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We look for love in all the wrong places. Few things expose this more than the Facebook status or photo. Today my city includes the Facebook community that I connect with regularly. We all fall prey to the inner vultures that seek the rancid emptiness that cries, "look-at-me-and-love-me." Our social media posts are often quite revealing here. Many posts are updates for "friends" to peer into our day's activities and our heart's opinions. This is as valid as two friends connecting and catching up over coffee. But some posts (though we may not know exactly which ones) put our inner hunger for love on display.

We can too often post for our own self-promotion. This can come in the form rants and jr. philosopher talk (like this blog, perhaps). It can come in provocative moral-shock posts or the Cosmo-cover looking webcam photos in tight clothing or lack of it. What are we really saying? Is this a cry for love drenched in to acid rain of our culture?

Some of this can be labeled a type of vulnerability. Some vulnerability can be healthy in a mutually agreed relational circle of grace which includes wise feedback and "speaking the truth in love" (Bible: Ephesians 4:15). Most of us lack such a safe family atmosphere. Few have the tools to communicate our feelings (or track our emotions and their underlying causes) in appropriate safe and life-giving ways.

Churches are supposed to become those love-one-another places that help the growth of the person. God is the one who can teach us the wise grace of letting people view our inner status in a way that is healthy for everyone. We really do have a God-shaped vacuum that we are trying to fill. Beware the vultures.

Still in the Spinning Senselessness of Life

I read, "He will be missed." A young man died today. A great kid from a good family. Across town an old man lay in a hospital bed in a care home, veins filling with drips of morphine, intermittently appreciating time with family and feeling the walls of this life close in. Other friends report foolish choices, the consequences of which they will have to navigate the rest of their lives. Another has physical pain with no explanation. All of this within the past few days. And I sit for the moment relatively still and watch them spin around me like reality on imax.

This is where Sunday morning sermon-words, easily spoken with a smile and a joke must become real. We should all shudder and fall face-in-the-rug at our finite ability to grasp the depth of things we say we understand. We must put our hand to our mouths and Be Still before God. All else is the idolatry of platitudes and blind faith in dubious psychology about the mourning process. All else is will not give the satellite photo perspective of the eternal faith-flashed on a regenerate mind by God the Holy Spirit. Indeed, "he will be missed" and it will not make sense. There is only being still.

Noise: A Hindrance to Hearing?

Recently I spent the morning listening as I heard downtown noise.  I began with a small group of friends walking a quarter mile of Elm Street and praying for the good of the city--prayerwalking. Later, I met two others, one a former art school student to walk and pray around the buildings strewn about that make up the NH Art Institute.

The prayerwalk, for me, is an on-going experiment in loving a section of the city through inviting divine benefits over its people and institutions. In this I find God directing and simplifying my thoughts; speaking whisper-soft amidst the sounds of the city. My brain activity is focused at the objects of God's love. I picture the needs and wants and hopes of people I may never meet and ask God to pour out his best into their stories.

Praying, which might seem like some labored religious duty can feed the imagination and center a harried mind. In prayer over the campus, I "see" God rescuing the student from depression. I "hear" the purity of the first prayers of new believer. I smile at the thought of a lively discussion about the image of God reflected in the arts.

However, it is not my creativity or emotional state that make prayer work. Its value is not measured by the spiritual assets accrued to my account. These are perks. Rather, prayer is eternally rich with possibility. "With God all things are possible." The experiment of listening (noise or no noise) is in discovery. We are only called to spot the trail of Jesus who is already at work in the lives of people in this city. Amidst the noise we listen and join God in conspiracy to love a person before they realize its Source.