A Culture of Permission

Can I just be honest with you for a moment? This place is amazing. It’s hard to believe that somewhere on earth could contain so much joy and excitement. There is a freedom here to love, and we’ve taken full advantage of it. Whether it’s the lunch line or the class room, it’s hard to make it far without someone celebrating you with an enthusiastic “What’s up bro!” or “How’s it going?!” High fives and hang loose signs galore. Everyone serves each other and everyone is grateful. My work duty is in the kitchen, and even in there you will find a surprising amount of delight. We sing songs as we clean, and the dirty dishes that are dropped off are generally accompanied by cheers and warm “thank you”s. We respond with a “You’re Awesome! Have a great day!” And the best part is it’s all authentic. We mean it with all that is in us, and if anything, it’s less exuberant than we actually feel. We can’t not be joyful, we can’t not be thankful. It’s like the monotony of life and the critical thinking that we’ve been so long enslaved to has been stripped away, and at last we have permission to wildly and outlandishly love each other. It’s as if all the false professionalism that has restricted us has been replaced with childlike wonder, and our hearts are singing in the joy of this liberation. I’ve never seen the prayer “on earth as it is in heaven” come so nearly to being answered as I see it here.

There is such a beauty in the diversity of backgrounds here. As I walk around I hear a variety of languages being spoken, and of those that are English, many are of a different accent. Three of my roommates are Korean, one is Norwegian, and the other is British: the British culture being by far the most different from that of the United States. We say trunk and hood, they say boot and bonnet; we rent a car, they hire a car; we say “rock, paper, scissors,” they say “paper, scissors, rock.” I think there may still be some rebellion there from the revolution. (A joke my British roommate told me, “In England we say horse riding, but here you say horseback riding… just in case you forget what part of the horse to ride”).

Week One

The week began with worship in the Ohana Court. Several hundred of us got onto the chair-less concrete slab, and as the music began, all of us raised our hands and voices in adoration and anticipation. If we were silent the rocks would have cried out. It was like the first warm breeze of long cold winter, a starving man’s first bite of a six month meal. The day ended in similar fashion in the prayer room for ministry night, where we sang and cried out for more of God. We took a moment to pray for those that were sick and hurting, and after many miraculous healings, ended the night in wild dancing and laughter. I think my weekends will be spent looking forward to Monday.

As I sat in our classroom for the first time, I felt a strange awareness, a fear almost; it was like a great intimidation of what would happen here. I became awake to the reality that there were deeper places in my heart that had not yet been satisfied, deeper areas of brokenness that had not yet been healed, and it felt as if it would be in this place where they would be exposed.

Over the past few years God has brought so much healing to my heart. I’ve tasted of his goodness and He’s put many of my fears to rest. He has silenced my anxiety and brought life to my depression. But in the midst of all this, I’ve somehow grown to limit Him. I had experienced Him in a certain way and believed that his ability to heal was equivalent to that experience. My life has since consisted of seeking God in the areas where I believed He would meet me and coping with the rest of life by my own mechanisms. I buried my fears so deep that I had forgot about them, though their symptoms still influenced me. But now, as all this has begun to surface, a cry has grown in my heart “God, make me whole.”

Our speaker for the week was Mike Brown, and the primary thing he did was give us permission to hunger for more. He shared story after story of ways that God had met him and spoken to him. Chills ran down my spine and excitement filled my eyes as he spoke. I was amazed by his stories and more amazed by the person he was. Yet as close as he was to God, he was still as hungry for God as anyone I’ve met. He invited us to refuse to be the one who is left out, and to say “Even if no one else hears God, I will hear God” He told us that it is all available to us, God himself has made himself within reach; the question is what are we willing to do to find him? “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to seek it out” (Proverbs 25:2). These words reverberated through me, waking up a longing and a long forgotten anticipation. With my faith now stirred, through tears, as honest as I’ve ever prayed anything, I prayed, “God, I want to know you.”

Though I wouldn’t have said it, I had come to believe that God had an end, that he was finite, and I lived as if I had almost grasped the fullness of Him. My job in life had become about reminding myself of what I already knew about God and about living out what I thought I was supposed to do. But my gosh, there is so much more to God than what I’ve ever imagined! As Mike Brown said, “my job is to have the most dynamic, alive, joyful, fulfilling relationship with God, show others, and tell them how to get it.” I believe this is far more powerful than my strategy, because when I look at what has inspired me the most and what has given me the most motivation, it wasn’t someone telling me to try harder, it was sitting across the table from someone who was living in wholeness and intimacy with Jesus. Watching their life gave me hope for my own, and inspired me to do what it would take to get there. I think I settled for simply serving God through my brokenness, because in all honesty, I didn’t believe that God was willing to make me whole. But perhaps He has just been waiting for me to start believing he would and become desperate enough to seek Him out.

I’ve cried almost every day this week, mostly out of shear hunger for God. But hunger is a sign of life, and hunger can only exist when what is hungered for exists. So I’ll take it as an invitation. God has over and over again asked us to ask of him, to seek him, to find him, and he has promised to reveal himself. This first week has exposed my desperation, and I believe that God will finish what he started. I stand at what I thought was merely a refreshing glass of water, but now see, though dimly, that I am on the shores of an endless ocean, and my heart’s cry is to swim in the depths of it.