Surprise!

Sunday was another awesome day at The Crossroads. Attendance was down a little, but we saw some more new faces, and had some returnees as well. Our worship time was just incredible. Robby and the band did a terrific job, and everyone just seemed to have this really awesome spirit of surrender. The message was great, and I don't say that because I preached it, but because God really spoke to me during the message.

I just am always really touched when I consider the depth of what Christ did for us on the cross. The reality of his sacrifice on the cross should drive our lives of service and worship to God.

But, here's the cool/funny/frustrating/surprising thing that happened. Before the service, our worship dude, our church planting intern, and I got together to pray like we always do. I was preaching on how we are supposed to live our lives for an audience of one, so our prayers were really focused on God, on his majesty, and his sovereignty (all really good places to go in prayer). So, I felt impressed in that vein to pray that God would surprise us today, that he would do something totally unexpected, something that we didn't prepare for, that he would do something that was way beyond what we had planned for the day. Cool prayer, right?

Well, here's the thing. Even though I prayed that prayer, I had expectations about the way God would answer that prayer. I had a certain framework in which I thought would be reasonable for God to work in a way I didn't expect. Do you get the irony there? I had expectations about the unexpected thing I was asking God to do! I wanted God to surprise me, but not too much.

So, fifteen minutes before our service is going to start, I tell our team that one of my primary goals for the day is that we start on time. Five minutes before start time, we heard a loud thud from outside, where we do our children's ministry. We have canopies that we set up outside that our children meet under. We go outside, and a huge gust of wind has come along and totally lifted the canopies, and two of them are now on the roof of the building sixteen feet up in the air.

We all had a good laugh while we figured out how to get our now destroyed canopies down. We were thankful that no kids were under the canopies. And my awesome team did what I am always telling them to do. They were flexible, and they quickly relocated children's ministry and did a great job.

Needless to say, we did not get started on time. And, yes, God did surprise me, but so not in the way I thought he would. But maybe God showed us that it really is all about him, that we constantly walk in dependence on him, and that our ability to plant a church, to reach people, to have a worship service, to sing praises to him, is all completely dependent on his activity.

After all that, we had an awesome worship time. Maybe the fact that we had already seen God answer our prayers in a very unexpected but very quick way made us very ready to see him, fall before him, and hear from him. It was a great surprise!