This Theater is Open Again
This week, my husband has been working with a friend to quite literally bring a theater to life.
He has been up on ladders, covered in dust and sweat, installing whatever electrical guts need to be installed into places no one sees.
It isn’t the glamorous part of any theater. No one is applauding him, or his friend.
But it is necessary work. Because very soon, that stage will shine, in every sense of the word.
And the people will come to experience it. People who need to feel. People who need to be reminded that they are still alive.
…a detail of a sold expressive portrait
Is that not a powerful metaphor for what I, as a bondservant of Jesus in my “fourth quarter”, am being asked to do?
I am called to reopen the theater of my own imagination. Clean it up. Wire it. Prepare a space inside myself, just behind my eyes, where the presence of the Holy Spirit can show me something new.
Some of us shut those curtains a long time ago. Too many disappointments. Too much time has elapsed between our first and second acts. Even more time between the second act and the third. We think we have been forgotten.
But the Spirit of the Lord is “hovering over the waters”. He is stirring, even in our bones.
There’s movement behind the curtain. There! Did you see it?!
It is time to dream again. Time to let the theater of our imagination become rehearsal for what God wants to birth through us next.
And we don’t need applause to begin again. We don’t need proof. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not (yet) seen.” Your hands do not need to touch the evidence for your heart to believe again.
It only needs one honest emotion.
But isn’t that where it gets sticky?
Because the church, sadly, wants to call that “emotionalism”.
And so, in one fell swoop, those of us who were made to feel deeply, are made to feel less intelligent.
But those same Christians who cry “emotionalism”, will pay handsomely - willingly - for a night at a movie or for Netflix. And why?
Well, to “safely” feel something…anything...but at arms length. They are paying hard earned money to feel their feelings second-hand, when we are being invited by God to feel real things freely! We can enter in, and feel alongside the great cloud of witnesses, the angels, and even to feel alongside the God-man Jesus, sometimes with sound effects like wind, maybe tongues of fire, and sometimes with groaning that can’t be uttered!
Let me tell you something: feelings are what happens when the inner theater is not fake. When that space behind your eyes begins to belong to God again, and you and I begin to imagine the Kingdom of God being made manifest on the earth.
I believe God is asking us to do a new/old thing: He’s asking us to conceive it first in the womb of our imagination.
Or, returning to the real-life metaphor, He is asking us to do the hidden, dusty, thankless work of wiring ourselves back into wonder.
We are to feel again. We are to hope again. Because the people will come to experience that. We are to prepare a space for them to learn to do the same.
