The Electric Drama

It's a challenge to keep God's story experientially "thick" in our lives. It's so easy for his narrative to feel so thin and seemingly absent in our day to day experience to the point where it's functionally non-existent.

I was so blessed this past week to attend an event that was full of snapshots of what God is doing around the world this moment. Egypt. Pakistan. China. Germany. Iran. Syria. Saudi Arabia. The stories being told truly leave the listener in awe of God's story. The type of drama we see unfolding in the Book of Acts is unfolding all around the world right now outside of North America. We're just blinded by CNN. Don't get me wrong. For the most part, they're reporting facts and figures. But they just get a few isolated notes here and there while completely missing the grand melody and symphony of God's story that ties all the music together. The major news stations skim the surface and miss the underlying pulse pumping through the internal veins of God's drama.

I got to sit for a couple hours in a spiritual IMAX theatre during this event, hearing concrete stories of what God and his fully immersed protagonists are doing in his story. I learned that a few months before the Syrian civil war started in 2011, many Syrian missionaries were warned to leave the country because of the impending civil war yet initially refused to leave because they wanted to urgently preach the Gospel and save as many lives as they could at the risk of their own lives (later they ended up leaving due to political reasons outside of their control). I am so challenged and in awe-full respect for Christians who are being persecuted by ISIS jihadists who refuse to renounce their faith even though their children are being tortured and killed right in front of their eyes. They belong in the hall of fame of God's saints with the greatest honour deserved amongst our spiritual kin. I also learned that there have been former ISIS soldiers coming to know Jesus through dreams and visions of him as well as encountering the love of Middle East Christians.  Then, there's huge numbers of Christians in the East as well as the Middle East willing to rise up amidst the nightmarish conditions they're persecuted in. Hearing all this stuff makes me feel like a small Hobbit hearing of all these races rising up to battle Sauron together and save the world.

I miss this kind of environment. It's been around a year since I was in one. I miss my spirit being energized like this. In narrative therapy language, these kinds of atmospheres "thicken" the story of God in one's consciousness with magnetically charged suspense. It reminds me that falling in the middle of the electric drama of what God is doing in the world is like falling right in the middle of a spiritual Avengers movie. A lot of the times there is a constant edge of your seat tension of good versus evil with hot projectiles flying heavily on both sides. Here, one feels wholly alive to a divine purpose drenched with holy adrenaline. Hearing epic testimonies of God's counterplot that constantly foils Satan's agenda surges Spirit-filled energy through one's very bodily fibres. The narrative recipe of the cliffhanging uncertainty of events, suspense-filled outcomes, and consecutive game-changing shifts in the plotline delivers deeply satisfying soul food. This is a story with a setting that feels like every square inch of the atmosphere is saturated with the dynamic tension of Good vs Evil.

Oh, what a joy and challenge to maintain the thickness of God's grand story in the theatre of one's soul. The soul hungers for such a story. However, many times, the soul forgets this hunger as well as the content of what it was created to hunger for. Hence the North American epidemic of soul anorexia.