naked in a coffee shop

I love to watch people. So when I'm sitting in a coffee shop and an interesting person sits right in front of me, I am happy when he sips his oddly green smoothie, sets it down and stares at it for a moment before he continues with his work. This is one of the reasons I love coffee shops so much and was so excited to finally have an opportunity to sit and sip a Chai Latte in a coffee shop in Grenada.

As I waste time on Facebook in Rituals' Coffee I set my status to the following: "Doug wants to be naked and OK with it." Now, any person with a full functioning head would quite possibly be intrigued by this statement. Why would Doug want to take off his clothes in the middle of Rituals' Coffee? And why would Doug be OK with that?

If you know me, I think you may have picked up that sometimes I have interesting ways of organizing or expressing my thoughts. If you don't know me or did not know that about me then please note this as an example. Please further note that I do not literally want to be physically nude right now nor do I ever desire nakedness in public places. However, it's true that I would like to be content if I was stripped naked. And as we've previously established, the average person would raise a brow to this statement but for myself, I think of Job when he said something similar,

"Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I will depart. The Lord gives and takes away, may the name of the Lord be praised."

This is one of my favorite verses. I came to this earth with squat, I am blessed to have a lot, but when I die, what do I got? (I just made that crappy rhyme up.) I want to be content if and when I am stripped of everything and everyone I love. Not just content but even encouraged to grow, praising God and constantly expressing an unaffected joy despite my losses. Being in Grenada has shown me that I have depended too much on other people. I learn from other people, I grow with other people, I help other people with other people, I'm held accountable, I'm encouraged to pray and read by other people. Community is amazing and is a true blessing when you've found it but I think that, possibly, the emerging church culture can put too much emphasis on community. Among the spiritual disciplines, community has been raised to the top of the church's priorities. But, I think that every spiritual discipline is equally very important. For example, if we think prayer is more important than scripture-reading then we pray to a God we don't know. If we prefer scripture-reading over prayer, then we gain the head knowledge but our heart is not completely in it. Likewise, if we put community above the rest then we don't know what to do when we're left alone. These disciplines must be balanced.

A healthy balance of community, prayer, reading, worship and service is essential to having a healthy, life-changing relationship with Christ as well as being affective in ministry. Missions involves loneliness and until you're prepared to transform your loneliness into solitude (as Henri Nouwen puts it) I don't think you're ready.

Like many other Christians, I put too much emphasis on community. I grew very much back in Lansing with an amazing group of brothers and sisters in Christ that I have been blessed with. But too much depended on them so when they were gone...I was spiritually lost. If I were more balanced and read the scriptures more by myself or prayed more by myself or served more by myself then I would be more prepared for going by myself to a different place and culture.

I thought I was ready to drop everything to follow Christ until I realized that that meant leaving an encouraging and comfortable community behind. hmm...