God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.
John 4:24 (NIV)
What the Father Seeks
The gauges in the control room give off enough light to read by, and after midnight nothing else in the building is lit. The man on shift came up the stairs at ten and won’t go back down until six. He logs moisture and temperature on a grain silo that doesn’t need him for most of the hours he’s paid for. Dust turns through the beam of the work lamp. He talks a little while he waits, the way people do when the fans are loud enough to cover it.
Jesus said his line about worship inside a conversation with a woman, and when he’d finished she told him she knew the Messiah was coming, and that when he came he would explain everything to them. She was setting the real answers somewhere out ahead of her, where a question that big seemed to belong. He told her the Father is looking for worshipers now, and he gave the reason: God is spirit.
God isn’t held in any one place. A man forty feet up a silo at four in the morning stands as near to him as a full sanctuary does on a Sunday. Jesus said worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth, and he left that must where it was. Worship of that kind turns the whole of a person toward the God who is actually there, and says what’s the case, including the parts that would look bad written down.
The words can all come out right for years running while the man saying them stays a long way off from the Father who’s out looking for him. The Father is after the man himself, turned toward him and telling the truth, and he’ll take that from someone alone on a metal stairway in the middle of the night.
At six the man signs the log, cuts the lamp, and comes down into a morning that got started without him. What do you say to God in a place where there’s nobody around to hear how it sounds?
A Prayer to Remember
You went out looking for worshipers, God, and you haven’t stopped. Teach us to bring you what’s true about us tonight, and to say it where there’s no one around to hear how it comes out. We’ve kept the presentable version ready for years. Take it off us.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
