refugee boat in the entryway of the Cologne cathedral a week ago. It was an actual boat, about 6 yards long, that had held 100 refugees on their quest for a new life. Many of those people had died on the journey, suffocated to death by the bodies of other refugees. Scared people looking for hope. Projected on the floor in front of the boat, it said "Christ sits in the refugee boat." Nothing in any church has moved me as swiftly and deeply as that image. I needed a moment. An empty boat tells a story of hope and loss and suffering and need. It asks for compassion and understanding and Love. Christ is there in it and in me. He is in the boat, and He is in me, so maybe I can see myself in the boat.

Not a closed cathedral, not a church full of religious trinkets, but a refugee boat might be the best image of Christ's love inspiring us to participate in His work. Let it be so.

Will and Skill

God isn't a genie. 

I've been told that my entire life. You can't simply ask God for a Ferrari and expect one in your driveway when you open your eyes. Besides, do you have any idea the amount of insurance you'd have to pay on a Ferrari? Do you really want that? Instead, I was told to ask God for things that would allow me to better serve Him. We see this in the garden when our example of contentment, Jesus, asks for the end of his suffering, and then concedes that He'd rather the Father's will be done, than His own. 

How fascinating.

Just a few chapters before (Luke 11), we see Christ tell his disciples to ask for anything, because those who ask will receive, those who seek will find, and to those who knock the door will be opened. So ask for whatever, because God will give it to you? 

God is all around us. If there is one thing I've tried to express on this page it is a life of spiritual fulfillment is a life spent in pursuit of the presence of the Divine who is all around us all the time. God's will is moving forward and is the single most progressive, catalytic, and unstoppable force in the universe. My will--or your will--is fleeting and can be changed by what we had for lunch. Asking God to give you your will and expecting Him to do so is both a good idea and a bad idea. God promises to grant us the desires of our hearts. Jesus says if we are persistent in asking, it will be given to us. The funny thing about this promise is it's contingent on how close we are to God in the first place.

The closer you are to God, the more you find a peculiar transformation taking place. Your will and His will are becoming more and more similar. His will is becoming like your will, your will is becoming like His will until the two are nearly indistinguishable from one another. At that point, your contentment with all things will be so great that asking for change in the trivial or mundane won't cross your mind, and the things which you do ask for will be the things God has been waiting to give you all along. 

God wants your will.

When the bush spoke to Moses, God asked him "what is in your hand, Moses?" (Ex. 4:2) It was a staff, because Moses tended sheep for a living. Moses was a professional leader of ornery, stubborn, stupid creatures long before he did it as a mission from God. The Lord had prepared Moses with skills and talents he could use to better serve the Kingdom and bring about God's will. It just took an argument with a shrub to convince him. 

There's nothing wrong with being talented, even if your talents lie in a realm people consider "secular." Do you know what the Hebrew word for "spiritual life" was? There wasn't one. In Moses' day, the idea that one aspect of your life was spiritual and another was secular wouldn't have made sense. The ancients understood better than us the idea of a holistic experience of God in our mundane, daily lives. 

If you can't experience God in what you are doing for a living, either you aren't being faithful to the way you were wired, or you aren't working with your eyes open. God loves you and made you exactly who He wants you to be. When you do your best at what you're skilled at doing, God is delighted.

God wants your skill.

We need businessmen and women, dancers, politicians, yoga instructors, lawyers, baristas, doctors, and artists who live their lives and do their jobs while loving others as they want to be loved, turning the other cheek, giving without expecting repayment, and bringing justice and reconciliation to a world desperate for it.