If you think people only drift away from God, give this a read.
In the absence of any opposing force, my experience is that we naturally drift toward an inevitable connection with God, toward the heart of God. It is, in fact, our own subconscious longing that connects us to the “pull” of God. This is our nature, and this is why Christian meditation works … but … there is a complicating factor: The gentle force that draws us is, at first, easily resisted. Initially, the tug of God is like the subtle magnetic flux that causes a compass needle to swing toward true north. It is such a gentle attractor that the needle will not respond unless it is resting free of all disturbing forces. If we break free of those forces, we will eventually be carried on an accelerating river of grace toward the ocean of God’s love. Meanwhile, until we gain the necessary momentum, we are easily trapped in the backwaters and swirling eddies of life. These become our comfort zones, and we are reluctant to leave even when given a chance.
As a wannabe Christian, I find that I still get sucked into the occasional backwater. I figure I must be about average in that respect. Like many other average folk, I need release from the distracting swirls of ordinary life. If the Holy Spirit supplies the tidal force, we average folks only need to be set adrift, right? This is exactly what Jesus did; wherever Jesus went, he created disequilibrium.
“Lost souls” are mostly, but not exclusively, just ordinary folks whose gyroscopes are spinning with the selfish busy-ness of life. True, some have “gone over to the dark side” but, for the rest, if we can perturb their comfortable gyroscopic spin, they will begin edging toward God. Evangelism doesn’t always mean that we must “bring people to God.” In many cases, we only need to distract people from what is distracting them, tweak their equilibrium, and let God’s own charisma and drawing power do the rest.
Practically speaking, this means that church can never afford to be 100% business-as-usual. It needs to be a bit edgy, a bit different, a bit uncomfortable, a bit outside-the-box. If it doesn’t have these disquieting characteristics, people will remain in their comfort zones, trapped in their personal backwaters and eddies.
Let me tell you how I got perturbed, connected, and rivited to the Good Friday part of the Easter story. In 1980, when I walked into a modernistic Virginia Beach Catholic church for Good Friday services, I was given a single nail — a really big 5 1/2″ 50d galvanized steel flat-head nail. Biggest nail I had ever seen. Humm, I thought, this is one very cool object lesson! I placed the big nail on the pew and largely forgot about it … until … it was my turn to take my nail, and drive it into a huge wooden cross that occupied most of the floor space surrounding the altar. Somebody handed me a hammer, I got a grip on my nail, knelt beside the cross, and found that, for the life of me, I could not make myself hit a single lick. Never saw it coming. Forced me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about Easter, with the result that I was drawn into a deeper emotional bond.
That’s been the pattern for me; first I get religion in my head, then later, sometimes much later, I get it in my heart.
Specularity 