All those who feel like they are in-between, raise your hand.
Between choosing to stay home and ready to go out.
Between picking out the groceries and waiting to pay for them.
Between doing dishes for one meal and cooking another.
Between the last zoom meeting and the next in person one.
Between the first day at work and the next promotion.
There’s a whole lot that happens in the in-between, and it can feel like an endless sea of waiting. Like the three-hour line at Disney World in the sweltering Florida heat (where we were supposed to be this week). Apart from some solid people-watching, nothing exciting happens in the three-hour line, because it’s just…waiting. Right? Perhaps not.
Most of our lives are lived in the in-between, in the monotonous teeth-brushing, car-pool, commuting, meeting after meeting, doing the things and seeing the people, all the while just hoping to experience a touch of Jesus that will be enough to get us through the week.
We are an instant society who does not like waiting. And when we wait, it can become monotonous. And when it becomes monotonous, we miss things.
When it becomes monotonous, we can miss God’s majesty.
I’m guessing you’re not one who’s ever done that. For example, I know that you’re very aware that the sunrise is actually a swirling ball of nuclear fusion that does not consume itself but rather heats the earth and our solar system so perfectly that if gravity changed in the slightest amount, that yellow dwarf star, or the sun as we know it, would consume the earth. Yet the solar system orbits perfectly around it and we actually set our zoom meetings to begin and end according to the placement of that swirling ball of gas.
But the sunrise – we’d never mistake that for monotonous.
Neither would we just overlook that one random deposit that showed up in our bank account.
The incredible healing received after a messy divorce.
The restoration of a relationship that soured years ago.
That time the doctor said there wasn’t cancer because the tumor just healed itself and disappeared.
Monotony schmotony.
I have a daughter who is eight, and when she was younger, she always wanted the same cereal and the same movie and the same bedtime story and the same knock-knock joke. Kids have abounding vitality, free in spirit, wanting things repeated and unchanged. They always say “do it again” and we grownups do it again until we are nearly dead, because we grown-ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But God?
God is strong enough to exult in monotony. God says to the sun each day “do it again” and the moon each night “do it again.” Perhaps God never gets tired of it not because it’s necessity to make the world go round, but because he is strong enough to exult in monotony.
Perhaps to God, it’s not monotony. It’s just his majesty.
So when we find ourselves in between the sunrise and sunset of our situation, how do we not miss His majesty? We seek his presence.
There comes a time in our lives when each one of us seeks the presence of God, and we all seek him for different reasons. Throughout history, people have sought Jesus out of curiosity, for healing, because of fear, because our parents’ did, or because we just need help and don’t know where else to turn. But if we only look to God for what WE want, we will miss SO much.
In Mark 2, a paralyzed man sought Jesus to ask for healing. And Jesus heals him (what the man wants). But he also forgives him of his sin (the part not to miss). You see, Jesus can heal all of us and all the pain in the world right now, but we are going to get sick again. Get in trouble again. Because when sin came into the world, we were broken. And sin is still in the world, and it will be until he returns. (again with the in-between)
When we seek the presence of God, he does things we can see and things we cannot see. God exults in the monotony of our everyday lives, weaving a beautiful majestic tapestry of schedules and phone calls and near-misses on the highway and running into a friend and hearing that right thing at that right moment in the most monotonous-seeming events.
But Oswald Chambers says that “if I obey Jesus Christ in the seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God.” Think about the times that you were perhaps just going about your day and you saw Jesus.
For Moses, he experienced God’s presence and then his face glowed in a miraculous way.
Then when Joshua was walking around his camp, he experienced God’s presence and immediately fell at his feet in worship.
Hagar was running away in grief, and when she experienced God’s presence in the desert, she knew deep comfort.
Moses, Joshua and Hagar were changed, and when we truly seek and experience God’s majestic presence, we cannot walk away unchanged, because there is nothing monotonous about it.
So, let's go back to the paralyzed man. After Jesus healed him and sent him on his way, Jesus looked around at the people standing nearby and asked them which was more difficult – to heal the man or forgive him?
Jesus can heal someone with a mere thought.
But for Jesus to be able to forgive sins, Jesus had to die.
Before we even prepared a defense of our sin and our struggles and pain, Jesus went to the cross and died, and after being dead for three days, was raised back to life SO THAT we could be eternally forgiven of our sins, guaranteed a personal relationship with the majestic God of the universe. My friends, there is nothing monotonous about that.
That’s no in-between – that’s everything. More than the 30th knock knock joke and a swirling ball of fusion.
Look for his majesty today.
FORMED
God is calling us, the people of Irving Bible Church, to become a multi-ethnic movement of missionary disciples, formed in the way of Jesus for the sake of the world.
We want to be a transformed people who experience vibrant spiritual growth together. We want the Spirit of God to shape us more and more into the likeness of Jesus as we follow him.