A life worthy

"Put your Bible on your head to show how much you love Jesus...everyone must daaance!"

If I heard that coming from any western worship leader, I would be a little shocked, to say the least.  Here, most of the congregation yelled enthusiastically in response, and put everything from Bibles to purses and large rocks on their heads.  I retrieved my Bible out of my purse and looked at it a little uncertainly.  Up until now the worship style had involved a lot of hallelujahs and amens and foot stomping and arm swinging and butt shaking.  I wasn't sure my Bible would stay on my head through all of that.

It's been almost two years since I've been to the fishing village church.  My fond memories involved beach chairs, a wooden-pole church without walls, a few goats wandering through the non-road, and a lot of sand.  We've progressed to bare concrete walls with a variety of holes (ventilation?), wooden benches, and rubber hoses hanging through the ceiling at strategic spots.  The children were just as friendly as ever, willing to enthusiastically greet us and explore hairstyles, watches, water bottles, and Bibles as a variety of service entertainment.  As I tried to communicate with them, my words came out in a jumble of Ewe and Krio and French and Indonesian and English, with a little pantomime thrown in for good measure. 

And so we sang in Ewe, and I sang along in my jumble of languages; and we danced to the shekere and drums, along the aisles and in the front of the church and next to our bench seats. And the Bible stayed on (mostly) through the end of worship.  The sermon was on unity, but a section from the main text reached out off the pages and into my heart.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Eph 4:1-2

Right now the calling is surgical wards aboard a little white hospital ship: faces and legs and hands and eyes and lives and souls. The calling is training nurses with humility and gentleness and patience, reaching out to the needy, being the face and hands and heart of Christ.  The calling is to live a life of radical love.

And a life worthy of that calling would be dancing, dancing...sometimes with a Bible on my head, and sometimes with a baby drooling down my back, and sometimes with tears running down my face.  A life worthy of this trust would indeed be a wild and radical and difficult and wonderful life.  Lord, give me the strength and the patience and joy to live a life worthy of this calling.  To live with only You as the audience, as Your love saturates until it spills out of the cracks and overflows uncontrollably into life...