My Big Apple Epiphany

Currently, I am sitting in the lobby of a hotel in the middle of Manhattan.  So, since I won’t be blogging from the comfort of my own home, you may need to be warned that this blog is going to have a slightly different flavor than the others.  To be forewarned is to be forearmed.  So yous guys should arm yourselves…hahaha.

This week I have spent a great deal of time alone, walking around the ‘greatest city on earth.’  It is worth mentioning that I have been to the city countless times and spent hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours here.  But, ‘living’ here is a new experience for me.  In all of that time spent here, I have developed some 'rules' about how to survive in NYC: keep your head down, don’t smile at anyone, and walk fast even if you don’t have a clue where you’re going, etc.  You see, it is the worst possible insult to be thought of as a tourist here.  If the native New Yorkers think you are, you’ll be asked five million times if you want to go to a comedy club, give money to the homeless, or the greatest of all offenses... purchase I ♥ NY paraphernalia.

As someone who lacks affinity for any sort of unannounced touch, Times Square isn’t one of my particularly favorite places to begin with.  However, I am a hopeless sanguine, so the flashing lights and swirling energy naturally attracts me.  But, out of all the times I have been to the city, even though I follow every rule, people can always tell I am not from here.  Over time, because of this, I have grown to absolutely despise Times Square. And wouldn’t you know, that my hotel that was supposed to be near Central Park, ended up being right off of, you guessed it, Times Square. 

So, I have had to adapt.  If I want anything (including Starbucks), I have to walk outside the hotel and into the madness of Times Square.  But, a funny thing as happened to me here.  Like all funny things that happen to me, it has shifted my opinion about several things.  Maybe it was out of rebelliousness or just the spirit of trying something new, but for whatever reason this week, I began to break my rules.

On my way to a Hillsong service last night, for instance, I had to hail a cab.  Now usually, I just tell the cab driver the address and let the little TV in the back of his seat drown out the awkward silence of two strangers sitting in a closely confined, deathly rapid, moving vehicle.  But last night I decided to mute the TV and talk to the cabbie...despite my hard and fast rule. We had a $7.50 ride and guess what?  I learned so much about another human being that I would normally have no way of getting to know, in that short time.  So, on the way back I did the same thing, and much to my surprise, the driver asked which borough I was from.  When I told him I was from Connecticut, he didn't believe me.  In fact, Pascal (his name) still thinks I was joking.

It’s happened to me a few times this week, actually.  I have been mistaken for an NYC native 4 or 5 times in the week that I have been here.  This may seem like a menial thing to anyone else, but for me it’s anything but lackluster.  You see, it’s not about the cab driver, being viewed as a tourist, or even NYC, it’s that my formula didn’t work. 

For those of you that may not know, my father is my pastor.  Not in a weird home-church sort of way, but in the way that he pastors a church that I attend.  From the pulpit this Sunday, dad was talking about how past experiences can build your ideas about how the future is laid out.  And what's really disturbing about that is that our experiences may be totally misconstrued.  Your experiences are subject to this world and what you have seen of it and since when is one view the final word on anything?

As Christians, we are supposed to find our reality in Christ.  Natural experiences are just a tool to practice what we know to be true in the spiritual realm.  You hear people who have died and come back say that the reality after you die is so much more real than anything they have experienced on earth.  That’s because it is.  We are spiritual beings before we are natural beings.  Christ himself embodies this for us (no pun intended).  He was and is and is to come.  So, always having been it was just for a small period of time that he took on a natural form. 

Are we so much different?  I would contend that we aren’t that much different at all (with the exception of the whole ‘God’ thing).  We can’t afford to get lost in what we’ve seen or been a part of in the past, because that’s not our reality.  God has formulas, of course, but they aren’t usually what we think they are.  To be honest, we shouldn’t even be worried about trying to figure them out.  It’d be like explaining astrophysics to a pre-schooler.  Our main job is to find out who He is and believe me, that can take a whole lifetime.

I realized something while I have been here—that I didn’t really know who New Yorkers were and that my past experiences had very much defined my assessment of the city.  And then I realized something that really hit home.  Maybe I have done this with God.  Maybe in some areas, I have let my past experiences dictate to me what kind of God I serve, instead of entering into the reality of what His Word and character actually say.  You see my Bible says that He is my healer, my deliverer, my strong tower, my help in time of need, my savior, my creator, my all-sufficient, the great I Am, the author and finisher of my faith, my friend, my love, my safety, my ruler, my King, my God.  That’s my reality.  He’s my reality.

Everything else is just passing, fleeting.  I think we get so caught up sometimes in what ‘works.’  It’s easy to do.  In the words of my very wise older sister, Rachel Adams, “Reality smacks you in the face and then hands you a trust issue, so who wants to repeat that?”  I love that because it’s so true.  Instead of fighting back or walking away, we just accept the trust issue and thank reality by playing according to it’s rules.  Not anymore for me.  I’m done with that cycle, and the gloves are coming off.   I’m here to bring the reality of the Kingdom of God to my experiential reality and blindside it with a Brooklyn right hook.

You can never ‘unknow’ something once you know it.  I will never go back to being the tourist in NYC, because now I know how not to.  The same is true with God.  I know now, that His reality is higher than mine and honestly much better.  So be encouraged by my Big Apple Epiphany.  Maybe you have some preconceived notions in areas that are based on a distant memory of what you thought you knew.  We all do.  Find it, recognize it, and deal with it like a real New Yorker. :)

^My hotel lobby, aka birthplace of my blog^

God: Subjective or Objective?

If you know me, you may have perceived that I am a straight-laced kind of girl.  I started this life with a small allotment of tolerance for those who are the 'creative types.'  I like events to happen in an efficient way, and I like to be the one who finds and executes the plan of operation.  That's how I like things to go, anyway.  Unfortunately for myself and those who have to put up with me, life happens in spite of me and my plan.  I say all of this to make this point: in the ongoing and timeless battle of subjective vs. objective, I fare on the objective side 110% of the time.  I like to know the 'why' of a situation so that I can figure out the best 'what,' 'when,' 'where,' 'who' and 'how.'  As you may have guessed, this makes me great at organizing events, administrating, and solving world hunger.  You can imagine then, how frustrating it may have been for my little Type-A personality to grow up with an X-type father.

That's my dad.  He doesn't fit into any box- well, perfectly anyway.  He sees events as they happen and makes judgment calls seemingly on the fly.  Growing up in his church, I not only had to see him (and respect him) as 'father,' but 'pastor', and as I got older, 'boss.'  Like I said before, his leadership methods didn't bode well with me all the time.  Often times, I would think to myself, "things would be so much easier if you could just tell me why we're doing this."  It wasn't until extremely recently that the Lord checked me about my attitude.  You see, it's not that I didn't respect my father, in fact, quite the opposite.  I wished I could operate the way he did more often, but my nature is to nail things down and always have a plan.  So, I was irritated when things didn't go according to plan...my plan.

The Lord literally stopped me mid-thought one day and gave me a revelation.  I love that.  God used my own bad attitude to show me something.  I realized that there was only one way you could be successful at working for my father; you had to know him.  That is the absolute only way that you can know if he is going to approve of something or not, if he prefers something or doesn't... you have to know him.  As I let that download in me, I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit come upon me.  That is how my relationship is supposed to be with God.  God is both objective and subjective, and more often than not, I am not privy to the object.  I began to mull this over and search it out in scripture. 

How could I have missed this?  It's so evident in the Word.  It's like when Tamar whores herself out on the side of the road and the Bible says she is found more righteous than Judah (one of the 12 tribes of Israel).  Looking at that subjectively, it makes zero sense.  Even by the Law of Moses, prostitution is wrong.  So is lying.  So is stealing.  In fact, she pretty much broke every rule in the book that day--and it's counted unto her as righteousness?  Here's the secret: maybe Tamar didn't know the full plan, but what she did know was that God is a God who holds the end from the beginning and His will would be accomplished.  She trusted God for the rest.  And that's really what trusting God is all about.  It's about knowing Him.  He's the Type-A of all Type-A's.  He has a plan and He will execute it.  Sometimes the thing you are doing makes little to no sense, it doesn't fit in your box, it doesn't bode well with you.  Well I am sure that whoring on the side of the road didn't particularly sit well with Tamar either, but because of her trust in God, she was in the direct bloodline of Christ. 

Or how about the woman with the alabaster jar (Mat 26:6-13)?  The standards at that time being considered, what she did was wasteful and unclean, yet Jesus called it beautiful.  In fact, it so touched the heart of God that He declared that her act of worship would be forever told as part of the gospel.  Subjectively, it seems so foolish, but isn't it like our God to use foolish things to confound the wise?  You see, His plan was much bigger.  He knew Jesus was about to be crucified and He needed someone to anoint Him for burial.  How could the disciples possibly know that?  They couldn't, and they weren't expected to.  They were expected to know Him, what He preferred, what He approved of, what He needed.

There's an intimate relationship that we are privileged to have with our God.  Because of Jesus Christ, we are able to spend time with God and develop a friendship, a heart connection with Him.  In the Bible, Abraham is called a 'friend of God.'  Now, in our everyday relationships, we all know what happens when you become best friends with someone.  You spend time together, and sooner or later you begin to become like one another, and then a point comes where you can't remember what your life was like before you met this person.  That's what God desires with us.  He wants an all-access-pass to know us, so that we can know Him.  He wants to show us things that we never knew we never knew.  He wants to clue us in on little bits of the big picture, but He can only do that if we truly know Him.

I realized that my dad is a lot like God in this way.  He operates on the fuel of relationship rather than details or plans.  I believe that God wants us to do the same.  He wants us to run on that fuel so that when we are presented with a situation that seems uncertain, we can rely on our best friend to lead us.  "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14).   Our lives are subject to the objective of God.  Lean on Him, let Him guide you and you are sure to fall in line with the objective no matter what the subject!

^That's me and dad