Creatures of Worship

I blame my love of reading for destroying the word “creature”. When I hear the term ‘creature’ I automatically think of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series. J.K. Rowling did the term a little more justice in creating the fictional house elves, but to refer to humans as ‘creatures’? We don’t have disproportional noses and ears, nor do we use all four limbs to walk [or at least if we do, it is for a limited time only…like shamrock shakes].

I thought that college was a time for discovering your identity. Apparently this is a lifelong process…who knew?? ;) Anyways, there is a new identity that keeps punching me in the face (basically) and that is that I, that we, are creatures of worship. Do I truly know what this means? Not a blessed clue, but I can tell you that I’m at least trying to put one foot in front of the other in terms of discovering the truth in this statement.

This is the first time in eight years that I am not singing for a grade. I came to that realization the other day as I was painting a wall. KaBlooM. [mind blown].  Now don’t get me wrong. I would give anything to sing with Concert Choir or One College Ave again (particularly now as this weekend is homecoming at Messiah College). Community worship, community singing is something that fills a specific void in every soul whether you can carry a tune or not…but I’m rabbit trailing. That’s a blog for another day.

One week ago. Painting a wall, fingers and hair doused with specks of blue, in a room with no furniture (awesome acoustics), and an ipod and speakers and here I am… here we are [as there were others from my team as well] simply singing, simply serving. There was no grade to worry about, no worries about cracking or how that vowel sound should be produced. Not a care in the world that Chris Tomlin sets all of his music in unrealistically high keys. All of us together, some singing line for line, others joining in for a line here or a line there, some singing a completely different song over top of the other because they compliment each other well [hmmm…can you guess who did that?] And best of all we were singing to a Creator. Looking around at us in this half-painted room it was Revealed to me that “this is what we were made to do”. In discovering one’s identity sooner or later the question of purpose is going to be posed. What a simpler answer than we were created to worship our Creator. In all that we do: words and actions. There’s my life’s purpose. Boo-yah.

To quote on of my beloved teammates, Miss Tiffany (or as I loving refer to her, Auntie Tiff-Tiff) “what does that mean?”. I’m about to go all technical on you here. First of all, you couldn’t pay me enough money to do the job that Webster did, but you have to admit that he {and others, I’m sure} created one stellar dictionary. He says that worship is “an extreme devotion or intense love or admiration of any kind.” Well, that’s nice. I love many things. I’m devoted to many things. How do I know which of my loves and priorities ‘wins’ so to speak?

That’s where Louie Giglio came to help me out. He’s got a book that has some good stuff in it. I wouldn’t give it five stars, but just because a reference isn’t of epic-life-changing quality doesn’t mean that it can’t speak truth. There was one phrase that put the final piece of my puzzle together for me.

“Whatever you worship, you become obsessed with. Whatever you become obsessed with, you imitate. And whatever you imitate, you become.”

Louie Giglio, “The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life”

Boo-yah. Now, keep in mind that I said my puzzle. Not your puzzle. Not his, not hers. Who I become is the end result of Who I worship. And please know that I do realize that I’m writing this out much simpler than it actually is. Yet in the beauty and complexity of all that worship is, it really is quite simple. I take ownership of that fact that I am a life-long learner in this process. I just thought I’d take the opportunity to splash you with a sprinkling of one [of the many] lessons that is in progress at the moment.

This dude knows what worship is all about.