Jesus and Swing Sets

I have been having kind of a rough couple of weeks. Things just don't seem to be going my way lately. Unfortunately, this has really been bad for my spiritual well-being. For some reason when bad times come I spend less and less time with Jesus. In hindsight that seems really backwards but it happens. It is a hard thing to control. Tonight might have been a breakthrough.

I took a walk tonight. I really like walks but I don't seem to take them very often. When I go for walks I like put my ipod on and just kinda go. Nowhere in particular usually. Sometimes I go on long walks, sometimes they are really short. Tonight I ended up walking around a nearby elementary school and eventually I found myself on the playground. I decided that would be a good night for a swing. So I swung on the swing set. It was really weird for me for a lot of different levels. Mostly because I am over 6 feet tall and was swinging.

The first memory I have of my wife-to-be was during the 5th grade around the swing set at our elementary school. I spent some time thinking about how lucky I am to have her tonight (I also was very lucky that the swing set designed for little kids did not break when I was really high). Then after that I was just quiet for awhile. I wasn't stressed out or worried or mad or sad or happy. I was just me swinging on a swing set. I talked to God tonight. It was amazing. I just started thinking about the swing and about God. These are some probably corny things I learned about life and God from the swings:

1. My spiritual life is kind of like that path of the swing. I move forward so quickly and when I feel like I am getting so close to God some unknown force pulls me back. Then when I go backwards as far as I can I start moving back toward God. It really is just a back and forth kinda thing for me. Sometimes I stay close to God for a bit longer but I always seem to rock back eventually. I really don't like that. Sometimes I get lost in myself and don't even realize I am headed in the wrong direction.

1a. I will never make it over the top. I think every little kid tried to see if they could swing all the way around the swing set. A full 360 degree loop. That would be so awesome. Unfortunately it is not physically possible on a swing set. I learned that part from an episode of Mythbusters. The same thing goes for my journey to be more like Jesus. I am never going to get there. I will never be Jesus and I think that would kind of defeat the purpose of Jesus to begin with. I will never be complete. I just need to try and work out my salvation with fear and trembling.

2. I am starting to understand what it means to have faith like a child. That has always been a bit confusing to me. Does that mean we blindly believe in Jesus like a kid believes in Santa? No, the truth is really on our side. I think what Jesus means when he says faith like a child is to have a simple faith. When he was spending time hanging out with the kids everyone else was standing around debating about why Jesus was doing that. All the kids cared about was being with Jesus. I think a lot of times we get caught up in all of the "stuff" that we think Jesus is about. We focus on things other than Jesus. Kids don't have time to worry about all of that stuff. They just want to spend time with the King.

3. God shows up in weird places. I spend a lot of time in Church. Sometimes there is loud music or communion or fancy lighting or some sort of illustration involving live animals. These are all designed to create a worship experience. And that's OK with me. But the problem is when we believe God needs all of these thing to speak. Tonight I heard God speak on a swing. It was almost completely dark and there was no Christian music playing or candles of goats. It was just me and God. All God really needs is for us to take some time to be quiet before Him and to wait to hear Him speak. That's all.

4. U2 is one of the greatest bands ever. I was listening to them on my ipod while swinging. I am pretty sure that Jesus is a big fan of Bono. And probably The Edge, because he uses a lot of delay. Everyone knows that delay is the prefered guitar effect of Jesus Christ.

I was going to try to add another thing about jumping out of the swing when you get really high. As it turns out there is not spiritual significance to this at all. It is just fun. And yes, I did jump out of the swing.