Spiritual Bug Eyes

I don’t know what to say, but I know I am supposed to write this. This is one writing about three different people posted on three different blogs about one God. Genesis has been blowing all of our minds. God has plucked us out of our individual lives and placed us together to break our hearts over His deep and crazy love. And we are letting Him. Sunday mornings have been titled blogging Sundays, I think after this session it should be called, “Spiritual Vanilla Chai Tea Latte Day.” What started as a morning of writing the thoughts of our last week has turned into an intense awakening to the being of who is God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit in one. He’s so intricate and knits together a girl from Southern California who can never get warm, another from Georgia with the greatest raccoon hat known to man, and another from England with a right obsession for tea and saying the phrase, “like a beast” to be ravished over the same part in the Bible all at the same exact time. We’re a weird match and its perfect. Over this last week God has given us eyes like bugs to read Genesis. They are big and bulging and have an anointing to read the Word like we’ve never seen it before. They have adopted the name Spiritual Bug eyes and I pray they will stay forever.  He has revealed to us, all in one moment, His love for us. He has molded our hearts into loving God the Creator, God the Maker. All of this world, every single tangible and spiritual thing in life goes through Him. John 1 says, “All things are made through Him and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Our question to that was simple. Why? Why would He create the world, why would He create each one of us knowing that we would sin? Throughout the week He revealed the answer in a few very tangible ways—because He loved us. Reading that you may say, “That’s Christian 101.” We said the same thing. But this is different. He took us and He broke us into the full impact of what it looks like. Every class, every sermon, every five-minute conversation while standing in line for the shuttle revolved around God being the Creator. We took this as a sign that He wanted to take us on a journey and we were right to listen.

The first occurrence happened in the prayer room when the first girl asked God to allow her to love Him with the same love He has for her. Suddenly her heart was being squeezed and physically ached. God himself, in that moment had taken her heart (her actual physical heart) into His actual hand and squeezed it. He said, “my heart aches like this for you everyday, all the time, this is how much I love you. My heart physically aches for you.” And then her heart broke. Mine happened over three days. It started with extreme pain in my ribcage, an ER visit with no diagnosis, and a continual discomfort that felt like a little man was in the inside punching out. After prayer the pain went away and was replaced with a sensation that felt like a hand holding my rib. God in that moment says, “I am holding your rib to remind you of your beginnings. There was pain because you had given a part of yourself to the world and now I am taking it back.” And for the rest of the night the tangible presence of God was touching my rib; holding the very beginning of my existence. And when we didn’t think anything more could happen (oh our tiny flesh-like brains) God touches the third one with lighting-like pains down the inside of her body and we all fall down.            

As we continued to write in the café and be ravished by more of God the presence came over us. We looked around to see if anyone else looked crazy too, but it was just us. Holy Spirit was blowing His power over the entireties of our bodies and we prayed for an increase. And then it happened, the specific moment that made us stop everything we were doing, praise Jesus, then write about the glory of this God we know nothing about. We realized that all of us have glitter on the palms of our hands. After searching for the source and failing we realized it was not glitter from the things of this world, it was gold dust from the power of God. There were no words, no sounds, just three truth seeking souls looking down at six hands that the Creator of all things made. One says, “I’m so hot I want to be naked, but I’m freezing,” and we all understood its meaning. We were drunk in the Spirit and could not move. Friends came by our table and we didn’t respond, we couldn’t respond…what do you say that doesn’t make you sound crazy? But it’s not crazy. It’s not fake, it’s very, very real because He is. He squeezes heart, carries ribs, sparks bodies and brings spiritual gold dust to the flesh of Jesus chasers all because He loves us. And in this moment, right here in a coffee shop drinking the best vanilla chi tea lattes with our shiny hands and individual touches of God on our internal organs we fully receive that gift.­­­­—God loves us fully. He has permanently engraved His love on our hearts like an etch-a-sketch. He’s infinite, yet opens the curtains of Heaven to gaze at three small grasshoppers in the corner of a small coffee shop on a normal Sunday morning.