passion twenty two
A black olive new year's eve party that goes until 2 am. A van filled with 5 girls leaving at 4 the same morning. It's the first day of the year. The first day of my year. And it's still the first of the year hours later when they dock in Nashville and run in the middle of the street to get burgers from a local restaurant. It seemed like days apart, but I still have the blurry street photo with the date stamp on it.
The next 5 hours to Atlanta were a breeze. We were headed to the 60,000-person Passion Christian Conference in Georgia. The first night was two messages and some worship. The next day was the same: worship, message, worship, message, lunch, worship, message, etc. There was a break for dinner, but we'd brought food. Both nights ended at midnight with various levels of exhaustion from the crowd. And of course, they kept Maverick City Music until the very end.
Now that I have all the logistics out of the way, here's what I learned:
1. God wants to use me...somewhere, someway.
A huge focus of the conference was missions. In the first three messages, we heard a lot about world missions specifically. The Irish potato famine. Tim Tebow's family travelling across the globe and his father's mission in that. Helping to rescue girls from a life of sex trafficking and show them the good news. All of it was very inspiring, really. The focus was so powerful on the first day, and then towards the end of the conference, that I think many people felt a strengthening in the callings God has been awakening in them. For me, however, I had a bit of a negative reaction to this focus. I got the feeling that somehow Clara was the only one of us doing it right. I mean, she was leaving for the World Race mission trip. And beyond that, Becca was giving her life to ministry, Naomi has been mentioning teaching abroad for years, and Lindsay has always been so impassioned to help everyone around her and reach out to those struggling.
And me? I like to travel, yes. To go places, see thinks, have deep conversations. But I've never felt particularly called to "missions." That is, with the definition I'd been given over and over again at church. To leave, live somewhere else, plant churches. That kind of thing. I've seen how much of a rift pressing your opinion onto someone else can cause, and I value making my own decisions with my own thoughts. I've been half-heartedly praying for years to be better at evangelizing. It's uncomfortable. And so, the focus on missions had me feeling useless. What good is my faith when it's not travelling to 11 countries? Leading worship on Sunday? Teaching in Japan? Helping broken teenagers?
I hope you're rolling your eyes reading this. These are silly questions. One thing was clear to me during the conference: God does want to use me, somewhere. I just need to be willing to listen. It is because He hasn't revealed the details to me that I haven't done it.
2. adoration can be a calling just as missions are.
This was something that became clear to me after discussing my thoughts with Clara and Naomi. If you've been following my blog and instagram lately or just had a conversation with me about this topic, you probably know that I keep talking about "falling in love with Jesus" and been completely serious about it. In the car on the way home, I divulged feeling as if I my lack of calling to the mission field wasn't enough. But then Naomi said that she didn't know what was happening with her life yet, and Clara said she didn't know or make plans for after the race. True, I thought. What good is a plan at the beginning of my last semester, when I'm already focusing on my own art failures and trying to graduate? Then I realized I had felt called, do feel called, nearly everyday. But it feels weird to name it as a calling when it doesn't really affect anyone else. I feel called to grow closer to God, to worship, to adore.
No, this doesn't evangelize people. But I feel called to spend time with Him, talk to Him, show Him everything, make impossible amounts of art with and for Him. That's the calling right now. Love for Him. Art for Him. That's been the calling for over a year now. I don't know where it's "going." Should I? Or should I trust fall, learn to become a ragdoll, to surrender my spaghetti limbs to Him? To surrender to and to love the surrender, have it become the song on my heart.
This is the calling now, for this time. That I know.
3. true intimacy and devotion with God takes time and focus.
I write these things on a day when I wasted way too much time on social media and essentially avoided God until 2 pm. One of the speakers at the conference challenged us to spend more time with Jesus than on social media, pointed out that we cannot be devoted if we are distracted. I see this, looking back at my fall semester at a girl who desperately wanted to fall in love with Jesus but was so impossibly busy and distracted that it didn't happen with the fervor that she truly wanted. In that time, He still drew near, but she wasn't able to give him everything. School and grades and theatre and relationships and work and food were things I did before Him.
How am I to be intimate if I have no time to give?
4. wholehearted obedience
Is anyone else scared? Of things like being twenty three, for example. Or maybe of having little knowledge of cars, dental insurance, jobs? With no plans and little money and an intense commitment to a faith that I grew up into?
But for some reason I'm not scared at the words wholehearted obedience. I've already seen that I have little to no claim on my own life. Look at the mountains, the stars, and you'll see that. So what's left? Life on the surface is distracting, sunburnt, loud, confusing.
He said his yoke was easy and His burden was light. I believe Him.
4. depending on the Lord.
It's time to listen. To pay attention. When I think about my history with church and faith, I am amazed at how much time I spent just being there, without really engaging. But as I graduate and move on into life, it becomes increasingly more clear to me that I have no idea what's going on. And, as someone who likes to live life on a whim and trust implicitly, leaning on God wholly and listening to Him is a non-negotiable for me. When Jackie Hill Perry spoke on God's holiness, I felt this. When another speaker spoke about the gravity of sin and how our hearts are being entangled and distracted by sin, I felt this. If this is my faith, and the thing I want to be most known for, shouldn't I be taking it seriously?
If you're like me you've heard every day in Sunday School that reading your bible and praying is important. So...why don't we do it everyday? His holiness demands our respect, our obedience, our lives. I tend to forget that.
I would say this is honestly the underscoring message of the conference, at least for me. The sheer importance of what real Christianity asks of us. Is it not our entire lives? It's not, oh, I'll get married first or I'll graduate first or anything before what God asks of me. One of the speakers talked about how delayed obedience is still disobedience, and also explained how he'd seen the hand of God moving in impossible and specific ways in his life. But I look at my own life and see that I am living very much for myself. So, it's time to start paying attention, leaning on Him, depending on Him, because when it comes down to it, faith isn't something I own, neither is a relationship with Jesus. He owns me.
And here were some observations of mine during the conference:
1. spectacle has no place at a Christian worship gathering, but it is...inevitable.
The passion team was able to raise about a million dollars while we were there for Bible translation worldwide, which was amazing. In order to encourage people to donate, they arranged for a translator to come and translate a verse from John from english into his native language. For the first time, ever. So they brought out a long table and a comically large paper and marker and had him write it out. While we watched. Then they prayed for him and he had a seat in the audience.
This display left all five of us feeling a little weird. It was cool to see him do his work, but it was so incredibly staged. And for the first time? I felt like a consumer. Like part of my ticket price was to watch this guy do this thing for me so I could clap and laugh and send him on his way. I wanted him to pray, or speak, or tell us more about his ministry, and not be a spectacle for us to videotape and put on our instagram stories.
2. Christian youth culture is just a different form of regular American youth culture.
I suppose it's inevitable that all teenagers judge each other based on looks, voices, personalities, whatever. We sure did our share of judging others, but let me tell you what we saw: thousands of teens and twenty-somethings packed into a stadium, throwing paper airplanes around with their telephone numbers on them. Posting snaps on the community snap story advertising themselves or their friend as single. Checking snapchat every few minutes throughout the worship songs. Protective physical signaling over their significant others. Leaving during the messages to get food. Watching their own stories obsessively. Taking over 5 minutes to pose for a photo. Not really connecting with anyone else.
To many of us, the conference felt a little like a high school event, what with all the obsession over snapchat, dating, fashion, food.
3. I would love to share my talents and worship in these ways.
Something I thought repeatedly, as I saw some of my favorite worship leaders and singers lead us in worship, was how beautiful it would be to be in their shoes. As I worshipped with Sean Curran, I knew he was made for things like that--not leading us in a song that we all knew, but explaining why he wrote what he did, annotating his own music, continuously turning the praise back to God. It became clear to me that God can work so beautifully through creators and artists, teaching them how to create for the Creator. I kept thinking about how comfortable it was for me to perform at the Levitt in the summer, and how easy it would have been to share my passions with those people.
I think of this now and imagine it to be impossible, as well as hopelessly tangled with pride. But I come back to the fact that God is on the throne and has some pretty cool plans that I know nothing about yet.
4. it was lovely to worship with so many people, but I don't know that I would go again.
The people I saw at passion had everything they needed, and then some. Food, water, merch, phones, Bibles, journals, pens, boyfriends, girlfriends, groups of friends, church communities. I'm not saying no one was hurting, but I am saying that we were all extremely privileged to be there. It was cool to think of all the racket we were making, and that God was acutely aware of every voice and set of desires in that stadium, fully able to speak to all of us simultaneously. But I also noticed how so many of us weren't really listening. We worship without fear at home, we hear sermons preached every Sunday. We don't really know what it means to "be on fire for God" but we ironically use the phrase sometimes.
I'm speaking for my friends, the people around us, the people I saw and interacted with. Passion has been around for years. It's been changing and getting bigger and inviting more spectacle, but the basic concept of worshipping with a body of believers is the same...wherever there is a body of believers. We were there to experience, to be ministered to, to share. Not just to feel something. So we went, and we learned, and now we get to share. Would I make it an annual New Year's re-centering? No, because I think just a day set aside to be spent with Jesus would be enough. Or maybe a long Sunday afternoon car ride with a sermon, handpicked worship music, prayer and some journaling.
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