This weekend I worked with the children's ministry and, in that capacity, received a CD of the music the kids were learning/had learned this semester. Now my church in Houston is wonderful for many reasons, but one of them is its music. We have the privilege of hearing some fantastic Christian artists every week, many of whom are personal friends of the pastor or his family. Chris Seay (if that name looks familiar to you, you may be thinking of his brother: Robbie Seay of The Robbie Seay Band), the pastor, even boasts that it was he who gave David Crowder (I believe) his first guitar. So when I say I got a CD of children’s ministry music and actually played it in my child-free car on my way to work Monday morning, I want to be clear that this was not your typical Jesus loves me, this I know kind of music. J The songs are peppy and cheerful, but some of them also have great depth to them, courtesy of a few of the artists bless us with their regular presence as worship leaders.
The song that has stuck with me, however, is not one that initially struck me as particularly loaded with spiritual meaning, and yet I have found myself singing its opening chorus line over and over in my head since seven o’clock Monday morning. It goes like this: Je-sus loves me. He made a-all I see. He wanted meee to beee…part of the big God story, the big God story, the big God sto-ory. Somewhere between the 600th and 700th repetition of these words, it hit me that I spend a lot of time looking at my little story and not nearly enough time seeing things from the perspective of God’s big story. I find I have a little extra left in my checking account and I plan generally unnecessary shopping trips; Something happens with my center/agency and I barely get through pleasantries with my long-suffering parents before I’m complaining about inefficiency, I hear about a friend’s engagement and I focus on my feelings of being left behind. As I continue down this rabbit hole, I get more and more lonely/ irritated/ prideful/ upset/ vulnerable to temptation and thus, find more reasons to focus on my own little story.
But God doesn’t want us to live in our own little story. He wants us to be part of His huge, glorious story! How incredible is that?! We were created to be workers and warriors with God and while sin corrupted that relationship, He still wants us to be restored to that place. There is still a part of our make-up that longs for that kind of adventure! It may be for that reason that people of all ages get so swept up in epic adventure stories like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Narnia; the all-out fight for what is good against what is evil rings true in our souls.
The beauty of literature is that we never have time to get lulled into a sense that the brokenness we see around us is normal. In life, it is easy to fall into that trap and then to see the stories and prophesies in the Bible as fantastic rather than true. As we wait for them to unfold in God’s timing, we lose the sense of urgency that is present in a well-written epic novel. (At least I do.) But it really shouldn’t be that way because God is doing big things even now—holding back His wrath so that more of His children can recognize and cling to the gift He’s extending to them.
Over Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to share the Gospel with my grandmother, which is something for which I have been praying for quite a while now. I probably have had chances before, but I never took them and in the last few months it has been heavy on my heart, so I had been asking God to give me one more chance. The funny thing is that I was half-way through explaining the Good News before I realized that God was answering my prayer. I can’t describe the feeling except that it was incredible. I was overwhelmed with the knowledge and simultaneously so excited and proud and humbled to have been entrusted with the task that I had failed in so many times before. As she asked questions, I lost my fear and laid out the truth with love and passion and without worrying about tiptoeing around the issue. There was so much freedom in that step of obedience!
The reason I bring it up is that at one point she asked us (Chelsea had joined us at this point—once again, I can’t even describe the feeling of sharing this experience with my incredible little sister!) about the wrongness that is so pervasive in the world and why, if God loves us, He doesn’t come and put it right again. At this point I got pretty passionate and I don’t know if I made my point very clearly, because this is something that I finally understood this year through reading Revelation with my church small group: God hates to see the brokenness of our lives and the only reason He is holding back the restoration of the earth and humanity is so that He can gather His children and bring them to a place where regardless of what befalls their bodies, they will be back in right relationship with Him, able to work with Him in the new earth that is lit by His very presence!
The restoration that He is going to bring cannot be accomplished without the wrath and just judgment that will eradicate sin and forever break the power of the enemy. If people were left the way we are without Jesus’ sacrifice, we would be casualties in that destruction and God knows it, so He waits, gathering His children and changing their hearts so that when the time comes, only the chaff will be burned away, revealing our pure, true selves, the way He intended us to be and we will have something to lay before the feet of our Lord that will make Him smile and welcome us with the intimacy of a perfect familial relationship.
The big God story puts the things in my little story into perspective and allows me to side-step the traps that the devil so carefully lays for me (he knows me very well, so his traps are very often successful). I here pray that God would continue to give each of us a glimpse of His larger story being worked out even through the things that don’t make sense in our lives so that we can rejoice in the purpose we each have: to be workers with the almighty God who loves us enough to stay His hand for a little while longer so that His lost sheep will be brought back to Him to rejoice with Him at the restoration that is to come!
