On Worship

Worship has been difficult for me this last year.

Through ups (a few major ones) and downs (big), I have had trouble finding true worship.While my emotions were intense, unbounded, as I was tossed from the top to the bottom like a small boat on the great sea, the worship service seemed even keeled and calm. While I was living the drama of the greatest rejoicing and greatest despair of my life, the worship service offered the same peaceful and composed practice designed to draw me to God. While I had changed and was changing every moment, often in ways that caused me to feel torn apart, the worship service was as tranquil as ever. How could I find my way to God when there was no opening to express my deep emotions? Just that, how?

So I spent time meditating and praying on that. I spent time with a group planning a new contemporary worship service. I spent time in church feeling unable to connect. I spent time on sabbatical from church. I even spent time at a seminar on the role of liturgy and worship in spiritual formation (imagine!).

Then I thought about spiritual formation.

I thought about being conformed to the vision of me that God has. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to Face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” Imagining myself as the vision that God has of me, led me to think about my own responsibility for my own spiritual formation. If I am not open to being spiritually formed by God, I won’t be. It is that simple.

That is when I began to realize that the barrier to worship was in me, not in the service. Worship is an experience only bounded by what I bring to it as God is always there offering an unbounded communion. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship." From sun light to dark, from deluge to drought, from calm to storm, nature responds with constancy of being in the existence that God has created; nature responds with worship. Worship is the state of constant communion with God, a state of grace, a state of joy, a state of nature; it is what I was created for. Worship of God, our creator, redeemer, and sustainer, is both personal and corporate, full of particularities and universalities, both internal and external, both defined and beyond description For Max Lucado, "Worship is the thank you that can't be silenced." Surely, that is the eternal response of nature. Regardless of the experience, nature responds with worship, with thanks. God is always pouring out the communion. It is up to me to open my heart to receive it. Sometimes it is easier, sometimes it is harder but the communion is always there. Maybe by opening myself in a worship service that seems unable to meet me, I will find a communion that I could never have hoped for or imagined.

I think that is called growth. What else would God send in this season of new life.

Thanks be to God.