Circle Dance Part 2
Picture by Linda Bobbitt
Last time I invited you to imagine yourself in worship forming a circle with every other worshiping congregation in the world all focused inward on God. This week I invite you to remain in that circle but turn 180 degrees. When you turn around, you can’t help but notice that God’s presence does not stop at the walls of the congregation.
Recently, I spent some time on the beach. Walking along the coast in the morning I watched the sun slowly emerge through the cloud bank while listening to the rhythm of the waves. I was awe struck by the realization that this same sound and rhythm are experienced throughout the world, everywhere water meets the land. I tried to imagine the world’s shoreline and was quickly overwhelmed, so instead I just looked down to the sand below my feet.
There I noticed something. Tiny holes in the sand indicating small creatures washed in by the tide and digging down. As I continued watching I saw some of these creatures washed up in the low waves at my feat. I picked up a couple of them and they are pictured here.
Picture taken by Linda Bobbitt
These small creatures live out their lives in this place – where the sea meets the land. Holding their shells, I realized that creatures like this inhabit all the coastlines of the world. They cannot move far by themselves. Rather they are moved by the waves. In a way, they are a perpetual witness to the continuous connection between sea and land.
As I considered these creatures and the coastline, I realized that the church is like the coast – a place where the world meets God. There is a lot more to God that we can’t see or comprehend, just as we cannot see or comprehend the rest of the ocean.
Each of us lives among the waves. Some of us are like the small creatures I found. We are rolled about by the Spirit receiving what we need and digging down when we seek safety in familiar rhythms.
But some of us take another approach. When we learn to pray deeply through spiritual practices, we become like snorkelers and sometimes even scuba divers. We can explore more of the sea including the beautiful coral reefs of spiritual gifts and even the spiritual depths where we meet God with sighs too deep for words. In those places we can only breath and rest in the gentle rhythm of God’s rocking embrace. As snorkelers or scuba divers we swim among the fish and experience God from a different angle. Here we experience a quiet brightly colored beauty that we could not imagine from the brown and grey shoreline of our everyday life.
Even though we feel like fish, eventually we realize we are not. We must return to the land. Yet as creatures of the coast, we bring a deeper awareness of the unseen world – the world that always moves with the rhythm of God’s waves. Eventually that rhythm becomes our rhythm. We go through our days rocking gently in God’s presence. The challenges of each day are simply another wave. Some loom large and other are only ripples, but all of them pass. Regular times of prayer and meditation reconnect us to God’s rhythm bringing us the spiritual nourishment we need to engage the world each day.
