Therefore, I urge you, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is your spiritual act of worship.
- Romans 12:1
He was a flame on the altar, burning with God's glory, and soon our whole row was lit up by this flickering flame of the Spirit: a man who compulsively spins, a lady who shakes uncontrollably, another man who just has the need to jump. There we were among the orderly rows stuffed with polite people in our well-mannered congregation, swaying, spinning, shaking, and shuffling in worship, aspiring to the heavens with feet of clay. The Spirit must have been moving because even I was caught up, in my pious rigidity, clapping out of rhythm with the rest of our off-beat row.
They were worshipping with one foot grounded in the Kingdom of God and the other planted firmly on the earth, engaging God's presence in a posture of full embodiment. All the senses stimulated as they responded to God from the depths of a visceral gut reaction, and not the mere mental assent that I cerebrally offer in worship.
If it's true that it's not only words that speak to us, but lives, then I wonder if God is even more deeply touched by the way they give their lives to Him with immediacy and urgency. They may be disabled and weak, but they don't have a disabling weakness, in fact they seem refreshingly whole, and this is nowhere as evident as when their spirits are soaring heavenward in worship. The creative power of God is most evident in their human weakness and point of need. They don't really care what other's think of them when they are worshipping God heart-to-heart, for they've heard the voice of God, "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9) and they unashamedly respond in worship, "when I am weak than I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10).
It was time to leave for class. I got up from our pew as unobtrusively as possible so as not to distract others, when a "friendly" man in our row who I met for the first time expressed so much enthusiasm to see me I thought, in his over-excitability, he had mistaken me for a celebrity. He vigorously took my arm and led me to class, and so locked arm-in-arm we walked happily together out of the sanctuary.
In class, another man whom I work with from time to time led us in prayer. He has a rare gift of encouragement and of seeing the best in others, and in characteristic fashion he ended his prayer on a charitable note, "And thank you God that I could work with Dallas this week and that he's such a great worker." I was moved to tears and thanked God, with tears streaming down my face, for "every good and perfect gift, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights" (James 1:17). I felt his prayer opening shutters in every stuffy room of the household of God and letting the light flood in.
I knew I had found a home, a genuine worshipping community, one that calls us into the posture of worship, loving the Lord our God with all that is within us, and sharing the overflow of that Divine love, one to another.
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