Missing The Moment

By Larissa V

We miss it. We miss it every day…. and it’s right in front of us.

The other evening I went to listen to Francis Chan speak. I’d read his book (Crazy Love), even heard bits and pieces of audio from him, but I held my skepticism. It wasn’t that I didn’t think he loved the Lord. You can just tell that he does, but I wondered what I thought of him. I felt cautious of jumping onto the Francis Chan crazy bandwagon. I tend to get a little reserved when I start to feel like a possible lemming in a sea of others as they all start to run past me directly for the cliff.

I want to make my mind up, and not allow the fact that others think he is amazing to propel me to wave a Francis Chan flag in front of my house.

So, I went. Cautiously. Sitting there wondering why.

He spoke. Not eloquently...but powerfully. I like it when I hear a man speak from a deep place of truth that is not dependent upon himself, but in the rawest sense of the Lord’s strength. He had no magic pill or formulaic answers to life. He just read what we all have access to every day of our lives and shared of how he is learning to live it. He lost his place, forgot what he was going to say, and yet still continued to speak with power.

At the end he spoke of how this was not about him. This was not about what people said or didn’t say about him. This wasn’t what we thought or didn’t think about him. This was simply about the Bible, and what the Bible said of loving the lost and poor and orphaned and widowed. And then he sat down.

As the program was wrapping up the closer of the night said a quick shout out thanking Francis for sharing, and asked that we thank him. People clapped. And then they kept clapping… and clapping…. and standing and clapping… and I did a slow cringe inside my soul.

We’d missed it. The minute we stood to stand and clap for Francis Chan, we missed it. We missed everything he had said. We were applauding the message, and the speaker. We were living in that moment of feel good and I want to change the world and feed the homeless. But we weren’t living outside of this moment. We weren’t stopping to see God in it and what he was calling to us. We were applauding a man and his message, and a little part of my heart died at our human depravity.

We miss it all too easily.

We miss the maker of this earth and instead choose to praise the made in front of us.

We miss it every day, and I’m tired of missing it.

What have you been missing lately?