Today we visited a remote village in the middle of the Andes mountains - people who never have or very seldom see any other people than those in their village and has never heard the gospel. What a privilege.
We saw how 7-year-olds walk hours of VERY steep mountains, up and down, in the rain and in the cold just to go to school, alone. Wow.
We had the awesome opportunity to give them the living word of God!!! We felt God lead us to do a drama about how we so easily make recipes of "How to pray..." Of "What we should do for God to hear us...". Most of our journey we as a team were faced with this ritualised approach to an unrestricted God. Stand up when you pray. Sit down. Kneel. Close your eyes. Repeat a memorised prayer. Shout.
When did Jesus ever say anything about any of those things in the Word?
Is prayer not just a fancy word for speaking with our Dad?
Somewhere God has become a "far God". I remember God speaking to me about even pointing up to the sky when I speak about Him - when has His home that is built in our hearts moved to an imaginary place in the sky? When did El Shaddai become El-I'm-Too-Far?
And so I was reminded of a moment while teaching at a pre primary school: It was break time and I heard someone yelling. Immediately thinking something was wrong, I found the "yellers" - a 5-year-old boy and girl were standing beneath the tree, looking up to the sky, yelling. As I came closer, I heard that they were praying. A dove had died and they were having a burial for it. Praying - yelling to God. I smiled. Waited for them to finish and asked why they felt they had to yell at God, looking up to the sky? "Because He is far and we want to make sure He hears us", was their answer.
My heart broke as it was again today, as I am reminded that it is us that teach our children that our Dad is "far", even if it is only through our hand gestures... Should not even that not follow what we believe?
The reality is that our amazing God and Father, our Best Friend and Counsellor lives inside of us - the sad part is that all over the world His children do not know that and they deafen their own ears with unnecessary screams to a God that is with them....
And so - I will leave you with a quote from "RADICAL", a MUST READ book by David Platt after he spoke about just the same things:
When we truly grasp the gospel and what it means and does. "Our attempt to reduce this gospel to a shrink-wrapped presentation that persuades someone to say or pray the right things back to us no longer seems appropriate."