Archives: September 2009...

Editorial...

Being caught off guard

“This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood shed for you”.

Jesus said these words to his first followers around 2,000 years ago just before he died. We say them now when we get together as his followers to remember his love for us. I said them a few weeks ago in a tent with thousands of other people.

That occasion was pretty special. For me, it was the highlight of this summer’s Soul Survivor events. I was helping out serving communion to a section of the Big Top, so it meant that I had to say those them to a few hundred different people in the space of around 10 minutes.

Initially I felt a bit weird saying the phrase to complete strangers (and then giving them a random chunk of bread from a loaf I was holding). But after about the 50th repetition something really clicked.

Jesus died, was beaten, broken and murdered for all of those people. That’s a powerful thing to stumble onto when you’re busy trying to make sure the communion queue doesn’t start getting rowdy and you’ve got a bunch of things floating around your head that you need to get on and do… I think the thought kind of caught me off guard.

For every one of those people (me included) Jesus was saying ‘remember, this is how much I love you, I did all that for you’. It was an awesome privilege to be there and observe that… It genuinely was one of those moments where you feel like your head might burst with the sudden recognition that God is there, he’s speaking and he loves us.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, my head didn’t burst (luckily for me and the people around me). But God caught me totally off guard. I wasn’t being super spiritual, I hadn’t spent hours worshipping that morning and I hadn’t been asking him to speak… he just used the simplest phrase I’d heard a hundred times to show me more of who he is and how much he loves all of us.

It made me realise God was looking to speak. And I guess he’s still looking to speak now; to me, to you and to your mates. And sometimes he will use the simplest situations to make himself known to us…. he can even speak when we’re thinking of a bunch of stuff besides him and we’ll suddenly have a moment of clarity where he’ll remind us what he’s all about.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to hear his voice (stuff like asking him to speak, taking time to listen and reading his word are essential), but it’s also about letting God catch us off guard by seeking him in the mundane stuff we do everyday. The challenge is to hear what he’s saying as we walk to school or work, as we’re chatting to our mates or as we’re grabbing a cuppa… Why not ask him to catch you off guard over the next few weeks and see what happens (email us to let us know if anything does!)?

We hope you enjoy the other articles we have this month, do drop us a line if you’d like us to cover anything specific… we’ll see what we can do.

Cheers

Dan
editor@soulsurvivor.com
ps. Sorry for the appallingly late arrival of this month’s edition… It was all Mike Pilavachi’s fault!