The Worship Trick

 

I was watching a show about magic the other day, listening to a character explain how the secret is always to misdirect the audience from seeing what’s really going on.  It works on me.  Even when I’m really looking for it, I get lost by the slight of hand and lock my eyes only on what I’m told to watch.

There is one who uses this weakness against me.  His sole aim is to misdirect my affection from the One it was intended for.  He shows up in places and ways I least expect him and before I know it my eyes are focused on a tree with fruit that seems like what I need, but will leave me half as filled as I could be.

I heard someone talking about this trick on the radio and was reminded of how cunning the tempter who performs it can be.  If I had tuned in early enough to know who was giving the interview, I would give proper credit to the speaker.  She was a woman who had been involved in youth ministry and created a list of things she felt high school kids in youth groups needed to know.  One of the things on the list was this:  Your youth minister is not your connection to God.

I knew what she was talking about because when I was fifteen my youth minister was exactly that for me; I just didn’t know it.  I had been blinded to it until an announcement was made on a Wednesday night that my youth minister had left the church.

I had been close with him, part of a smaller, more intimate group that spent time together outside of church.  That closeness made his leaving all more difficult to deal with.  The excitement I had about going to church began to fade and I knew it was mostly because our youth minister made every gathering jam-packed with fun, but there was something more nagging at me.  I realized this close relationship I thought I had with Christ was really more of a relationship with my youth minister.  Yes, I had a relationship with Christ, but the depth I thought was there just wasn’t.  Most everything I did in the Christian realm was to make my youth minister proud and without that person to please church left me feeling empty.

In time, I began to draw from the spiritual disciplines he taught us, like reading my bible and how to handle and view money, and put my focus where it was intended to be from the very beginning.  I think I finally have it straight now, but after twenty-something years there is still a mystifying pull toward the wrong center.  That pull is no longer toward a particular person, but toward an experience that I’m tricked into believe is the only kind of worship that is meaningful. 

There is something amazing about being in a room filled with people worshipping together the One who created them.  But, every now and then this sneaky one who drew Eve to the tree she was to steer clear of whispers to me, “This experience is the ultimate.”  If I won’t leave the garden, he’ll work on me right there, pulling my eyes in every way he can from the one thing I was made for.  He tells me Sunday mornings are enough, that I’m wise, that my relationship with God needs no cultivating because it’s already pretty solid.

Of course, none of that is true.

He tempts me to believe nothing is happening on weekday mornings when I spend time alone with God at my kitchen table before my family wakes up.  There, I only hear the sound of a temperamental coffee pot sputtering every few minutes. There are no drumbeats or soloist hitting a high note in exact unison with words that speak to an issue close to my heart.  It is quiet and often unemotional, which can lead me to believe what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile.  It certainly doesn’t feel like an encounter with God most days.

Then, one day, I hear Him.  It’s almost never loud.  An obscure verse He laid on my heart on a Tuesday morning is the same verse He laid on the heart of another.  Direction I asked for on a Thursday morning gets confirmed in a way that could only come from God.  Bit by bit, I’m learning to hear His voice because I’m spending time with Him, in community and in isolation.

I’m watching for the white gloves a bit closer now.  I pray with my boys on Saturday nights that our hearts will be open to worship God on Sunday mornings.  Then, I pray I will commit to it all over again on Monday, in the quietness and solitude that can seem so insignificant, but has been the making of a relationship over all these years.

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.  (Luke 5:16)