ARCHIVES: Oh So Real (June 2008)

Yesterday at BT Kids we sang “Oh So Real” for the first time in a long while, and as we were singing the song I remembered this note/journal entry that I wrote maybe six months ago (wow, after checking, it was EXACTLY six months ago!!)… so I searched the ol’ gmail archives and dug it out. I re-read it with a huge geeky smile on my face and thought I’d post it… it doesn’t quite fit into any category neatly, but there's an A-Musings moment with a definite S.O.S. vibe…

My apologies for not using proper capitalization – I do that a lot when I’m just journaling or writing random thoughts to an imaginary third party that didn’t originally intend to be published :-D.

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June 1st, 2008

first of all, let’s talk about how i probably get a better workout during BT Kids worship than i do at the gym. goodness gracious. EVERY song has jumping for, like, 80% of the time - and the other 20% has hand motions. i'm certainly not complaining – the songs are amazing. although if part of it is an attempt to tire the kids out before the lesson... i don't think it's working :-\.

so we're singing "oh so real" and i always get a little bit excited when that song comes on cause it's just a good song and i always enjoy the inner chuckle i have with myself picturing james powell during the "jump to the front" section. james does not play with this song. dancing MUST be done full out. love it. and we get to the "he broke the chains and now i am set free" section of the song, and all of a sudden out of nowhere God just brings back to my memory chain after chain after chain that He's broken in my life. i've actually been worshiping God a lot lately as the Chain Breaker - which, although it is not an official "name of God" in all the names-of-God books and lists... it's certainly one of the "names" that i resonate most with.

which makes me think... i wonder if God had a good chuckle when Moses was like "so... um... what's your name?" i can just picture him chuckling and thinking "how in the WORLD am i going to explain the all-encompassingness (new word) of my name to this human?" I AM was actually a pretty sweet solution to this problem, although it still isn't even CLOSE to showing us the true depth of his "name"… but since we're bound by three dimensions and we use only 1% of our brain capacity i think maybe God had to simplify it a little bit. and even though this might not be theologically sound (or maybe it is), i like to think that God's name is not only "I AM" - as in "i am the essence of being"... but also "I AM..." with the dot-dot-dot. because God is so many things to us at different times in our lives - and it's not just that He possesses those attributes - He is the definition of those attributes! I AM love, I AM comforter, I AM daddy, I AM restorer, I AM chain breaker, I AM teacher, and the list goes on and on and on.

what was i talking about?

oh yeah, today at BT Kids. so God - in the time span that it took me to sing "...broke the chains and now i am set free..." - brought back a flipbook of memories in my mind of so many chains that he has cut off of me, each of which had a flood of memories attached to it. so i'm trying to process all of this in half a second's time, and then the chorus starts up:

oh oh oh oh
he is oh so real

i promise you, i almost burst into tears right there in front of all the kids... right in the middle of the three-claps. HE IS SO REAL!!! it just hit me in a completely new way... God really is real! really! real! i know it sounds like i've completely lost my mind, but it was the most amazing thing. i just wanted to start running around to every kid in that room (and every worker for that matter) and yell "don't you get it??? he's real!!! this is all real!!! God is real!!!" i thought about Job saying "my ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you," and i wondered if maybe he had the same experience... without the three-claps.

i think about so many of us who are true believers in Christ and have surrendered our lives to him... but yet deep down there's this little part of us that wonders "is this really real?" it's not a part that we talk about because we'd be afraid that people would doubt our salvation or WE'D doubt our salvation or that we'd feel like we insulted God or that we'd start re-evaluating our entire lives or ten million other reasons... but it's that little part that makes us question whenever a prayer isn't answered in the way that we wanted it to be answered or when we see pictures of children halfway across the world with their ribs sticking out of their bodies. it's that nagging little thought that - even though we've seen God move time after time after time and he's done countless miracles in our lives - refuses to go away and be silenced. today, mine was silenced. oh, i'm sure it will surface again somewhere along the road since i seem to have a short-term memory sometimes when it comes to the amazing things God has done... but i think that this moment today was enough to hold me for quite a long time.

i’m thinking right now about how i'm a completely different person than i was even just a few months ago. God has moved so dramatically and things in my life have changed so dramatically that i'm now being told by some that i'm too extreme in my pursuit of God and that i need to relax. and i understand - because i was one of those people who used to think and say that about others. but when God has moved in my heart in the way that he has... and it really becomes real to me that he is REAL and that he is ALIVE... nothing matters but pursuing him. God is speaking to me - he's showing me things - he's asking things of me... and it's real.

i know you’re thinking that it’s impossible for me to have thought all of this in an eight-bar phrase – and i’m sure some of it was fleshed out as i sat and thought about it later on – but it was just like a flood of memories all at once. sometimes i just sit and shake my head thinking about where i used to be and where God has brought me from.

i remember being in the stairwell of 163 livingston street maybe three years ago after a transitions meeting on a day when i was literally inches from losing my mind, had nearly jumped out of the 5th floor window and was clinging onto the banister like it was my last hope of salvation. i remember susan pettrey standing there with me as i was shaking from all of the anger and fear and confusion, and i only remember one thing that she said. she said, "amy, is this all real, or isn't it?"... referring to the things of God. and i remembered having absolutely no idea as to the answer to her question, but almost involuntarily yelling "YES!" i couldn’t explain it, i had every reason to believe the opposite, but there was something inside of me that instinctively knew what to say. something inside that knew that if it took my entire life to find Him and if it took sacrificing absolutely everything that i have to get to Him… i had to do it. i had to fight. i had to trust. because even in that moment of absolute pain and confusion – even then - i couldn’t deny that God was real.

three years after the stairwell on the 5th floor… here i am in the basement of 180 livingston street. serving the children, singing at the top of the my lungs with joy absolutely bursting out of me. on fire for Jesus with a laundry list of testimonies of deliverance that would take hours to articulate. and realizing how right i was. He’s not just real... He’s oh, SO real.