Thin Spaces

Many people have argued against going to specific places where God appears to be pouring out and healing and setting people free on the solid ground of saying that God is at work everywhere so why would I need to go somewhere else to "experience" God in these ways. I don't. I know that.

But there is something about getting away - first- to a place where I give God all my time and attention and I get to worship a lot and receive a lot of prayer. And - second - getting away to a place where other people are pressing in to worship and know God more for extended periods of time. But it is the third one that is unsettling - for whatever reason or for many reasons, God seems to pick places. We want to throw that out because the Temple is gone - we are the temple of God now; His dwelling place.

The Celts had an understanding of thin spaces; spaces where two things intersect - the sea and the land, the forest and the field, a burial mound; this world and the Otherworld. These were places where the unexpected happened, where the Otherworld and Eternity was bound to break through because it was a thin space. It makes me wonder about people and places that focus themselves on desiring God to visit, to show up, for revival; where worship and prayer and fasting desire more than anything to come into the Presence of God. Maybe God visits those places in particular ways because the first and the second thing are happening regularly there. Maybe its something else completely and isn't meant to be analyzed. I think we are meant to be thin spaces where other people encounter God.

Whatever the case, I've found some places like that. A prayer room in a church basement on Capitol Hill in Seattle. A church where people are getting healed in Redding, California. A church in Toronto where people are experiencing deeply the love of the Father that heals. If you want to hear an amazing testimony of that, go to www.fpcbellevue.org and click on Sunday, Feb. 1 sermon by pastor Scott Dudley, my long time friend. I got to be with Scott in Toronto a few weeks ago and prayed with him last Tuesday and I must say that he is a different man - the old has passed away and, behold, the New! It is a beautiful work of the Father, the Son and the Spirit that is beyond my description. Some other time I'll write about how God met me there.