One of the great takeaways from our Wikicclesia gathering last Saturday was hearing people from different walks of the Christ-life sharing what they see God doing on their journey. It was great to see lots of people I knew and some I had never met before describing a similar story to my own. It means that God’s is working sovereignly, above and beyond what us humans can coordinate, to pull his Church together.

We got to hear the story of Agent B, something I always love hearing. One of the ways he described what it is like following Jesus in his life was the image of “surfing”. I’ll loosely paraphrase:

“Listening to Jesus and living this life is a lot like surfing the waves. You don’t always know when the conditions are going to be just right for that perfect day of surf, so you always have to be ready and waiting. Keeping your eye on the horizon, watching weather patterns and hoping that the planets throughout the whole universe will perfectly align just so you can have a day out in the water. If you wait too long to respond, even 10 minutes, you could miss the opportunity.”

This was a watershed moment for me. Over the last 2 years, my own prayer life has been honed to a basic assumption that Jesus does care about me and actually reveals things to me when I listen to him. And what B described was the need not only to be intentional about listening, but also be just as intentional on diligently following through with action.

“Those who hear my words and put them into practice is like a man who builds his house on solid rock.” ( or in this case…’is like a bodacious surfer-dude’)

Sometimes I feel like I hear from Him, but I just add it to my to-do list and never get around to it. I see the waves are perfect, but I keep my surfboard polished and dry.

I’m ready to play in the waters.

Last 5 posts by Mark

• God is Wholly - October 2nd, 2008
• The Great Moderation - September 30th, 2008

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Doing and Being, Listening, Prayer, Secret Agents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.