Spiritual Personalities: Cornerstone, 6/10/07

So I finally got to do Corinne Ware's spirituality inventory with the Cornerstone class yesterday. I thought it would provide a good way to wrap up our yearlong study of great OT characters. http://www.fullerseminarybookstore.com/search_results.php?id_author=15061 I took great pains to point out that it is not the Gospel, just a tool for helping us understand some of the things we've been reading and studying and experiencing.

Initial defensiveness from M. and L, (M. came in late and missed my caveat; L is in his down cycle) but the kids seemed to respond. I made a masking tape cross through the middle of the room, and numbered the quadrants. The kids took the inventory, then I invited them to stand in the quadrant in which they had the most hits. Not suprisingly, most fell into #2; Joanna, Will, Aaron were in #1, and Kaylee stood alone in #3. No one stood in #4.

I asked them to recall all the different OT characters we've studied this year, and give an example of one for each quadrant. "Moses!" for #1. "David!" for #2. "Daniel!" for #3. "Joseph!" for #4. (Joseph? Hmmn. I would have said Samson...) Then I asked them to consider Jesus, who stands at the still point of the cross, spanning all quadrants and inviting us all into a deeper knowledge/love of Him. In so doing we will draw closer to one another.

Finally, we stood in our quadrants and held hands, making a circle, and thanked God for giving us our different personalities and gifts, and for allowing us to enter into the Story He has been telling, from OT through NT through the history of the church to this very moment to eternity. It was my small effort to remind the kids that Christian life is not just a matter of their individual experience, or even their experience in the VCC youth group, their experience at CHIC, their experience as 21st century Gen-X American Protestants--muchless their experience of Velvet Elvis.

Then it was time for worship. Steve gave a great sermon on creation ex nihilo:

"God takes nothing and fills it with something. He takes death and turns it into life. He can fill the nothingness in your life and in mine. God changed the world’s nothing into something. And when through our sin the nothing snuck back into His creation, when our lives and our relationships and our hearts got holes in them, God came to us. He came into the world Himself to feel our emptiness. He filled peoples’ stomachs and healed their bodies. Then He let us hang Him up on a Cross and make holes in Him. He took all those holes, all that emptiness, and filled it with grace. As Philippians 2:7 says, Jesus Christ emptied Himself, made Himself nothing, so that we, so that His world could be something again.

God calls you by name and raises you out of nothing into someone. His grace is there for you. If you feel like your heart is empty, then it’s ready for God. If you feel like you’ve got nothing to offer, then He has something for you. In Jesus the power and grace that made a universe out of nothing are ready to make something out of you."

I can't wait to see how Jesus is going to resurrect us. Maranatha.