Unseen

Two of my nieces were in their school's biannual musical over the last week. My eldest niece(who is now my work colleague - on the payroll at the ELC) accompanied my daughters and I to watch it. I think I must have missed bits of the show because the girls were in the chorus and usually on opposite sides of the stage which meant my focus was constantly flickering across the leads to keep an eye on their perfectly timed moves.  Well that is my excuse for missing the huge visual metaphor of the staging design!

The musical was Godspell and the characters were mostly dressed in construction worker get up, with hard hats and tools. A collection of parables are sung and spoken with Judas eventually betraying the overalled Jesus to the suited up architects(Pharisees & Sadduchees). The orchestra, lighting and sound were great, the staff and students should be very proud of their work but it wasn't until the next morning that I suddenly realised that the set was a metaphor for the plot.  The chorus spent all non singing and dancing time bringing in prefabricated walls, windows and doors which they clipped together as they sung their harmonies until the interior of a church was obvious. The stories and musical numbers were Christ building His church.  The architects who were focused on the buildings also missed the plot, for church is people not walls. The distraction of what made the who unseen.

After Godspell with our stars!

How often do we miss the plot because we don't notice what? How often do we miss opportunities to build people up because we don't notice who? 

As a child I was taught to pray my own prayers in private.  This form of meditation I think encouraged self reflection and often bought solutions to the tricksty social dilemmas that a nosy child worries about. I always prayed for what suited me but living on a farm soon taught me that different people would be praying for different weather at the same time - eventually I decided that God set His natural laws at creation and they ran their course. 

As a teen, watching the starving Ethiopians on the news every night, I lost any belief in an interventionist, personal God and struggled for years to reconcile the idea of people attributing a needed car space becoming available to answered prayer and innocents suffering. I felt that I needed to choose between being part of an experiment in free choice that was going horribly wrong observed by an uncaring God or the possibility that God didn't exist. Science saved me. The constant patterns and beauty from under the microscope in my biology classes to radio telescope visions of space, spoke of a designer. 

Going back into the Gospels I eventually saw the parallel between Judas and those disappointed in unanswered prayer on their terms. Judas believed by forcing a confrontation between Christ and the Pharisees he was going to see the Messiah he had always believed in, the general of an unstoppable army that would conqueror the world and return the promised land to God's people.  His limited concrete view of his world stopped him seeing the much bigger battle that Christ had come to fight.  In Hebrews 11 faith is named as the conviction of things not seen yet as concrete beings we need to see to believe.  How often does our infantile faith waver when it rains on days we plead for sunshine? How many have cut God from their lives because their pain and suffering have not been relieved? How many of us delight in the abstract but demand personal physical proof of God?

Nick's DVD

At school this week our Chaplain showed a clip from Nick Vujici's testimony. He said that through his battle of reconciling his birth with no arms or legs, his hardship and the idea of a loving God he came to the conclusion that "God changes me not my circumstance". Since Jesus' ascension and Pentecost, God has been present on Earth as the unseen Spirit. If invited the Holy Spirit will intervene in us.  I believe that He will guide our thoughts, motivations and responses.  He is the ultimate cognitive therapist.  

How do we see the unseen? Our kindness, our integrity, our involvement and  perception will not heal the ravages of our genes or alter natural laws or remove the consequences of our and other's choices but it will bring a little bit of heaven to those that our life impacts. Your face can show God to those you see everyday.

2 Corinthians 4:18 - ... look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are transient but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Reading Now: 
Sylvester by Georgette Heyer, Assumptions we make about what is happening in other people's heads cause such stressful social interactions.
Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome 

Barbara A. Wilson, Nick Alderman, Paul W. Burgess, Hazel Emslie and Jonathan J. Evans

Predict everyday problems associated with the Dysexcutive Syndrome - a new to me diagnostic tool of the unseen cause of debilitating symptoms in a couple of students at school.