EL’s Dribble

I was having lunch with a friend… eating well and having good conversation. And we slowly migrated to talking about God… and eventually to discussing what it means to really connect with God. And the question came up, “How do you really experience God’s love?”

I wasn’t all that sure how to respond. If there was a formula they didn’t teach us that in school. And my friend and I have been in the “church world” long enough to know all the pat answers [ie. more Bible and more prayer].

I thought back [quickly] to moments of very tangibly experiencing God’s love. Times where it felt unmistakably other-worldly. A mix of euphoria, liberation and embrace. Inebriated, but never losing yourself. Soaring in the clouds, but well grounded in reality. And you can’t help but to mutter to yourself… “Man, He loves me… He really loves me.”

And the only response I could think of was this… it seems like most experiences of God’s love are associated with some degree of surrender. The heart or will’s need to resign… to give in… to give up… to yield to whatever God is going to do – good or bad.

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I’m fairly packed out this last week before Christmas. With prepping for things this weekend and other random Christmas odds and ends. But I read a post by David Watson that really summed up well my suspicion about spiritual leadership.

I’ve found myself to be a student of leadership and have read a fair amount of books and have always had an ear for bits of wisdom from good leaders. But I have to say that I get tired of the alpha-male type leadership paradigm. And feel like there’s something wrong with Christian leadership borrowing too much from the secular landscape. At the risk of raising the argument that “all truth is God’s truth”… let me say that I mostly buy into that.

But there is always something counter-intuitive when you try to understand any topic in light of the Gospel. It’s safe to say that it’s never… I mean NEVER the way everyone else understands it. And maybe why the Gospel is still so revolutionary.

Here’s David Watson’s post on leadership – original post here:

I have been thinking a lot about leadership the past few months. What makes a leader? We are created in the image of God, and there is an inherent leadership quality that is a part of creation. Some people are born leaders. We see them all the time. Yet, many of these natural leaders never become spiritual leaders.

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I’ve always thought that higher gas prices are better for America. We’ve become overdependent on the automobile and cheap gas only gets us to drive without a conscious. Imposing some pain on the pocketbook might be the only way for us release our grip on foreign oil. It’s an oft-discussed topic.

But The Huffington Post discusses Thomas Friedman’s analysis of gas prices on the international landscape:

As Thomas L. Friedman has been saying for years, “the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated.” When oil prices are high, anti-democratic regimes become richer and more powerful, terrorists get funding and the world is unsafe. When oil prices are low, the “petroauthoritarian regimes [have] to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income.” When there is no demand for oil at all, there is simply no money with which to fund terrorists.

Seems like another problem with no straight forward solution – what do you think?