It happens every time after I return from a mission trip, and it doesn't matter if it's an overseas trip or if we stayed state-side. There's a culture shock that hits me a few days later right at home when I least expect it.
This morning while worshiping with the body of UBC, I was standing in the choir loft singing my heart out, when I looked around and felt my heart drop. I was enjoying a fellowship so sweet, and yet I had just spent a week with people who would fall into one of the following two categories:
1) They desperately long for a family to worship with each week like that
2) They have no idea of the joy that they are missing
Why do we often treat our blessing of this gathering so casually, when there are millions of people in the world who are longing to share in it? Specifically, why are we meeting without passion when 98.4 percent of New England needs that fellowship?
As I was working through those thoughts, we started singing O the Blood, and then we sang In Christ Alone. I started having faces flash through my mind of those we met and talked with this week. So many people who could not sing the words of those songs honestly, and in many cases probably don't even have a head knowledge of what they mean. I thought specifically of Sham, who when asked how he viewed God, said, "He is gracious." We sang these words:
O what love, no greater love. Grace, how can it be? That in my sin, yes, even then, He shed His blood for me.
THAT is what grace really means! My heart longs for him to know that, to experience that grace in his life, and to fall on his face and worship his Prophet, his Priest, his King! Our own hearts need to be continually gripped by that truth. Our hearts need to deal with that reverse culture shock every day - because this world is not our home. We are living in a foreign culture every single day, and we should live as radically as that makes us feel.
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