As I watched the rain come down in long, wet sheets I felt the Spirit of the Lord. He was in the cool wind that blew rivers of rain down the sidewalk and in the laughter of my nine-year-old as she laughed, jumping through puddles gleefully. He was everywhere, but mostly He was in my heart, whispering His desire to pour down His rain. As I watched the summer storm blow through my neighborhood, I knew this was what we needed most. A washing, a refreshing, a cleansing, to take away all the things we cling to, all the things not of Jesus, and to bring us back to His heart.
His heart. That is what had come to me earlier. As I drove and prayed the word “heartbeat” came to mind. Don’t laugh, but for some reason I thought of that scene from the movie with Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing, where he is trying to teach the clumsy Francis Houseman how to find her rhythm. He places his hand over hers, on his heart, and he says “lubdub, lubdub,” showing her that moving through dance steps is like feeling the beat through your whole body. I think his words were, “it’s a feeling,” and I understood God was wanting us to get His feeling for the world.
I felt like the Lord was telling me that we needed to get in sync with His heartbeat, and until we could do that, we couldn’t move in the right direction. The Word says we’re one body, but the fact is a body has a head. Unless we’re following the leader it doesn’t work. If one foot wants to go right, and the other foot wants to go left, you don’t end up actually going anywhere.
Naturally this thought led to political parties. I’ve heard a lot of that going on lately. People being accused of leaning one direction too far, and it made me wonder if we couldn’t just go straight, following the true compass for our direction. I have always considered myself a Republican, a Conservative Christian, but society had left me lately feeling like a vagabond, like a wanderer, a sojourner searching for my way home. The thing I was discovering was that perhaps the place I had always felt so comfortable wasn’t my home anymore. Perhaps the Lord was leading me to His home.
Democrat and Liberal had always been like dirty words where I came from, and I certainly couldn’t bend on my moral views. Some things the left stood for I couldn’t stand with, but many ways the right was acting didn’t settle right with my spirit. To me, we all had it jacked up, and we had gotten so busy building our own agendas, we forgot the cornerstone that had been laid down. God was calling us back to that foundation, that heartbeat, that place of love we had wandered away from.
Over the past couple of months I had seen more bickering, more disagreement, and more division than ever before. It’s like the country had two sides, you had to pick which camp you wanted to be a part of, but sadly neither seemed to be a place I’d want to lay my head down at night. I certainly wouldn’t sleep peacefully being a part of either. Then I started to notice other lost children running around in the wilderness in between. Good people, with good hearts, who couldn’t find there place in what the world had become. God was opening the eyes of His children, and once open many of us couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Had we always been blind to how off track we had gotten?
The more I’ve fallen in love with scripture over the past few years, the more I consume the truth therein, the more I see what Jesus wants for His church. One body, unified. His Spirit, in us. Us in Him, seated together with the Father in Heavenly places. Not just after we die, but now, while we wait for His return. We have been commissioned to draw all people to His table, but we forgot that along the way. Instead we decided to throw our own dinner party.
