iWorship...

I recently took the $12.99 plunge into the world of Rhapsody. For the past three days, I've had two songs in my Mixer... "Open Up the Skies" by Deluge and "From the Inside Out" by Hillsong. I have these two songs on perpetual repeat. Three days into this saturation I'm now able to listen to these songs without losing my composure and openly weeping in my office. Did I mention that my office has two large windows for the corner walls over looking my coworkers? Yeah, it's fun to openly cry at work... :) They've not committed me yet. I think there's still hope, though...

Anyway, these songs scream the cry of my heart. One in particular, "Open Up the Skies" opens with these inspired lines:

"Father, loving Father, please come down and meet us / we are longing for Your great touch / open up the heavens shower down your presence / we respond to your great love / we won't be satisfied with anything ordinary / we won't be satisfied at all"

What gets me most is the near desperation that come across in just the lyrics. The cry of the church has been for so long "Give me! Give me! Give me!" The chorus goes like this:

"Open up the sky / fall down like rain / we don't want blessings we want You"

Of all the cries that the church can make, this is the ONE! If you've never listened to this song, then either make the $13 plunge on Rhapsody or buy the CD or something. Just hear this song!

It wrecks me! It says:

"Here we go, lets go to throne / the place that we belong / right into His arms"

These lyrics are fantastic! This is where we belong... right into His arms and the fascinating thing is that God wants us there too! He longs for us. But, we are too busy with anything and everything. I know I am. We run and run and run and all that ever matters is being near to God who is present.

It reminds me of Jacob in Genesis when he crosses over the river and lies down to sleep. He then has the dream of the ladder that stretched from Heaven to Earth and he sees angels ascending and descending. He sees God. When he wakes up on that ordinary piece of ground, with an ordinary stone for his pillow, he says something remarkable... something that marks our everyone of our lives "God was in this place and I was unaware of it."

What scares me isn't whether or not I'll make it to Heaven in the after life. That's already been determined. What unnerves me is that when I stand before Him, will I see all the mundane things in my life, all the times I sat outside with starry skies screaming at me that God was there and I was unaware? I'm crying even now as I type this. This should unnerve us all, that we will see God in the after life and we will become aware of how close He was to us all along and how unaware we all constantly are.

My life's journal written from the vantage point of the afterlife will surely say, "God was in that place and I was completely unaware." That place will be wherever I happen to be looking back at that moment. My challenge: Live life aware...