What I thought was going to be an extremely rough day has turned into revival at the very least and is more noteworthy for the transformational shaping of my life that has happened today. My schedule started with the Hope Center in Lexington from 8:00-11:30am, class from 1-5pm at Asbury Seminary and a HSM retreat from 6:30pm to 12:00am at Bluegrass Christian Camp. I feared that I was going to be so drained that I would not get anything out of it. Once again I learned that it is not about me but what God can do through me, how much He loves me and the interesting things he does to show us that.
The day was focused around the concept of humility in a way that allows us to serve in humbleness like Jesus Christ. The root word of humility is humilis in latin, which also is where our english word humus comes from. Humility carries this connotation of coming from dirt. We can serve humbly and out of humility when we realize that we were created out of dirt.
Genesis 2.7 says the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
This is the key to unlocking the meaning in this blog post. We are humble and can serve in humility because we were formed from dirt.
This concept of being formed from dirt and its relation to our humility and humbleness was a driving factor for the day. There were several different ways in which I had the opportunity to serve in humility and humbleness. The most humbling was in our team serving each other in the leadership class at ATS. We served each other through foot washing which made me extremely nervous but also humbled me in a way that I have not been humbled before. We modeled Jesus washing his disciples feet by washing our team members feet. It was a very unnerving watching each other wash each others feet but in this I realized something. We were using the same water to serve each other and almost instantly I made the connection that just as we used the same water to serve each other, we were serving the same Jesus to each other and we all as christians serve the same Jesus to the world. It was a remarkable experience.
I thought that I had gotten as close to God as I was possibly going to get that day and that I would just go to the HSM retreat to be there for the high school students. I was so wrong. A week ago I posted Sarah’s Leaf and it was about discovering God’s artwork in nature around us. Sarah created an awesome mosaic of God’s art of me consisting of leaves, flower petals, some other odds and ends, and most importantly dirt. At the top right was the impressionable Lord thank you for your art.
Lord thank you for your art.
She gave this to me today and through it God revealed His art and creative control through dirt that was on the mosaic. I thought about how amidst all of the amazing things God has created like mountains and seas, that we are still his most loved art, formed from the dust of the earth.
I almost broke because the entire day was about living out humility in relation to us being formed from dirt. I had lived the day by thinking I was nothing more than something formed from dirt when God used this mosaic to force me to realize that I am His created art even though we were formed from dirt. God has created so many beautiful things from dirt and to live in dirt and to be one of them is awe-striking. We have beautiful grasslands that grow out of dirt, amazing Redwood Forests that grow out of dirt, tree covered mountains that house sunrises and sunsets where the trees grow out of the dirt and the examples go on. These kind of things take my breath away when I have the opportunity to experience them in all of their splendor like a leaf with Thank you Lord for your art written on them or some of the amazing sunsets I have been blessed to see.
These things are so amazing, yet I think God sees humans from which He formed out of the dust of the ground as His most beautiful creation. What is humbling is not that we were formed from dirt, but that God can form us from dirt and that this is an ability we will never have. We serve humbly because our living God has the creative power to birth us, not turn His back on us and to send a way for us to come back into communion with him when we turn our back on Him. Father God this is my untitled thanks.