What is Truly Awesome?

Lately my family and I have been in what you might call a slump. It feels kind of like we are all standing around looking for God, wondering where He is. It is through this time that I have come to a stunning realization. The thing that we long to have, the thing that compels us forward and keeps us going is something that we have long believed to be found in the church (read as church-building.) This could not be further from the truth.

We had been involved in a church plant several years ago that was a truly awesome experience, and through it we learned more than most church-goers might learn in several decades of attending church. I do not say this to brag or to make more of us than we are, just to illustrate the point that God was there--and was really making a difference in people's lives. The plant lasted for about five years when it ended in miserable failure. Truths were revealed that cut deeply, and we were left standing around confused, frustrated, angry, and asking God "How did this happen?" The sting of this has haunted us for many years, and has been a large factor in our involvement in church and how close we will let people get to us.

What we have learned from all of this is that we have expectations, and that we put those expectations off on God and think that He is in some way obligated to fulfill them. Reality check folks, God does His thing and has no obligations of the sort to maintain for us. The first thing that we needed to admit is that we really thought that God let us down. He didn't. Job lost way more than we did when God allowed Satan to put the screws to him, and he never felt that God owed him anything. We also needed to realize that although we met in a church building, it was really, truly, only God working in the lives of the people there that compelled us forward and gave us the strength to carry on. We didn't do anything special there, we were just real people with real problems, seeking after and serving a real God. It says in the Psalms that "our God is in Heaven and He does as He pleases." It is not for us to understand God or even try to, (I don't want to have a God that I can understand.) What we do need to understand is that God is in His people, and living out our lives in service to Him and helping strengthen His people, is what the "church" should be doing.

I have said all of this to say that I have seen a miserable failure become the de facto standard that I have been measuring all other churches against, and that is exactly what I need to be doing. It was in this miserable failure that I have seen the truest manifestation of God in a body of believers, ever, period. Despite the hand of man doing it's best to mess it up, God has shown me what it is that I need to be doing. That is the answer to the question "what is truly awesome?" Seeing God take something that I have labeled as a failure and showing me the success in it is truly awesome. That is the God that I serve, one that can make awesome out of utter disaster.

-cw