Thin places in the Kingdom...

At this moment I’m suddenly encouraged by thoughts of the kingdom.

That may seem like a weird statement (when I read it I think it is) but I’ve come to find that in my life I have these bizarre moments where my heart feels warm and I realize that I’m in one of those “thin places” where the kingdom of God is so near that I feel as if I could just reach through and step into it.

Maybe I’ve had too many cups of coffee, maybe it’s just a combination music, reading blogs, looking at pictures, and thinking about my own emotional state that just create this moment. I honestly don’t know. I do believe, however, that God is near. He is so very near, at every moment, and that there are just some moments that He knows we need Him to touch our hearts. It’s like when a significant other spontaneously says that thing you love to hear or just gently touches you at the right moment and you feel the love that you crave when you weren’t even expecting it. We’ve done nothing in that moment to deserve/ask for this love, but they freely give it because of their mysterious love for us (mysterious because I sometimes wonder why anyone would ever or could ever love me).

I’ve actually been experiencing love in a new way this week. I dove off a cliff (metaphorically speaking) into a new realm of community, laying bare my heart in scary, embarrassing, intimate ways. I sometimes still feel strange when I look around at people who now know my heart more than some ever will and feel extremely vulnerable. There are people who now have the knowledge and power to hurt me at the very core of who I am. They can throw salt into and rip open a wound that has been healing for years (and isn’t quite healed yet.

Their response, love.

They have loved me and continue to see me through this time. When you live in that tension of being able to be hurt by anyone by no one does it community reaches a whole new dimension. The question was asked, and is still being asked, what if this is what community always looked like?

I believe that this is what the kingdom looks like, a place where we experience it not just in serving and intentional times of seeking, but in the random (or not so random) moments when we feel unloved and abandoned, moments where we least expect to feel the touch of God. It’s in those moments, too, that the kingdom is near.