Most of science is stumbled upon, discoveries that have changed our understanding and our very existence have been accidents, serendipity, discovered on the journey when looking for something else.
This is what happens in church, people discover something new....
When we encounter God that part of our being that is called spirit gets a jump start, it gets a shot of red bull, it has its muffler taken off! Suddenly your mind can’t figure out the feeling and your body can’t explain the emotion and is thus left with an odd sense that all your being thought it knew for fact has now felt something that it has never felt before and that does not fit inside a known box!
So what do you do with this? Like any good scientist who has discovered something new by accident he tracks back to see if he can define the parameters and boundaries with in which this reaction occurred. He does this to see if he can control those parameters and then to recreate them in the HOPE that he will be able to recreate the same response, to create the same results. In other words you seek to know if it was a one off or was is this something you can do again, and again, and again. Thus with church and this feeling that your mind can’t figure out and your body can’t explain that you have accidently stumbled upon you look to find the way to capture that experience again to see if it was chance, a one off or was it ‘real’. A good scientist looks to replicate the experiment to define the parameters and to set a control!
The experiment called ‘church’ can be repeated, it can be defined and it can most defiantly be repeated! You can pick yourself up every Sunday and walk into church; you can meet people who exude this feeling, who use words that make your spirit jump such as Jesus and eternity. You can sing the words on the screen, you CAN raise your hand when asked and you can laugh when things are funny, you can listen and take notes as others do around you as you hear words from the Bible and you can open your mind and heart to something beyond the control of your knowledge and to-date experience.
so now you have repeated your experiment and event pushed the boundaries of it, developing it, adding a few more elements and find that the results are the same...a feeling of peace in your mind that you can’t explain, a buzz in your heart that is untraceable, a sense of acceptance amongst relative strangers who somehow feel closer that brothers!
Experiment complete you walk out of the door, but then you stop, turn, and look back into church and all of a sudden tears fill your eyes, it’s like your bathed in light that exposes all that you hate about yourself from your physical appearance to you dark hidden thoughts anger and inadequacies but theSe are not tears of fear, or rejection or of a broken heart they are tears of joy. even though you feel completely exposed you feel completely whole! You know that you know that it matters not what you have done or will do ever again but that you are loved with no stringS attached.
It is this sudden rush, this exhilarating high that causes you to run back into church again, and again, and again. You have found that the scientific method applied to church has proven more reliable than any other experiment in the known universe.
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