(This post describes events from July 2010)
See, I am doing a new thing
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
And streams in the wasteland
The wild animals honor me,
The jackals and the owls,
Because I provide water in the desert
And streams in the wasteland
To give drink to my people, my chosen
The people I formed for myself
That they may proclaim my praise
We wanted to do something different at the mid-project retreat this year, something that wasn’t in the Global Urban Trek Director’s handbook. The above passage from Isaiah 43 had been echoing in my spirit throughout the Trek. When I was in college I started thinking about the idea of the “new thing” that God was doing, the new creation, the new life that we live in and the new kingdom that we usher in as the body of Christ. I coined a catch phrase, “the old man is dying.” My artist friend Sarah said she would do a painting of it someday.
The fact that we even ended up at the retreat center was the first new thing that God did among us. We were supposed to go to a different retreat center, which I discovered (through intuition and a wise phone) call had double booked the dates of our retreat. So at 5pm the day before our retreat I snapped into task-mode and within 30 minutes we had reservations at “Villa la Paz” (the Peace Villa). The funny thing is that I had a feeling this change was going to happen, I perceived it in my spirit.
During our second night at the retreat center we did a Bible study on Isaiah 43. I led it, and it was a somewhat mediocre effort to academically pull apart the text and understand what it was talking about. I struggled leading a study in this kind of academic style that I hadn’t done for a long time. During one of the moments of awkward silence where no one seemed to have an opinion about anything, my co-director Helyn asked our student Josh what he was thinking. “Actually I am really distracted right now and having a hard time connecting with this passage,” he responded. “I was thinking about how to make keyboards accessible to people in rural African villages where there is no electricity.”
“Actually,” I responded, “I think that what you are thinking is exactly what this passage is about. You know, streams in the desert, isn’t that what it is to bring music and innovation to a place that doesn’t have access to that kind of technology?” The comment diffused the uncomfortable silence of boredom, disarming the formality of the study and revitalizing us, and we finished off the study by commenting about the “new thing” that God is doing and inviting us to perceive, then we each illustrated what we envisioned in the passage.
The next morning we continued our journey into Isaiah 43, first with a traditional lectio divina (divine reading) wherein a person read the passage several times out loud, and we listened for words and phrases from the passage and shared the impressions and invitations that God was giving us all through this communal hearing of the word. The purpose was to listen to one another, to what we were each experiencing with the text, and let our sharing produce a nourishing feedback that would allow us to enrich our own insights and interpretations. After this process of listening and sharing we returned to our drawings from the night before and added to them based upon our communal experience in the lectio divina.
After pouring the word out into our artwork we stood outside in a circle together and shared our pictures with one another, one by one. As each person shared we listened to them and genuinely held them with our attention, then we proceeded to reflect on the commonalities of our artwork. Many themes emerged that ran through the various pieces—butterflies and streams of water, deserts, crosses and gathered people, new growth and trees and dynamic flourishing, and the city with its mess and its hope. Our invitation from that point was to create what Nancy called a “tapestry” with our various drawings. In a moment of divinely inspired perception Katerina pointed out that we were standing in a circle around a tiled design in the pathway that formed an image that resembled some of the images in our drawings. In the center was a cross, and around it were shapes that resembled butterfly wings. At that moment one of the students dropped their drawing and it floated to the ground and landed on top of the tiles. Helyn reached to pick it up. “No, don’t touch it,” Nathan called out in a firm voice. And suddenly we all saw it, we perceived that we ourselves were a living version of the artwork we had created, and we began to piece together a living, moving tapestry where our drawings came to life through us. Some fluttered around with their drawings as butterflies, perching on people’s shoulders. Others sunk down to the ground and began to weave and flow like the streams of water they had drawn. I circled around the group like the spiraling process of constant exchange and evaluation and flow that I had drawn as the central dynamic of my picture.
After all was said and done we sat down together in silence. Finally, after a long but surprisingly not awkward period of silence Katerina chirped, “well that was definitely the most hippie thing I have ever done with a Christian group.” We all burst into laughter. God had done a new thing among us.
