A spiritual re-wiring, of sorts

The "mountain-top spiritual high". If you've been a Christian for any length of time, you know what I'm talking about with that term. We've all been there, probably a number of times. You go off to that retreat, mission's trip, conference, whatever, and you come back all charged up and excited about your relationship with God. You resume (or increase the length of) your daily quiet times, and you make other significant changes. Everything is awesome, for like a week. Maybe two, even a month if you're lucky. And then before too long, life is largely the same as it was before whatever event touched off the "high". The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but I think one of the major causes is the fact that in these kind of insular events, it's easy to get very exciting and make decisions based on an emotional high that immediately fades when the real world hits. Decisions and plans of any kind made in the heat of an emotional high or low generally aren't the most lasting and life changing.

Like I said, I've been there, the most recent significant episode coming around my first trip to Thailand, back in February 2007. Now, don't get me wrong, God did some lasting work in my life on that trip, most notably kicking me out of a total spiritual malaise that I had been in for the better part of the year prior. However, the same scene I just described played out for the most part, and a few weeks later, all the big changes I had made in the wake of the trip had gone largely ignored.

After the experiences I had, and have (for the most part) relayed to all of you via this blog, on my most recent trip to Thailand, the cynic in me was pretty much expecting the same sequence to play out this time around. However, something very odd happened. This time, I came back and was almost immediately right back into the same old daily grind, with little initial evident application of the things that I had learned and seen on the trip. What I was doing, however, as you all got to see, was processing through what had happened and what it all meant. And so slowly and surely over the last weeks, some changes started to surface. A largely dormant daily quiet time re-emerged, without feeling forced or put on. More than that, I've started to find myself communicating with God outside of that early morning quiet time on a much more frequent basis. And I've seen the kind of expectation and belief in the power of prayer that I found in Thailand re-emerge. There are perhaps other things I could mention, but those are the highlights.

On Saturday, our Thailand team (minus Andrew) met with Kris (the member of the long term Thai team who is back stateside on home ministry) and Silk for dinner after a prayer gathering we had at our church for the Isaan - three different organizations that work (or are getting ready to work) among the Isaan, and supporters of those organizations were there, pretty cool. Kris was "grilling" us about our experiences, and one of her questions was, essentially, how has your life changed as a result of the trip? I was sharing essentially what I've written here, and I said that I felt like this time, there had been a kind of spiritual re-wiring done in me, rather than my typical temporary surface transformation. It was like it had just taken time for the effects of that re-wiring to work their way to the surface here in the States.

So, here's hoping that my instincts on this are accurate, and that there was something very different about what happened to me on a spiritual level on this trip, and what it will mean for me long term.

There's another very cool story that came out of Saturday's dinner, but for a couple reasons I'm holding off on posting it to the interweb, for now. I expect that to change shortly, however, so you can look for that at some point in the not-to-distant future.