As I mentioned earlier this week, I am going to begin blogging about cultivating and fostering a new faith community. While I have thought about leading a church and fostering a church-plant on-and-off for several years, I can't say that I had a specific call to it, although I'm not sure I was that open to it either. Even though - having been raised in a Christian faith community, and having owned my relationship initiated by God through Jesus Christ and His Spirit - I kept finding myself in leadership when I was involved and embraced into faith communities along my journey of life. Thus, I can attest to the mess of church...it's like making sausage...it's messy. But, back in February earlier this year, I felt like I was missing God...in that while I was making time with my regular rhythm of life, creating space to be with Him, I felt like we were missing each other. So, I went on a week-long fast to re-sensitize and re-connect.
Fasting in the past, while typically difficult and messy in that fasting usually makes me sit with my own stuff and deal with my stuff, the actual process of liquifying my diet is typically not hard for me. In fact, after a few days, I feel the weight lift and my heart opens wide after a few days of becoming more and more sensitized.
Anyway, this fast was different almost immediately. It was a real struggle, a wrestling and a relinquishing. I would describe it in that I wanted to be with God, but it was my agenda. I was making time to sit with and hold hands with God...but He wanted to wrestle. And while that sort of pissed me off at first, eventually I decided to wrestle because that's the only thing God seemed prepared to do with me at that point.
So I was thrown off, my expectations dashed, and I was mired in the pit, wrestling with God and myself and while I wish I could say I was nice about it...I wasn't.
And yet something deeper was happening and I don't even think I have words even now to describe it, except to say that in the wrestling a deep shift occurred within.
Thus afterward, in reflecting on what actually happened, in an apophatic kind of way, I kept coming back to some episodes from my youth. I felt like God had been reminding me of some of our interactions along the way, and this wrestling had brought newness to some old things...some very good, old exploits and echoes of conversations with God were emerging as the dust was settling. Some moments of claritas were shining through, as Aquinas might put it. The shape of things to come was forming, re-forming in a prophetic imagination kind-of-way, and I had to admit I felt I was discerning the sense of call to go and cultivate a faith community deeply connected and moving with Christ.
[to be continued...]
2 comments:
At first I thought you were going to plant a church in Pittsburgh. That's where my wife is from but I didn't know you meant that kind of pit.
I can't wait to hear how the rest of your journey unfolds.
hey ramon!
you're the first one to get the clue right! i'll tak more about it in the next post.
where in Pitt is she from?
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