What does God do all Day?

I was asked over lunch one day, "What does God do all day?" to which I replied, "He loves you, like you were the only one here." That has been my beautiful experience in walking with God, and I still am often surprised at it. The Creator of the universe not only loves the world full of people, but loves each person. He is bigger than time and space, and He bothers Himself with me, arranging circumstances and conversations and books and all of life that the Holy Spirit would use these things to teach me and guide me in all truth. In His tremendous grace He gives me chance after chance to live well before Him. It would be enough had the Son of God died to take away my sins, rose again to make certain our victory and hope in Him, and left us His word the Bible to show us the Way, and yet He even sends us His Holy Spirit to please us with His very presence. He is an intimate God. After all, "God is love," as many people like to quote. But the implications of this should transform our lives. If we understand that His church should be doing what He is doing, then we should also understand that to the world, God is doing what the church is doing. The question "What does God do all day?" becomes painfully poignant. We should search ourselves to ensure that the answer can never legitimately be mistaken for "Nothing," or even "Not much."
"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8)

Communal Living

I packed everything I needed for the week in New Orleans into one backpack and strapped a sleeping bag to it, which was liberating. Everything, that is, except my guitar. If it came to it, I suppose I could trade the guitar for a ukulele. When I put my backpack on, I wanted to walk across town instead of just to the car. We worked hard each day but there was still energy in the evenings for playing guitar, and frisbee, and hackeysack, and for visiting with people. Some seemed rather engrossed in their own cliques but most were very friendly. The lady who asked us to be quiet the first night, Bridgett, worked in the same house as I, and she was radiantly friendly and funny and enthusiastic about Jesus. I realized later that she actually did have a real concern for silence on behalf of another in her group who revealed herself to be far less cooperative with the communal living arrangements. I'd underestimated this, but Bridgett, I think, must have known, and I hope that next time that sister in Christ will find a Motel 6. I personally enjoy living in community. That was one of my favorite parts of being in the army; there was egalitarianism and camaraderie. It was the perfect Marxist socialist society functioning to protect and propagate democracy and capitalism. At any rate, what I observed of the ongoing mission which I was so briefly a part of at Gentilly Baptist Church in New Orleans was the Kingdom of God coordinating in a way that was surely closer to the efficient ideal. People were coming together to give of themselves in order to be a blessing to a hurting community, inspired by our Lord who gave all to us.

A Flood Survivor

One day while hanging sheet rock in New Orleans, a dreadlocked rasta-type poked his head in the window and started talking to us. He lived in a FEMA trailer two feet away. He was 52 years old, but he also said he was two years old because he felt like he'd been given a new life when he survived the flood two years ago. His name was Christopher, he was chiseled and beautiful, with thick dreadlocks mushrooming off his head. He wore a flight suit. He said that when the flood came, some people were swept down the street, but he managed to just get around the corner of a house and therefore not to be caught by the current. "But I was wearing the wrong boots," he explained, for they were too heavy to swim in and his feet were planted to the ground. The water rose above his head, and he thought he was a goner, until he remembered a Sponge Bob Square Pants episode about a deep-sea diver and realized he could walk under water. He walked to his house. "If anyone had seen it, they'd have just seen a nose cruise by," he said. His arms were outstretched and his head was straight back as he demonstrated how he made this journey. "It was beautiful," he smiled. When he was underwater he became tragically aware of all of his life's regrets, and that he hadn't lived whole-heatedly for God. "One of the things that hurt me most was that I'd never married my old lady," he recounted sadly. He prayed that he would be given another chance, and his boot suddenly found the firm ledge of the sidewalk in front of his house. He pulled himself up on his porch. "The Lord saved me, and changed my whole outlook that day," Christopher told us. "That's why I say I'm two years old."

I was assigned to hanging sheetrock with Keith and Cody and a multitude of brothers and sisters from other churches. I was glad for the opportunity to practice something I hadn't done much of, and so to learn some new things. Keith fortunately was familiar with the science of hanging sheetrock, having done it for a living for a while, though commercially rather than residentially. The shotgun house we were remodeling may have been 600 square feet. We didn't meet the homeowner, but others who did said she was staying in an apartment and working, and eagerly awaiting the day when her 13 grandkids could come stay with her again in her house. There was a sleeping loft for them in the room where my group was working, which probably was a carport before. The house was charmingly minimalistic to me, but some were of the opinion that it should have been razed. Many whom we were with were inexperienced with manual labor and unaccustomed to the heat, which set the work at a rather leisurely pace. Keith was aggressive about his work and I could tell this frustrated him somewhat. It crossed my mind, purely as an observation and with no malice attached, that some people really can serve better by staying at home and donating money. Money, however, is such an impersonal and easily abused solution. At the end of the week, no one would have mistaken my work for professional either; it was done by amateurs for free. It was a beautiful thing to see children of God gathering from far away because they'd been shown a need, and given an opportunity to share a burden and love our neighbors, as Jesus commands.

Prayer

I woke up early with a gray light from a narrow window by my head illuminating my cot. I was almost a blank slate in regards to my expectations of the mission, but already in sacrificing my paycheck, and the politics and usefulness of the program. I propped up on my knees to pray about all this, entrusting myself again to what I believed God had called me to do. I had forsaken a Mexico mission, which I had hoped since the year before to attend, because I didn't feel the Holy Spirit's perfect peace about going after just the first meeting. It had seemed like a good idea to me, as I am a Spanish major and need the practice. Later I learned of the New Orleans trip and, with almost no further analysis, put my faith in God and went. I dare say I obeyed God and went. And so, for a moment, somewhere in mid-air between the leap an the palm of God's hand, I wavered. But the landing was beautiful. The serenity, the perfect stillness of thought that I experienced before God that morning was supernaturally sublime, nothing less than divine assurance that I'd found myself in the center of his will. "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Eph 2:10). I didn't know what the day would hold, but my God knew exactly what to expect. He'd seen that place and the peole with whom I'd be working with long ago, and He'd made all the arrangements for me.

New Orleans

At a moderately nice restaurant some customers left a large hunk of chocolate cake and an almost untouched scoop of ice cream at a booth near my table. I eyed it and considered swooping for it like Crucial Mike. My apall at waste, my primal appetite, and my carefully calculated budget combine to bring me great pleasure in free food. I've never eaten after strangers though. It remains disappetizing to me. I almost grabbed a Burger King bag out of the trash one night on campus, but I didn't do it either. Stuff goes into the garbage for a reason. I let the cake go, but I did clean up some left over quesadillas from someone in our group. We drove the rest of the way to New Orleans laughing and joking deliriously, at last arriving at a dark and looming church building at almost midnight in a neighborhood that seemed much abandoned. We met Jackie the head coordinator who debriefed us somewhat as to what the next day's schedule would be like, and we were shown our cots. A lady from another group requested politely more than once that we be quiet because people were sleeping after a hard day's work. "After you've worked here a day, you'll understand," she said. I was thinking, if you're so tired, go to sleep.