While attending a conference, I sat at a table with several others. When the guest speaker began, the person across from me took out a note pad, a pen and placed them on the table to take notes. When the speaker was finished, not a word had been written on the pad.
Was the speaker dull? Not really, though frankly he would not have won an oratorical contest. Was his subject uninteresting? No, in fact because of the timeliness of the matter there were a lot of questions.
What happened, it seemed to me, that the participant, with good intentions, actually went into neutral. He was bodily present, but his mind was elsewhere. Perhaps fatigue made him inattentive to what was going on. Or maybe he was still mulling over some problem he had encountered before coming to the meeting. I understand, because on another occasion, that might have been me.
That blank note pad however, reminded me of something. A person has to put something into a meeting in order to get something out of it. I am thinking about the worship services of the church. Sometimes the speaker may be dull. Sometimes the subject matter may be uninteresting. But if a person goes away from church with a “blank note pad” it probably is because little or nothing was done to prepare for the service.
Meaningful worship rarely just happens. A moving worship experience usually doesn’t occur just because somebody does something great or designs a proper format. It happens when a person actively seeks the Lord, gives full attention to what is going on, and exercises his/her thinking capacities. In short, the person puts “self” into it. When a person comes to church, but stays in neutral, he or she misses a golden opportunity to be fed, to be challenged, and to be strengthened for the exercise of faith that begins after the service ends.
To carry away something from a church experience, one must put something into that experience...self. It is remarkably easy to sit and let the hour go by. It is often easier to go into neutral than to be actively involved, but not much learning takes place in neutral.
At the end of worship service how often is your note pad blank?
Would your church experience be more meaningful if you worked at it? I think so.
