A crazy idea... and a couple other random thoughts

So, I'm still thinking and praying about the crazy opportunity that so suddenly came about on Friday night. The friend and I who are involved are sort of surprised at the responses we're getting as we begin to float it to our friends. I think, we, or at least I, really expected at least someone, if not everyone, to simply look at us and tell us it was a crazy, stupid idea. And that would be that. We'd simply move on to other things. But no one has said that to us. No one. Most people are surprised, but almost everyone responds the way one friend did last night - "I could totally see you guys doing that."

Huh. Okay. Well, the decision doesn't need to be made for a while yet. So we're going to take the advice of another friend and keep speaking the idea out to God, to our friends and families, to our church community and to each other, believing that doors will close and the opportunity will die if it is not where God is leading us. It seems to be a surreal idea, but, at this point, albeit only a few days since the opportunity so surprisingly arose, doors seem to be opening, not closing.

And now, the other random thought that my title not so subtly alludes to!

In the middle of worship last night we were singing a song that cries out to God for freedom. And as we sang, God directed me to pray these words I was singing, not over my own life, but over the life of a friend. Not in a way that she would even know that I was battling on her behalf, but simply to cry out to Him for her. I've known her for quite a while, and walked with her through some pretty harsh and difficult things. At the moment our relationship is quite distant - her doing, and God giving me permission to step into a more silent role than the bold truth speaker he asked me to be for quite a while. And it's funny, because I would have never expected in the middle of worship to be asked to pray for her. But I was, and I did, and I'm not sure what to make of it. I don't know that I'll ever know the results. And yet I prayed - I think that makes a difference...

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.