If you’ve read this blog since it’s inception, you know I am a woman of open and hopeful and thrashing faith. I believe in a big God who loves each individual… but that belief is a wrestling I do fresh every day. Like Jacob in Genesis, I wrestle and prevail, and like Jacob, I am constantly finding God in new places – finding Him Even Here. I met Jesus by name in a youth group when I was 14. This entry is a poetic remembering of that time as part of Addie Zierman’s synchroblog in honor of her beautiful new book:
When We Were On Fire.
We ran through fields and over chain-linked fences to escape the hands of the enemy, in practice for the rapture. Dropped off in the middle of the hills and left to find our way back to the school auditorium, we feared Jesus would someday leave us behind because we didn’t truly believe.
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We sang at the top of our lungs with Joel Weldon at Hume Lake. We sang of love and hope and a Jesus who was everything. We knelt and sang quietly, trying to find the perfect pitch so Jesus would know we were worth loving… and so the boys next to us would too.
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We piled in vans and went to outdoor festivals to rock for God. When we were on fire, we could do anything for God! We moshed for God. We bought tshirts for God. We floated on crowds who lifted us up on their hands – 1000s of hands lifting us up so we could be closer to God, voices of love and cheering and camaraderie.
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We held hands and vowed to give our very bodies to God and only God, no matter what it took. And some of us kept our promises to ourselves and to God while some of us made babies… ones we kept and ones we did not.
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When were were on fire, we shaped our gold into a god in the refining flames – A shape to worship that made sense and we could hold, until, in a fit of tears, we would melt our golden god down; reshaping Him again and again.
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We will always be grateful for the days we were on fire, to know we can melt, that at one time we were not too cold or too far to be reached by Love – a love bigger than our confusion and much much bigger than our idols.
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