Church Family Update - June 19, 2020

Hey Everybody! I hope that you’re doing well and getting ready for a lovely Father’s Day weekend. You know what time it is right now…

Friday Book Discussion!

This week we read chapter 7: “The Monastery and the Road” from Recapturing the Wonder by Mike Cosper. We’ve reached the home stretch of this book. Today we discuss the final chapter and next week we’ll cover the epilogue and draw some final conclusions. Thanks for joining me for this discussion.

Content: In many ways, this feels like a wrap-up chapter. Cosper reiterates a point that he’s made earlier in the book that growing in spirituality and experiencing God is not a mere matter of increasing our information about God. While learning truth about God is important, it’s equally important for us to cultivate habits of perceiving God’s presence if we want to experience the wonder of daily encounters with our Creator. 

Cosper paints a lovely picture of how life in a monastery is designed to promote transcendent encounters with God. The pace of life, the rhythm of work, prayer and worship, the fellowship with other Christians…all of these are designed to create a real-life context where monks encounter God. But far from suggesting that all Christians should become monks and nuns, Cosper goes on to critique the monastic way of life and to suggest that we “normal” Christians in the real world can and should experience God in the context of our daily lives. 

In order to do this we need to pay careful attention to the habits and rhythms of our own daily lives.  

Commentary: Here’s a word picture that, I think, helps illustrate Cosper’s main point in this chapter. I have a friend who is a Lieutenant in the Air National Guard and he flies a refuelling plane. (Set aside your concerns about the American military-industrial complex for the moment. I share your concerns but it’s not the point of this illustration!). One day my friend brought me along on a training flight.

Here’s why there’s such a thing as a refuelling plane. Fighter planes like F-16's are very fast and powerful but they’re small. So they burn a lot of fuel but don’t have especially large fuel tanks. Which means they can’t get very far. If they need to get to the other side of the world, they don’t have the fuel capacity to make it. So they send a very large refuelling plane and they send about 5 F-16’s to fly in formation around it. Then the smaller planes rotate around the larger one and take turns getting refuelled, in mid-air, so that they can make it to their destination.

So on the day I went along on a flight, I laid down on my stomach in the back of the refuelling plane. The back of the plane is glass so you can see everything around you. And I watched as these fighter planes flew right up behind us, just a few feet away. And then the “boom-operator” who was laying right next to me would use a joystick and extend the boom into the fuel tank of the fighter plane and fill him up with fuel. After the fighter was filled up it would pull away and the next one in line would pull up. And they would keep doing that all the way to the Middle East or wherever they were trying to get. (I’m sensing political radars going off…bear with me. No-one is more eager to pound these planes into plowshares than I am!)

That picture of the smaller, low-fuel-capacity planes cycling through and refuelling in order to get to where they need to go, is the picture I want to plant in our minds about what our days should look like. We are low-fuel-capacity planes. As such, it’s not enough to fill up once on Sunday morning and think we can make it through the week. Nor is it enough to think that we could fill up once in the morning and make it through the day. We need to constantly rotate through and come back to the refuelling plane throughout the journey of each day if we want to make it successfully through each day.  

Application: There are so many opportunities each day for us to encounter God and experience His presence. In fact, each moment of each day provides us with that opportunity if we’re paying attention. Time in God’s word and prayer, paying attention to the beauty of creation, serving others, experiencing fellowship, sharing a meal, etc. Each one of these things is a potential act of worship if we approach it with the right mindset. 

At the end of this chapter Mike Cosper gives a very practical description of how he personally cultivates this practice in his own hourly, daily, weekly and yearly life (p155-158). I would commend these pages to you as extremely helpful. But even more important than what Mike is doing is what you and I are going to do. How will we structure the hours of our days so that we can experience all the blessing, goodness and grace that God has for us?

I can think of very few questions that are more important than that.

May you encounter God in unexpected ways this weekend.

Pastor Jason