I took off into the airwaves the other week to talk with one of my Irish friends on Skype. As we finally made a bumpy landing and connected eye to eye and ear to ear he complained of a bad case of “Dinasoaritis.”
He said he started going to a ‘successful’ mega church and realized when it came to following the bible passage he was the only one in his row who was looking at a paper version of THE book of THE face!
“Facebook!” he said, “That’s the magic carpet on which everything in the church seems to fly forward, and since I’m not on Facebook and have an old Nokia push button phone I don’t think I fit.”
I told him I was finishing off the blog about the “trouble” of Ps. 46.
He recounted how in recent years he had been shaken and his ‘mountain‘ of savings had slid into the sea! But he knew now this had been good thing because he was forced to trust not in his material assets but in God alone as his ‘refuge and strength’
I then said, “Imagine if the internet crashed and the IT ‘magic carpet’ on which we are all flying was pulled out from under us, where would that leave us?…..where would that leave the churches?”
To the early Celtic believers the Holy Spirit was represented by the Wild Goose… a fitting complement to the gentle dove, because fire, water and wind are types of the Spirit in scripture and these are elements that cannot be tamed and controlled by man.
Do you remember when the wild geese flew into the engine of flight US 1549. Captain Sully was credited with making a ‘miraculous’ landing but “The heart of the king (Sully) is in the hand of the Lord who directed that flight to the (Hudson) watercourse as He willed” (Prov.21.1 Adapted!)
As we learn to fly in the Jet stream of the Holy Spirit then no matter what happens we can be confident that we will land laughing on that same river that flows through our hearts and “whose streams make glad the city of God.”(Ps.46:4)
As we believe Isaiah’s gospel message,
“How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news…. ‘YOUR GOD REIGNS'”
…..we tune in to the voice of the ‘air controller’ in our hearts saying.
“Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps.46:10)
P.S. I apologized in advance to my friend Eugene about poking fun at him in last week’s blog and told him he had of course the right to reply. He said in his usual magnanimous way,
“Happy to be a vehicle of humour anytime for my Edgar Allan-faced American brothers and sisters!”
I don’t know if Eugene realized that Edgar Allan Poe the famous American literary figure was of ‘dour’ Ulster Scots extraction!
Also my google search revealed that one possible origin of the expression “Po faced’ is the face one would make if a used chamber pot was presented to one. With dung picturing in Ezekiel the idols of the heart…. maybe when we get rid of the last of these we will indeed be able, like the Scottish air traffic controllers, to not take our ‘old self’ so seriously!