A foundation for building
The Word is the the word that I need to ground my life in 2021.
Have you heard of the @dwellbible app? I started using it last year as a way to listen to the Word while exercising. I had no idea how powerful it would be to hear it over me while moving each day. I was previously a reader-only; but the hearing… oh my, the hearing of the Word spoken over me each day actually began to release a new word inside of me.
We all always (if you’ve grown up in the Church, as a sidebar here) have heard that the Word is foundational to the Christian life. It’s so repetitive, that it feels a bit like one of those Christian platitudes or cliches that most consumerists half-bite at (sometimes as an extension of duty or honor, and less often, as an exercise in joy and relationship). I spent a lot of years like that- consuming bits and pieces out of my shame/duty (there’s some connectedness there) or choosing just a piece or portion relevant to me and leaving the rest aside.
But in 2017, in my last year of my 20’s, I realized that I had done just about all I could do within my own power and so… at the end of my rope, as these things naturally go… I dug into the Word and bit by bit, as I read it, it began to change my life… it began to GIVE me life- a fount from which energy, conviction, and discernment poured from into the cracks and crevices of the driest parts of my life- resurrecting and bringing new hope.
So, last year in 2020, when I was at a brand new intersection where I desperately needed the companionship of the Holy Spirit and His direction on what to do next, I began listening to Scripture while exercising and, sure enough, it did a whole new thing within me again. There’s something about the vulnerability I develop while exercising that heightens my ability to hear and absorb. It’s sort of like - as I move, I pour out all of the chaos within me… and once emptied and quieted, I am able to be refilled.
Ann Voskamp wrote a brilliant blog post on this last year. In it she said:
“When I listened to Scripture while running, I could run away from the narrative of me and right into the narrative of grace. The relief of this was everything. I turned off all the noise of news and drama and distractions around me, and all the noise of fear and failure within me, and I just ran with my headset in, leaning in to the language of God. With every step, worries quieted, hushed, stilled- and all I could hear was the voice of God in my headsets, heart keeping time with His.”
In 2021, with the winds of tension and change swirling all around us, I need the language of God to pierce through the noise more than I ever have before. Our world needs a revolution; our world needs a revival; our world needs a Body of Christ that looks like the born-in-a-manger, brown-skinned Jesus whose radical love and grace upset the religious systems around him and confused the political - offering a third way- a new way to live both in the Spirit and in the flesh, with hope for this world, but not of this world… a Christ whose Body, the Church, could change everything if they were as hell-bent on sacrifice, humility, and loving the other as much as their Jesus was. Our world needs that Body of Christ for their revolution and for their revival.
And it won’t come without builders who are just as committed to the Word and prayer as they are to the slow-sacrificial-building-of-the-new.
This is a gift that my 30’s has given me. I know now, what I wish I would have known in my 20’s… if I don’t build to the sound of the Voice, then I’m sure to muddy, cloud, and convolute with the narrative of my own.
And so, I lean into Scripture, the language and counsel of God, to remember my connectedness to the Great Story and Who I co-create alongside.
In 2021, I am committed to revival, I am committed to revolution, I am committed to the flourishing of all of humankind… but I am committed to the building of it from my own small trenches… where I posture myself first in sweaty runs, headphones on, and Scripture turned up on high.