Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Talking About Him As If He Is Not In The Room

Has that ever happen to you? Your in a room with a bunch of people and they start talking about you but do not acknowledge that you are actually right there. You're listening; with the ability to chime in and maybe give greater depth to the conversation; because it's your life and experience that they are talking about. I hate those moments.

And I find that I do that all of the time to God. Because as I'm working on developing a sermon I'm researching about God, and pondering about God, and writing about God but at no point regularly do I acknowledge His presence in the room. Last week was different though. Armed with this new profound awareness of His presence I began to write my sermon as if a dialogue between me and my God in the room. The process became so much more intimate.

Then I started thinking, "Wow, what if I lived my life with God in the room!" Aware of His presence as I talk to my kids as I love my wife as I plan our future as I serve His church. Now a formerly distant impersonal God is surrounding me with His wisdom and insight and grace listening and giving greater depth to the conversation. Why? Because even with my family and my future it's His life and His experience that I'm dealing with.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Motivation to preach from Ecclesiates

Absurdity is the anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos. This is what immediately impresses itself upon the man who has renounced diversion. It cannot be otherwise; for in renouncing diversion, he renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patters, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or ask if they have any practical consequences in one’s life. --Thomas Merton