Dan was off with the DLA retreat this weekend and he asked me to fill in for me. I was honestly pretty nervous since it's been about 2 years! I spent some time trying to get an idea of what direction to head, and decided to focus on praying for awareness to what God is doing all around us, since this is something that has really been on my heart and mind lately. I also wanted to try out some of the ideas we discussed at the last leaders meeting, so those of you who made it a few weeks ago will recognize some stuff.
I opened with Genesis 28:10-16, which is set right after Jacob has essentially stolen Esau's birthright and Esau has vowed to kill his brother. Jacob escapes, heading north toward his uncle, Laban. Jacob rests for the night and has a dream about a ladder reaching from earth to heaven and angels ascending and descending, and when he wakes he says "God was in this place, and I was not aware of it."
Before transitioning to worship, I stopped and asked them to get comfortable for a second and explained real quick that in the Bible the words for 'spirit' and 'breath' and 'wind' are the same (ruah in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek). We think of these as three completely separate ideas, but for the writers of the Bible they are the same. FYI, you'll sometimes find different versions translate this in different ways like in the creation story (spirit or wind or either). You'll also see this in Genesis 2 when God "breathes" life in Adam, giving Adam His "spirit".
Anyway, I didn't tell them all that! But I offered the idea that breathe is maybe the most basic and yet important need we have. We are completely dependent on our next breathe, and can't last more than a couple minutes without it, but how often do we even think about our breathing? In the same way, we are completely dependent on God, yet how often are we unaware of him in our day to day lives? Is his spirit at work in and around us, but we are too busy that we don't see? So I asked them to sit for a few minutes in complete silence and just breath and listen. Then we spent some time worshiping right where they were at. I thought they were really connecting with it.
To transition to the prayer time, I read Exodus 3:1-5 (Moses and the burning bush) and prayed that God would open our eyes to him in the normal routine of life, that we would live in expectation and awe, looking for God's fingerprints, pointing out God's good work to those all around us. And I prayed that as we learn to see God actively moving that we would draw close to him and partner with him. We want to live in his story, not our little story. I wanted to stretch them a bit, so I asked them to flip their thinking a little and NOT pray "Jesus, come here" but instead pray variations of "Jesus, help me see that you are already here". I didn't want them to think I was saying it's wrong to pray the first prayer, so I made sure to tell them that. But I did want to stretch them and get them to wrestle with it.
There were some great prayers, all over the map in one sense but they were all personal responses to the core idea of awareness of God's presence at work, which was exactly what I was hoping for.
Also, Andrew Cantrel led worship for CJ, who was also at the retreat. He did a fantastic job even though I didn't make it easy on him by trying some new ideas! If you ever need a worship leader, he would be great.
And an early reminder for our next leaders meeting March 4th at 6. It's about a week and a half. I really hope you can be there. Our last meeting was really good and I think we had some exciting new vision for the prayer meetings. I'm sure we'll build on that this next time.
grace and peace.
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