Living out loud in the small moments

Controversy. We seem to feed on it in North American society. And it seems to have become increasingly worse in our current life with 24 hour news channels, charging into places and staying in places to give the latest pictures and updates for public consumption. Such coverage also brings almost relentless vilification of the authorities involved when fresh information is not forth coming on an hourly clockwork basis.  For example, there is a major disaster in one part of the world. An earthquake moves an island eight feet. A tsunami is created that wipes out villages, businesses, human lives while the media is critical of the electricity company because they are more focused on doing their jobs and thus helping people than they are about their media relations at the moment. Imagine that.

And we don’t have to go somewhere else in the world to find controversy. Here at home there is much discussion and reaction to the hit that Zdeno Chara laid on Max Pacioretty. Pundits criticize it, many bemoan it as just another bad moment in violent sport and the league doesn’t seemingly care about how it looks so sponsors threaten the owners’ bottom line if they don’t “get it together”. Or there is always the political life of this country and the antics of those who are to lead our civil governments playing she said, he said.

So it is no wonder that Nicodemus might be a little confused when he pays Jesus a compliment for all the signs and wonders he has done and the ways in which he has helped people. Jesus answers back with, “I tell you the truth: you must be born from on high if you are going to see the kingdom of heaven.”    Nicodemus is confused by such a response, asks a question, “Do I have to do it all over again? Is that what you expect?” Jesus expands on this notion and says to Nicodemus, no you must be born of water (baptism and repentance) and of the Spirit to see the kingdom. You need to be born from the Spirit, from on high.

  

It is not what we are commonly taught in the Anglican Church today. And I am not sure that I was taught it Sunday School of yesteryear either. It took a spirit-filled person being put (by God) in my path to get me to ask some of the questions that were fuelled by a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge that in turn caused me to start living the life from above.

There was an evangelistic mission in the parish where we were living a few weeks before my Nicodemus moment. I remember the day I started living my faith well. It was December 9^th 1982. We were living in a Northern BC town called Houston. I was active at the small, quaint little Anglican Church as a server. This particular morning I was at the Church for the 8am service at which there were only three people: the parish priest, a woman I did not know who sat at the back and myself. After the Eucharist, I was setting up the altar for the next service when I heard the parish priest say to the lady at the back of the church, remember, God so loves you that he gave his only Son, so that you might not perish but have eternal life… After the lady left, the priest and I walked across the street to a local restaurant to have a slice of toast and tea. Pensively chomping on a slice of toast, I ask the priest, “What do you mean when you say God loves me?” David explained that God loved us so very much that he had to be with us and to bring us home. He loves you too much to leave you out in the cold and alone. He sent Jesus to bring you home. At that moment, something clicked. And I began to put it all together for the first time.

Like Nicodemus, I had been a good Anglican. I had been baptized and gone to Sunday School and to Church. I was active in my congregation but it wasn’t until, sitting in that place, that it struck me that what God did through Jesus; it was done was for me. And I have spent every waking moment of everyday since that moment discovering and rediscovering just how much God really does love me and what he can enable me to do for him. And like so many other moments that have happened since then, I am discovering that what really counts is how we live out the little moments that follow the big moments when God is revealed to us in some great and awesome way. It is not about how well you debate an issue or how passionate you are about a cause. Nicodemus is proof of that. He took time to come out from the shadows into the light, but he was there when he was needed most and realized what Jesus had done for him. Let's allow the thought of how Jesus has lived and died for us empower our observation of Lent and let’s live our lent out loud for him.