Back from d'NA

It's been an amazing 9 days. Too much to blog about here, but let's just say d'NA was one overwhelming experience (once again) of all that is true and real and eternal.

In some ways, it was better than last year, as I saw better integration this year among the new campers, and greater maturity among the old ones. The epic continues, and now we've finished Part 2 of the Trilogy. In the coming year, I can only expect that God will continue to lead us further into the great adventure, to which he has called each of us.

I was thinking about the sacrament of communion, and come to think of it, the Lord's Supper as we know it, was only a very small part of the Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples. The famous events that we know of from the gospel accounts, can be narrated within five minutes. Perhaps the foot washing would have taken another 10 or 15.

But surely at a dinner like that, it must've lasted a few hours. What happened then? I am once again brought back to the picture of the Jesus who loved the company of his friends. The Jesus who probably shared the meal out of commemoration and celebration, rather than trying to lay down a new institution.

The Lord's Supper as we understand it, was probably recorded only because it must have been new to the disciples, never mentioned before. I believe the rest of the conversations that night, centred about familiar ground, perhaps experiences they'd all been through together in the past.

Nowadays, we analyse everything that's written in the Bible, word for word; we check against historical context... Yet few are they who stop to ponder how it might have happened in real life. The gospel accounts are incomplete, and John makes that clear in his closing verse. All this while, the church has been zealously checking for accuracy, relevance and feasible application. But we've lacked the one gift God has in abundance more than anything else: IMAGINATION!

I think if God were to complain about anything regarding his body of believers here on earth, it wouldn't be anything remotely related to mission, theology, heaven and hell, or anything that usually bothers us. He wouldn't care less about who's carnivorous, herbivorous, amphibious, whatever. I think God would like us to be more open and creative in the way we see things.

People everywhere suffer from this constrained mindset that subjects all of reality to certain slavery at the hands of what we know as the Five Senses. Modernity and rationalism has done this to us; we now need to be more irrational, more crazy and wild in what we do. No, not reckless, but more daring; less certain about what lies ahead, but more sure about going forward.

Is it logical to lie in the middle of a road beneath a shower of falling yellow petals on a Saturday morning? No, unless you're convinced God is paying you a visit. That's just what we experienced on the last morning of camp. Such joy is the very epitome of reality. C.S. Lewis was right; the only two signs that we're not living in an illusory world is that there's pain and pleasure. I felt both at d'NA.

It's good to be back.