One reason that A Quiet Water was started was to address a myth.  The myth that we can connect with God through some sort of external emotional experience. That being witness to a beautiful sunset, a quiet moment by the lake on vacation, or having a good worship band or even organ concert experience connects us with God.  It is not that these things have nothing to do with God. They are all indicators of God’s glory, but they just aren’t God.  They don’t connect us to God.

When we see a glimpse of God’s beauty and wonder and define the glimpse as the relationship itself, it is like falling in love but never getting past looking at the pictures we have taken of the object of our affection. It is as if we are watching the glowing embers of a beautiful fireworks show fall to the ground, but we never understanding the source of the rockets and why the beautiful embers stopped slowly floating in the sky.

When we make these experiences of beauty and wonder our god we are left in a tough spot. We currently live in an old but pretty house that overlooks the Puget Sound. One major down sides of the house has been house maintenance. Upkeep is twice as hard as a newer home and is pretty constant. We have had to sacrifice some comforts, space, and conveniences to live here. The upside, and the reason we bought the house, is better togetherness and beautiful sunsets and quiet mornings smelling the salt ocean air. My complaint with this is two fold. One is that I can’t share it better with others. The second is that you can’t watch every sunset all the time all night long. We get to the point where I know I have to go on with the evening. We have to get the kids to bed. We have four or five other tasks before the end of the day. We can’t live in the sunset.

Beauty for beauty’s sake and wonder for wonder’s sake can sometimes leave us disappointed. I have just seen the most beautiful thing ever. I have just heard the most wonderful concert ever. And the next day, I just can’t completely recreate the experience.  Shouldn’t I feel more we ask ourselves? How can this feeling dissipate away, and I now feel empty. I believe this may because we have been disconnected, or have never even known the source, of beauty and wonder. We are confused in our souls if it should ever appear again, and why we have had to come down from an emotional high.

The apostle John says that joy can be something a bit different than we may think. That joy is being able to proclaim eternal life. Yes, eternal life is something to proclaim! We are not all going to just rot in the ground 100 years from now with with no memory or importance of ever existing. The book of Hebrews tells us where that eternal life comes from. Eternal life comes from the blood of Jesus. The blood of Jesus is the key connector to us and God not the sunset. Without it, we are separated from God by our mistakes, thefts, excessive indulgences of the flesh, failure’s to act, and our multitude of sins. All the beauty the world ever offered will not reconnect us.  But with the blood of Christ, these heavy weights, these sins, which are the real dis-connectors that have separated us are destroyed and are now as far as “east is from the west” the Psalms say for all who call out on the name of Jesus.

There is no sunset more beautiful than that. But sunsets matter. They should remind us of nothing more spectacular than Jesus himself. There is no denying that if Jesus is who the Bible says he is that he is absolute wonder. We have eternal life, and we are in communion with him. We are part of something much greater than ourselves. With the blood of Christ our separation from the source of beauty and spectacular is broken, and we are dwelling connected to the one who loves us now free to enjoy him when he is obvious to our senses at the moment and when he is not.

Doug

The words of British poet Robert Abrahams say it well, “For some men die by shrapnel, And some go down in flames, But most men perish inch by inch, In play at little games.”  Our goal is to identify the little games and put a stop to them and put the right weight on the right things.