I Watched Someone Love Something...

I was thinking this morning again about the opening author's note in Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. It reads:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

I was thinking about this passage this morning, particularly that second last paragraph, about watching someone love something before you can love it yourself, and realized again the truth in that statement.

I spent almost two years watching people around me love God in a way that I'd never seen before, and then, suddenly, one night, sitting in a friend's car, and still watching him love God, and invite me to that too, I started to get it. All of the different friends in my life showed me the way.

And I was thinking about that this morning, because they're still doing it. They're still modeling for me what it means to experience God on a deeper and deeper level. I saw it last night at church, and sitting around a picnic table at Peter's Drive In last night, and standing in a parking lot as a witness of what God was doing as two friends prayed for another friend. Every time I see these people they teach me something new about God - they incite a desire for deeper and greater things.