Friday, January 27, 2012

Resounding Echoes

I’ve had a chance to talk to a good number of people over these last few weeks about our project.  What I can say with confidence is that the problem of excess resonates with people.  Pick your area of excess – food, stuff, spending, busyness – just about everyone gets the problem, and, at some level, claims it as their own.  Similarly, just about everyone does some things – good things – to help manage the problem.  But here’s the thing.  Excess is also tolerated as “just the way it is” which also means “I don’t really believe I can change it.”  Trust me, I am not throwing stones…I have tolerated it with the best of them.  Really, we are so immersed in it as a culture that it piles up around us unaddressed until we train our attention on it. 

Excess-as-a-problem resonates with people.  I hopped over to dictionary.com to look up the word resonate.  It means “to be understood or receive a sympathetic response” and also “to amplify sound through the sympathetic vibration of air.”  So, excess seems to strike a chord of sympathetic vibration in our minds and hearts that says, “This is a real problem.  More and extra doesn’t satisfy me.”

Agreeing on the problem of excess, we form a conclusion between us that we have a common enemy.  It’s all well enough that we can agree on what the enemy is, but I don’t want our agreement on the enemy to be that around which we form an identity.  That would make us victims of our own excess.  I am not my excesses, and neither are you.  My identity, and the ultimate source of our common ground, is in our Provider, our Father in Heaven. 

I woke up thinking about the specific part of the Lord’s Prayer that says, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Jesus doesn’t say give us today’s, tomorrow’s and next week’s daily bread.  He teaches us to ask the Lord to provide for our daily bread – our needs – for today and today only.  It seems to me that the idea of turning to God to provide our daily needs is the part that should really resonate with us.

After I looked up “resonate” (and because I’m a geek), I also looked up the word “resound,” and I loved what I found.  Not surprisingly, it’s a close linguistic cousin to “resonate,” but resound has more volume and weight to it.  It’s about loud, echoing sounds that you can’t help but hear. 

A big part of me believes that something truly God-sized is happening with this “7” movement (read Jen Hatmaker’s book, 7:  An Experimental Mutiny from Excess).  It’s how He moved our hearts to fasting from excess.  In my mind’s eye, intentionally turning from excess (and then freely sharing God’s wonderful provision – more on that another day) strikes a chord in others, and maybe moves them to action, and then more hear it and join in.  Can you hear the resounding echo?   Wouldn’t it be something if others rallied to turn away from excess and our own persistent tries at mountainous self-provision?  It would be like an echo resounding throughout American culture.  It would be music in the heavens.

P.S.  On a much lighter note, tonight’s dinner ribs that were a tish overcooked, gluten free toast that was a tish overbrown, and corn from the freezer that tasted a tish stale.  You can’t win ‘em all.

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