Holy Speechlessness - Nouns made Verbs

"Father God some moments in life don't seem to have adequate or appropriate words to say."

This prayer from my journal is such an apt description of how I feel sometimes, and I am learning that this sort of speechlessness is not always such a bad thing.  Life is full of a wide array of emotions, and I wouldn't trade any of them for the world.  I have heard some of the best sermons in the past few weeks and I seriously can't even explain how life-giving that has been.

Over MLK Jr weekend I attended the Atlanta Passion conference with Shane, thanks to his amazing family getting us tickets for Christmas.  I have been to Passion twice before, in 2011 and 2012, and it was edifying to reflect on how much I have grown in these past few years.  One of my favorite parts of the weekend is the worship experience, not because of the big name artists who play, but because worshipping in an arena with thousands of other Christians is the closest to heaven I have ever felt.  Something about the sound of thousands of voices crying out to God with everything that is within them is like a little glimpse of heaven breaking through.

Another big take away for me at Passion was this idea of nouns becoming verbs.  This is something our society naturally does....Google is a website, but we also "google" things, Snapchat is an app on our phones but we snapchat our friends, Instagram is an app and we instagram pictures of our lives, the list could go on and on.  But I believe this movement from noun to verb does not just exist in pop-culture.  In our everyday lives, we have the opportunity to act out our guiding morals, principles, and values, and in doing so, they come to life.

My worship experience at Passion felt like a taste of Heaven, living out the eternity we were created for.  In the Old Testament class I am in we talked about the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4-9; it says,

Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.5 And you must love the Lordyour God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. 6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. 7 Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. 8 Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

This text is a proper noun, a holy commandment, but what if we made it a verb?  The commandments are nouns, but they cannot fulfill their purpose without being put into action and made into verbs.  My prayer during Passion, and my prayer now, is that the Shema would become a verb in my life.  In all I do, in all I say, in all I write, in all I think, I want to serve the Lord and do it all unto Him.  I long to perpetually develop a more full theology, a more rich understanding of who God is.  And even more than that, I want that theology to change the way I live my life from the inside out, so that my faith might become a verb, a lived out reality of an inward transformation.

Heaven in action y'all....