Last night’s Worship Gathering was absolutely awe-inspiring. We revisited the thought of silence before God and hearing His voice. I then introduced 2 new worship expressions, that I wanted to be a part of our weekly gatherings. One was a writing station and the other was a communion place. I got the sense that many of us who had come that night were dealing with things, “luggage” if you will, that we had no business carrying. Luggage that we had taken ownership of that wasn’t even ours. I felt like we needed to write those things out on a sheet of paper and then give them to God. And, the reason that this act of surrender is possible is because of the sacrifice that Christ made on the cross. And so, I felt like we needed to remember the sacrifice that He made on the cross by taking communion. And so, I set an entire loaf of hawaiian bread out for us to break a piece off of. I felt like that was extremely important. When Jesus gave communion to His disciples, He told Him that it was His body “broken” for them. How often we find ourselves feeling broken inside. We are dealing with broken pasts, broken relationships, broken promises, etc. We carry this brokeness on our shoulders every day struggling with them. The truth is that Jesus Christ was broken FOR us, so that we can be whole. So, this act of surrendering to Him, was followed by a time of saying, “God, I trade my brokeness for your wholeness, because You were broken for me.”

These stations were open during our entire worship time. And we ended the night with a time of personal ministry.

Today, instead of eating lunch, I commited to everyone that I would take the time to pray over the things that they had written down on a card. No one had to put a name on their card, because God knew who they were and I didn’t need to know. As I prayed over those cards today, I wept for about an hour as I realized how much luggage we really do carry and God is giving an open invitation for us to lay it down and His feet and leave it there.

Speaking of open invitations, there’s an open invitation for you to come to the Worship Gathering next week. If you need directions email theworshipgathering@melwashington.com or click on the Worship Gathering button on the right.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Misc., Event Recap, 21CW, Worship Gatherings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.