05 September 2010

Advanced Words

We got back from PAX today and while the expo was fun I found myself missing the kind of Jesus-tinged experience that I really have come to expect on these things. It's not that we totally missed Him but in most spiritual ways it felt more like a day at the (non soma) office.

But just as I was rolling into my driveway something came to mind that I want to capture. It has the feeling of a fleeting and incomplete thought though so I don't know where this will wind up.

Whenever we get ready to go intonation boot camp we pray that god would give us "advanced words" for that event and he's always there to do so. Now I don't to go too far here lest it turn into some kind of superstition but I realize today that we've seen something similar with soma in that we often see our first experience of a trip to be somehow a pre-taste of the trip in general, or at least a vivid picture that tells us were walking with god. At first I thought this trip lacked such an event but in hindsight I'm not so sure. The first meta-experience of e trip was how rushed I was trying to get out the door. I just couldn't seem to get things wrapped up. That sense of work-pressure was in fact a constant struggle for me in this trip and took me out most of Saturday as I was too focused on ND and barely felt like I was in gods will at all - I was clearly working and not walking. But the first real "experience" came when we stopped by County Cousins for dinner. I've come to really enjoy this place on i5 but when we arrived we were shuttled off into the lounge where our waitress, while nice enough in her fashion, was a kind of dirty old lady making constant lewd jokes. On the one hand you try to laugh it off but it was not the kind of holy spirit encounter I would have liked...or was it?

I've observed before that I don't feel like the gamer community is hostile to god, they just don't know him and in a sense they don't know any better. I think this waitress was like that. She wasn't evil in any sense that I saw, just worldy - in fact very much like the kind of person Jesus got grief for hanging out with. And in that way she was like a focused in-your-face picture of what we s at PAX all weekend. People whose hope rests often in distraction and something like grave humor - you might as well laugh lest we cry our eyes out.

It made for a couple of days that felt thirsty but I was IN it all, as opposed to being separate, maybe to help me remember what that feeling is like. I wasn't feeling oppressed or opposed or anything like that, just dry. Vaguely missing something though I didn't know what.

Perhaps god was showing my something this weekend that I almost missed entirely.

Then again, maybe not...still need to chew on it.

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