Step Out

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

-- Dr. Seuss 

I have been to several conferences where there have been alter calls... for those of you who are unfamiliar, alter calls are when a pastor or speaker invites the audience members to see the mess their lives are; to come to terms with the problems that are having, the pain they are going through and the screw-ups that are a regular in their lives. They are invited to break down their barriers, take the sludge off of their shoulders and cast it on two crossed bits of wood.

Basically, they are called to really search who they are and the emptiness that surrounds them and ask themselves if it is really worth it to live in such a dark world on their own. Alter calls take the broken and the weak by the hand and help them to the front lines to be washed anew with grace; to accept that they are human and destroyed and that all they have done has been forgiven. Everything that has broken them does not matter any longer as Jesus is the real filler of the emptiness. He surrounds us and grants us new life. Alter calls ask people to relinquish themselves and start anew-- flinging their old, crumbled self upon the cross.

Tonight at Rock the River, I saw that again, but this time in such a more remarkable vastness. For this particular call, I was totally unprepared for the sights. While Franklin Graham was speaking the reality and the truth through Christ's words, he invited people to come down the side aisles to the center stage. As I watch people trundle down to the foreground I was filled with extremely opposite feelings simultaneously.

First off, I was filled with despair. I know that a little unusual for something so joyous but the idea that so many people in my city just have no idea. They didn't see the truth in Jesus and thought that he was just words and iron tradition. They needed sense knocked into them before they were able to realize that they really were set free.

But the second emotion was much more powerful and ruled out the first. The second emotion literally brought tears to my eyes and I had to hastily claw them away before they would be noticed. This notion that audience members brought their friends to an evangelism event-- it made my heart soar. Jesus said that he would have his word spread to the nations and that was so apparent in the hundreds of people who gave their problems, insecurities, dark areas and their very lives to the one who paid for it all in full.

(Save the girl in the green shirt closest, all those standing in this picture were only half of the numbers at the first of the alter calls. He works in the most fabulous and tear-jerking ways)

He is so mesmerizing. He works in ways that are so real. He is tangible, he is evident and he is ultimately inevitable.

The following clip breaks my heart but it gives me such hope for what we have the potential to do-- not just in Asia. No, in our own towns and cities of North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, Asia included. We have been blessed to be able to know what is beautiful and real. We finally know the truth and we need to work at it. We can no longer be complacent. We can no longer sit on the side-lines and exercise 'safe' faith.

Faith is dangerous. A relationship with Jesus requires us to live on the edge of something that is deep, dark and unfathomable. We cannot truly follow when we still exercise the dreary and desolate wrong that is so integrated into our lives. But because of the promises that he allows us to dig into; stuff like that he will 'never leave us or abandon us' or will 'send us a comforter so that we will always be filled'.

We are called. We must answer. It is a new day, a new age with millions of new people who just don't get it. The desire for more is prominent and aching -- and felt in everyone.

If anyone would come after me,

he must deny himself, take up his cross

and follow me.

For whoever wants to save his life 

will lose, it but whoever loses his life

for me will find it.

Matthew 16:24, 25