Chasing the Moon

One night while out chasing the moon as it hovered full on the edge of the wheat field, Ann Voskamp found herself prostrate on the ground in a powerful moment of unexpected worship.  Many things stirred in her spirit.  In her book, One Thousand Gifts," she shares some of those stirrings.  One of them caused me to pull out my pen and do some underlining.  I even put a star in the margin by the words.  "Every moment I live, I live bowed to something.  And if I don't see God, I'll bow down before something else."

 

It is both an ancient and a contemporary problem for people who are supposedly following after God.  The Old Testament tells many stories of folks who worship Yahweh and some other god just in case Yahweh failed to deliver.  If Yahweh could not bring the rain for the harvest, maybe Baal would take care of it.  Hedging their bets is what we might call it in our day.  The same double-mindedness still afflicts folks like you and me today.  We trust in God, but we also make sure we do not get so carried away as to put our sense of security in jeopardy.  And who is it that provides that sense of security?  If not God, then it must be self and all the systems we have put in place.

 

We actually do too little bowing down.  It is a bit difficult to bow down when the object of our worship, the object of our final trust, is within our own self.  As hard as it is for us to grasp, it is impossible to depend on ourselves and God at the same time.  If we are worshipping at more than one altar, it is one altar too many.  And even worse, it may be at the wrong altar.  A person can really only serve one master.  Someone much wiser than any of us has taught us that lesson, but hearing and believing are always two different things.