Deep tissue massage

I recently had to see a physio for some neck and shoulder issues that I was having. My first visit was very pleasant, so much so that I felt a bit guilty that my medical aid paid for it. Fancy having a good ole rub down at someone else's expense, ha! When my doc booked me for a follow up session I was only too happy to oblige! The trouble was that in the second session he began to really "address" the knotty muscular issues deep within the tissue. Ouch!! At one point he attached two electrical cables to my body (ala James Bond!) and exorcised the demons through sheer voltage! Needless to say, I still bear two burn marks (one on each shoulder blade) to remember the occasion by.

In the approach to this week I had high expectations of getting God's vision for the nations, encouragement for my spirit, of new songs and glory clouds. To put it differently, I was anticipating a spiritual "massage" of sorts. In the end it turned out that Father had a few "knotty issues" that he wanted to address in my soul. I witnessed with Mike Davies when he said that it would almost be better if we avoided the word "conference" altogether. The word has so many unhelpful connotations and immediately evokes the image of a kind of grand spiritual entertainment for bored Christians. In reality it is more like physio - painful, but incredibly liberating :-)

Amongst many other words, the message of the week for me was "getting real". 4 12 is all about "equipping" people. It turns out that a large part of that is panelbeating our hearts into shape and setting our thinking right so that we can see God and relate to him properly. Those that brought the word shared with such a humility as they preached. They preached such powerful truth but the messages were peppered throughout with moments when they "got real" about their own weaknesses and struggles in their journeys with God.

Will Marais shared in this manner and he spoke about "getting real" with each other and letting people into our lives so that we can get whole again. Afterwards we did exactly that by breaking into groups and sharing about stuff in our lives which we are trusting God to help us with.

Things got pretty real when Angela shared too, all about "veils" which cover the ugliness in our hearts and the veil which often seperates us from God. After the second day I spoke to a few people and they were experiencing  the same "tenderness" in their hearts that I was experiencing. Its like physio, sometimes we need a few "sessions" with God before he can really get to business with our hearts. And afterwards there's this sore, tender sensation which you know is also a good kind of sore. The kind of sore which means proper healing is going to happen.

After all this "getting real" it seemed God really responded to us in worship with the most heart-melting prophetic song about how God gets down on his knees just to draw close to us. God really responds when we humble ourselves before him and before men, he lifts us up to where he is and allows us to see him more clearly. He reminds us that it was actually him who humbled himself first when he came down from heaven and became a man.

After all the heart surgery there was definitely a shift in which God seemed to be saying, "Ok now that we have got all the 'you' out of 'you', know that I dont need a massive army to advance my kingdom and bring the light that illuminates every soul and brings healing. All I need is a few good men and women to do the job. Are you willing to be one of them?"

A story that will probably stay with me for a very long time came from Will (they usually do ;-) It was of a musical conducter called Verdi. [I'm paraphrasing] At the end of four days of performing, one of his interviewers asked him, "Why did you seem so unresponsive to the crowd after each nights performance? Why did you only seem to respond to them at the end of the fourth performance?" To which he replied, "There was a Maestro who I saw sitting in the crowd. He didn't respond to any of my performances except the last one. On the last evening he stood and gently applauded. The crowd appluaded on every night but what do they know? It is only the Maestro that can identify a truly worthy performance and when he applauded I knew that I could be proud." What a powerful life lesson, that I live to please an audience of one. Nobody else's opinion of me matters. When my Father applaudes, I know I have done well.

It seems that whenever I'm just about to give up on myself and feeling as worthless as a worm, God comes and he resurrects me to wonderful new life. I was reminded again of the truth that whenever we say loudly to God, "More of you Lord!", we are at the same time quietly whispering out of the side of our mouths, "and less of me". Before we can truly live we must thoroughly die.