Some of my favorite memories from my time growing up were the concerts we gave on our One Heart tours. One Heart was the high school choir made up of people from our youth group at the church I grew up in. As we had a very large youth group, over seventy kids on a Sunday morning, the choir was also quite large, about thirty to forty kids. In early spring we would start our weekly rehearsals in preparation for the tour we took through the Western United States every year right after school ended. With our matching ties and dresses, we would load up onto a big tour bus and travel for a week and a half giving concerts and working on mission projects. One of the integral things we did during our concerts was to have two or three of the group tell the audience about how they have grown in their relationship with God. We rotated this so everyone had an opportunity to share. This belief in the importance of speaking out what God has done in our lives was also periodically done in the main services as well. Thus I grew up believing talking about how we were learning to know God was important and a valuable part of our life as a community.
As an adult, I haven't found this level of open sharing in any of the churches I have gone to since. I don't even know if the church I grew up in does it anymore. They talk about the Bible, they debate theology, they even sit in silence and listen to God but none have had discussions about the conversations we have with him the rest of the time. Now I will grant you this level of sharing is an emphasis of the tradition in which I was raised and not every church has the trust needed for people to speak out their stories but still, I ache for us to have that kind of discussion. I wish we would sit and talk about what God has done in our lives, the things he/she says, the relationship we have with Yahweh, and how he works in our lives. Our culture considers spirituality a very personal and private issue but we are meant to share our stories and with them, encourage one another. We have kept our faith so private, we do not share the life blood that would nourish our souls. Why are we so ashamed of the best thing in our lives? We share much of our medical prayer requests but I rarely hear requests along the lines of, "I'm having a hard time talking with God" or "I am having a hard time seeing God in the world around me." We come together to praise him but we don't talk about all the good things he has done in our lives. I wish we did. Maybe then we would start discovering even more reasons to worship him.Labels: God, Spirituality