"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span..."
Isaiah 40:12
If I were not in church, I would never read those words from Isaiah probably, or if I did, it would be a quick scan, not something I would contemplate much, certainly not a brief phrase that I would imagine using for a spiritual talk. Good thing I'm in a church. Good thing I have a pastor whose eyes don't speed read through the Old Testament.
Lee, bless him, always paints a picture for we visual-minded folks with our TV brains. Lake Michigan is 300 miles across at its widest, and about 1,000 feet deep at its deepest. (That's over 3 football fields, which is the only way I can visualize distance, which is odd because I'm not a big football fan.) Anyway, it's a lot of water, and if you throw in lakes Huron, Ontario, Erie and Superior it's a lot to put in a measuring cup, which Lee held up for another visual aid, bless him. And then we add all the other inland lakes and the rivers, seas and oceans and imagine that in the hollow of God's hand. Suddenly God gets quite gargantuan.
As a side benefit, I immediately have this really fond feeling for God, this Spirit who uses a human anatomy word picture to try and describe himself in human terms so we can get just a tiny inkling of his ubiquitousness.
And then Lee talked about the heavens, and asked for statistics. I'm so glad I belong to a church where questions are asked and answers are called out from the Body, a church where we don't sit passively and run the risk of having our minds wander to what's on sale at Wal-Mart or how long it will take for the pot roast to cook in the crock pot. I'm also impressed by the statistical knowledge of many of these lovely people, who know so much more than I do about the speed of light and the nearest constellations and how long it would take to travel there. If Lee could have broken space travel down into football field measurements, I might have been able to wrap my brain around it a bit better.
Then he talked the heavens and being a guide in the mountains of Colorado, and making a base camp at 10,000 feet. After all the young men helped set up camp at dusk in record time, they took each boy outside of camp about 100 yards, which, when I think of a football field, is pretty far when you're high up in the mountains with night crawling in. The guides also took their sleeping bags and went out 100 yards individually, so that everyone was arranged in a spoke around the base camp. So there they were, a connected circle, but separate in their own Rocky Mountain world. I can almost hear the silence. And I could almost see the stars when Lee described lying there and looking up at a heaven so vast and so deep that it felt as if you could reach up your hand and touch it, and that it could swallow you in its immensity and dimension.
Then I thought of God measuring the vastness of space stretched out between his thumb and pinky finger. When I think of a God that big, I see a glimpse of why the sight of a dandelion poking through a crack in the sidewalk can bring me to tears. I begin to understand how I can stand in line at the bank and see these invisible threads between each and everyone of us there, and be filled with such love for strangers. God's girth is so enormous that he touches every thing, and every one. And occasionally when I am very lucky I feel the universe wrapped in his arms and saturated in Love.
1.1.06
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10 comments:
Anne,
I wanna go to your church.....
xoxo
And I so wish you did! How wonderful would that be. We also had different spiritual stations set up today. I chose to do one where I ended up sitting on the floor in the front of church, reading a psalm about thankfulness to God, and then via instructions writing down 25 things I was thankful for, and pinning it on our prayer wall.
That is so cool. I didn't go to church today. But I did end up thinking about the blessings (and blessings in disguise) the last year has brought. I didn't intend to, but I just ended up there. Lots of frustration, lots of pain, yet lots of joy and growth over the last year. And when I really think about it, it all brings blessing. I think today I could have written down 25 things I was thankful for! What Psalm did you read?
Karen, I don't remember which Psalm! I tried to find it, but couldn't. I'm very biblically challenged. I could see you labeling your 2005 as the Year of Change. I know how difficult much of this has been for you - and yet here you were seeing the blessings in all of it. I think I was a little too general in writing my list, so when I got to the end and couldn't think of one I added "chai tea latte". :)
if i was going to go to a church, yours would definitely be one of them! :0 i am SO glad you are a part of an awesome community... i know you know how rare this is! :)
did you end up making your journal for lee? did i miss my opportunity to write a story? i'm sorry if i did... i meant to, but you know how life gets. if you haven't done it yet, let me know, and i'd still like to... if you have, maybe i'll just write him a note anyway...
chai tea latte... yum.... did you know that general international makes a sugar free chai latte that is out of this world! if you haven't tried it, you must.
anyway, sounds like you had a great start to the new year! i'll have to listen online now!! :)
love ya
Darla, I am so glad for you and Michael out there being the church instead of being inside the church building. I just wish there were more local Zoo people for you to hang with. I wish I was one of those local ones. No, you didn't miss our expanded story deadline! We've postponed it until Easter because we didn't have enough stories yet. Thank you for the tip on the sugar free chai latte! I have celebrate the holidays via food, and now it's time to stop that!
Beautiful post, Anne. I'm linking from my blog (hope that's ok).
Ran across this thought here: "to grant God greater access to our hearts." Isn't it amazing that the God of such magnitude allows us the power to accept or reject Him?
Kingsjoy, I'm honored. Link away! Thank you for the link to another great blog. It is amazing that God gives us the choice to accept him or not. I don't think if a committee of Christians was deciding things we'd have been as reckless as giving humans free will. :)
Anne, this entry was especially interesting to me (thanks for pointing the way, Kingsie) because yesterday I spent the day envisioning a Bigger God. I've been contemplating a blog post on it, since.
The visuals I put myself through really did help, though they also made me realize how much He's beyond my brain's capacity to fathom.
Christine, one of those "godincidences", (thanks for that, Monty), that you were also contemplating a Bigger God as well, and trying to fathom the scope of him. Really the crux of Lee's spiritual talk was asking how big of a God we personally have, and have as a church. Are we doing church things and signing up for ministry positions because of some feelings of religious obligation, or are we truly living in a God so big that he is transforming us? May the glorious majesty of him swallow me up. Thanks for your comment, my dear.
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